During the winter 2021 semester, Heid E. Erdrich was the (virtual) Glasgow Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Washington and Lee University. As part of her residency, she visited the Shenandoah Internship class to discuss her work. Two interns—Kaelan McCabe and Georgia Ballew—researched her work and spoke to her about it via Zoom; this is a transcription of that conversation.
Shenandoah: Hi there! Thank you so much for being here and for reading your poem (“Faith and Less,” included in this issue). It is an honor to be the first listeners, or at least some of the first. We know that you have been teaching a poetry workshop at W&L this semester, so we wanted to start off by asking you if you could elaborate on the differences between writing and teaching poetry.
Heid: You know, that is interesting to me because I usually work from my practice, so I think of a writing course as a practicum in editing skills and responding to other people’s readings of your work, and craft naturally plays into that, so that we find ways to work on the craft of poetry, often by reading other poems and looking at them as examples. So to me it has the same sort of feeling of revising, just revising with a group of newer writers.
Shenandoah: You gave a reading of poems from your most recent book, Little Big Bully, back in February to a group of virtual attendees at W&L. Could you expand upon your inspiration for those poems and the overall themes in the book?
Heid: I wrote this book mostly in 2018 and 2019 and had a complete draft by early 2020, so it’s not very old—as poetry manuscripts go, it came together very quickly. It’s very much about things that were happening from 2016 on, but not overtly, for the most part. A lot of it is my trying to work out and figure out how abuse becomes a sort of cultural and political mode—what that means to individuals and what it means in your own life if you’ve been a victim of abuse. Particularly, narcissistic abuse was one of the things that I was focusing on—that little big bully that is ingrained in people when they’re bullied and perpetuates the need to either be the bully or be protected by the bully.
Shenandoah: Your poetry covers a lot of difficult topics, such as abuse, some more directly than others. We were wondering if these poems are harder for you to write, and if so, do you have techniques that you use to get through writing those poems?
Heid: You know, they were hard. Not so much hard to write because it was a release to write about many things that had not seemed important enough for me to write about in the past. It’s when you see a pattern and you begin to see how every demeaning of another person allows more demeaning of all of us. I started to think about witness and the harm it does when you witness harm that’s done to others, which is a complex process that’s been called moral injury. It’s not something that I’ve read a lot about, but that’s one of the phrases I’ve heard. I can’t tell you who I heard that from, [laughs] but the idea is that by seeing abusive tactics and being controlled by abusive people, we’ve all suffered a moral injury, and what does that mean? How do we all move forward together, and how do we create a future? The last half of my book was about the future. So, I think that answers a little bit? Both the larger story of the theme and the way the book moves. There’s a lot about the environment and water and women and water, which were big concerns of mine from 2016 on. They’ve always been concerns of mine, but there were things that happened at Standing Rock and elsewhere that triggered some of the poems.
Shenandoah: You talked about the importance of knowing your audience in your poetry reading, and you mentioned that you do not “dress up your writing for a non-Native audience.” Could you talk more about what that means to you, and if that is an attitude you have always had in writing poetry, or if it was something that developed?
Heid: One of the really difficult things to do as you become a poet and as you try to distinguish yourself and create a pathway to your original voice, is that you try to not be self-conscious in your writing. You try to be true to who you are. In order to do that, you have to not think about your audience but also imagine a perfect audience—so it’s tricky. It’s not easy. That’s what I was probably referring to when I gave my reading and talk—the idea that I don’t want to make cultural information from my Ojibwe culture and other Native American cultures available in a way that’s consumable. I want it to be natural to me, natural to my voice. Sometimes that means other people won’t get it. I’m a political person first and foremost, so usually what is coming from me has a political edge to it. And who’s to say that politics isn’t culture? I am also a food writer. Who’s to say food is not culture? Just because people might not recognize it in terms of what they perceive as Native American politics or Native American culture doesn’t mean it’s not there just the way it would be if I were doing dream songs.
Shenandoah: Going off of politics a bit, what, to you, makes a work a piece of activism, and what do you think is the power in literary works of activism?
Heid: That’s such a good question because I often get asked about the activist stance in my poetry, and it’s not that I don’t think it’s there, it’s that I don’t think of myself in the same category as the people that I often work with who are on the streets helping people out, taking a stand politically. It’s not that I haven’t done those things in the past, I just don’t think of the poetry in the same way. The effect of my poetry is usually on the individual, and occasionally on a group of students who get to have a conversation about it. Every now and then I’ve written poems that were actually used to change legislation. I wrote a book of poems about postpartum depression years ago. It was published in the U.K., but a group of midwives in Minnesota read from it on the floor of the state legislature to get some rules changed about midwifery, so I mean, you just don’t know. You hope that you’ll change people’s hearts and minds, give them ways to think. Certainly, I want to give to teachers and students. I think of myself as a poet who’s going to be taught, and I want to be able to have points of access, points people maybe need to research more, think of things more, but it also might change the way people behave. I know that poetry has done that for me, so I hope that it does that for other people. But I don’t know. It’s not activism like banging on a door, it’s more like taking someone aside and giving them some ideas.
Shenandoah: Tacking on to the last question—we have talked a lot about how predominantly white the publishing industry is. Do you have any general ideas about how we can foster more long-lasting diversity in publishing?
Heid: Now, that’s a difficult question. I work with publishers a lot. I judge contests and do in-house editing—not substantive editing, though, in terms of making choices for publishers. So, I do know that there’s this incredible lack of, not just racial and cultural diversity, but a lack of economic diversity. It’s not a job that most people can afford to have. It just doesn’t pay enough. Over my lifetime, I’ve met a lot of people who had other means of income who worked in publishing, and I think that makes for some worldview differences that are really hard to address.
Also, of course, it’s been white-male-dominated, though that’s shifting a bit. On the part of the publishers who make changes, it has to be very deliberate and very committed because it’s a really cultured industry, and changing a culture is difficult. You can’t just simply put somebody in as an editorial intern who is African American and not change anything you do and think, or try to do the same work and not have that person be an influence. You really have to listen, so it’s a tough industry to change. There are a lot of mistakes that are being made constantly, and there’s a lot of calling out on those mistakes now. It’s been really interesting in the past couple of years to see what’s happened.
Shenandoah: Back to your work as a poet, we were wondering if you have ever let a piece go unfinished or have you ever chosen not to publish a work and keep it for yourself?
Heid: Yeah, I’ve definitely done that. I have a nonfiction manuscript that I even had a publisher for and I just said, “No I can’t, I don’t feel it yet.” You know, it doesn’t feel like it’s a story that needs to go out there, and some of the things in that book are recycled into the poems in Little Big Bully. I’m lucky enough that I don’t get offered very much money for my books, [laughs] so I can say “Maybe not now.” If someone offered me a lot of money I’d probably say, “I’ll get right on that” and approve that manuscript, but as it is I work a lot of other jobs to afford to write. Sometimes it’s wonderful stuff like being able to teach, which is my preference for the most part, but I do other things too.
Shenandoah: On a similar note, are there any poems in Little Big Bully that you are more attached to than others?
Heid: That’s a good question. I love attached instead of “what’s your favorite?” The poems in the first part were difficult because they’re about sexual abuse, abuse of children that I witnessed growing up—not in my own family—cultural abuse and political abuse. They’re rough, so they’re hard to like. But, I feel strongly about the poem “Not.” It’s a poem of negation about things that didn’t happen to me but that I was aware of as a child—how hard those things are, and what they do to you as a person.
However, I really am more fond of the poems in the end that are about the future and are from dreams I had about a future where land is the most important thing—the poem “Dream of the Land-Based Future.” Also, the poems about Ojibwe prophecy—there is one is called “The Eighth Generation” which is part of prophecy. “Reprieve,” the poem that ends the book, talks about suddenly seeing a color that we couldn’t see before, and it changes everything about how we survive. Those sort of poems of survival, hope, disaster, and how we think of it. Also, how prepared young people are for survival really surprised me. I’m so impressed how everybody’s making it. I know it’s difficult. I have two young people in my house who’ve been trapped here when they want to be going anywhere else. I’m glad they’re here, but I’m just so impressed with how people manage things. That’s part of it—that hopefulness in seeing that every generation has had something to face that was difficult, and this is the human condition. It’s a bleak freakin’ vision, but it’s still hopeful.
Shenandoah: Looking into the future, what are you working on next?
Heid: I have that little nonfiction collection that I really should get back to since that editor accepted it [laughs]. She’s being very patient with me. But I’m kind of more interested in this little project that I’m doing of super flash fictions, and the character has the same or similar name, but as I’m writing them, a story starts to develop between the characters and you kind of have to guess which one is the real character. I really like that kind of writing. If any of you have ever read Michael Martone, he sent me a book to blurb, and it gave me this idea for writing these super-short fictions. His book is about a skywriter from the 1920s. It starts out with postcards of the skywriters who can write actual letters, and I think those are real postcards, but then he starts having fake postcards that get more and more complicated. I think there’s even an ampersand in one, which is impossible [laughs]. But it tells the story of this guy doing these various tricks in the sky and you follow a little story of his life and the mysteries of his life, so I kind of like that and my piece is a little like that. Who knows if I’ll ever finish that; I don’t mind if I don’t finish it.
Shenandoah: Sounds super intriguing, though, so I hope you do!
Heid: It’s fun, and I haven’t done anything really fun for a while.
Shenandoah: We saw in your bio that you have a sister who also writes. Do you both write similar things or are you very different?
Heid: I actually have two sisters that write. I also have a niece who’s a writer, and my sister, who is a doctor, is just finishing her first illustrated children’s book. So, there’s a lot of writing in my family—it’s sort of a family affliction, as my sister Lise, who’s a short fiction and history writer, would say. My other sister, Louise, is very well-known, very lauded, and, I have to say, reasonably so. She’s a fabulous writer, and she’s a novelist for the most part. Sometimes we end up in each other’s territory—we will both be writing about something, but it’s usually from such different angles that it’s not that big of a deal. We don’t talk to each other about what we’re writing very much, or we didn’t until fairly recently. The past few books that Louise has written (I think she always sends me the book ahead of time, but I don’t always talk to her about it), we’ve chatted about it quite a bit, especially during the pandemic.
Shenandoah: How do you think that your poetry and your writing process have evolved over the years?
Heid: That’s a great question. In this last book, I stopped using punctuation almost entirely. That evolved from performing poetry and creating breath scripts, where, instead of putting in punctuation, I used white space to help me read it properly. Otherwise, I would read really fast if I was nervous, or if someone read before me and I thought they were too hard of an act to follow. I’m not insecure about my work—it’s just that there are pressures, and I read publicly a lot. Before that, I had been writing plays, so it came out of writing those performance scripts, which was a big change for me.
Thinking about the visual aspects of the poem on the page came with ten years of working with visual artists as a curator and installation collaborator. That was a big change in the last book, which is called Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media. For the books before that, I often would be responding to other texts in my writing. I would be quoting or collaging in, which was very much a style of the day that I’d started out with. Then, all of a sudden, I found out there were names for things, like bricolage and such. I didn’t know there were weird names for these—I thought I was just doing it myself. I’ve always loved collage, though, so, for me, that’s a big aesthetic as a through-line. I’ve always loved science—that’s a through-line. I’ve always had sort of a political motivation in my work. Those are the through-lines that I would say I haven’t changed.
Shenandoah: Could you talk a little bit about your time as a journalist and the differences between journalism and creative writing? How and when did you make the transition?
Heid: I was a creative writer, but I also worked on my high school newspaper and literary magazine, including writing editorial content introduction, which I continued to do in college. After college, I got a job working for a small newspaper on Nantucket Island off the coast of Massachusetts, which is a very small community. I lived there for a year during the summer and winter, so I had to learn the community a little bit. I really enjoyed that job, but I got stolen by the police department because they liked the way I wrote the court report. I shouldn’t be proud of that, but they paid me a lot more. I’ve always been sort of on my own and had to make my own way, so I ended up working for the police department because of my journalism. Then, when I went to graduate school, I worked as an editor of a travel guide to Baltimore, where I was going to school, and just continued to get little editorial gigs after that, or short profiles, book reviews, that sort of thing. I worked for several organizations, but I didn’t work for any of them full time after a certain point. There’s a Native newspaper in Minneapolis, and when I moved here, I worked for them, too. It’s just gig work. It keeps me busy, but it also suits me because I’m distractible and like to do multiple things.
Shenandoah: Is there a person who inspires you the most when you’re writing?
Heid: It shifts and changes, but there are people that I’m usually thinking about. There are other writers I like whose work keeps me going. There are visual artists—Andrew Carlson, who did the cover art for Little Big Bully, is somebody who really inspires me. We talk while we’re working on big projects—I talked the whole book out with her just before I finished the first draft.
I would say I have a sort of thing about David Bowie, and I listen to a lot of Bowie while I’m writing, before I write, when I’m driving around, or walking and thinking about getting back to my work. But also, my other books would always start with obsessively having a Patti Smith song in my head—and then I knew I had a new book. Last night it was Iggy Pop, and I wondered—am I moving into my Iggy Pop phase? Anyway, David Bowie had this trick of cutting lyrics up and moving them into different parts of a piece of paper—it’s like the trick where you cut up your poem and rearrange it. David Bowie did that too, so I know that his work was like poetry—his lyrics.
Shenandoah: Since this is a literary journal class and we’ve been talking about editing, I’m wondering if you can talk about the role that editors have played not only in your career but in your work? Do you have an editor that works with you closely or edits your poems or actually substantively edits things or a conversational relationship with an editor?
Heid: I don’t, anymore, have that kind of an editor. However, I do that kind of editing. My first editor was a poet named Jim Cihlar. He worked at New Rivers Press. He also worked at Coffee House Press and a number of places, and he teaches with me in the MFA program at Augsburg, and we have our own press there. So, Jim was always a big influence, and we were in a writing group together for many years. His way of editing is now just ingrained in me, so I don’t necessarily need to bring somebody to the page with me. I didn’t do that with this book. The day it was published, only ten people had seen the manuscript, including my editor, the coeditors there at Penguin, the judge, my husband, my friend Eric Gansworth who’s a poet, whose work I edit too, my sister, my niece. Those are the only people who had seen it, so that was a little scary. Of course, I’d read the poems aloud, and that helps too. You find out if you’re doing the right thing by your audience and how they respond.
Shenandoah: Kind of a follow-up to that, what do you think makes someone a good editor? You said Jim’s editorial sensibility lives within you. How would you describe that sensibility?
Heid: Well, it’s not self-centered, and that’s one of the most important things. You’re not telling somebody to make an edit just because you would like it that way. You’re thinking about the whole piece, whether it’s an essay, poem, or a story, and you’re looking for strengthening it or tightening it—you’re asking the right questions. Jim always would ask a question of the poem, and that’s one of my key ways of doing our workshop, asking questions of the writing rather than saying how we think it could be better or making a lot of suggestions right off the bat. So, I think that openness to the writer understanding their own work and being able to see what needs to change themselves, rather than being told it, has been really important to me, and it’s a skill that I think is good for editors to have. Trying not to think about who wrote it or anything, but what it’s made of, and to think of it sculpturally is one of the things. Jim never said that to me. I’ll say he’s just really good with grammar and syntax and tightening the line. Eric’s the opposite of that, he always wants me to write more [laughs].
Shenandoah: I love that as a rule, “what it’s made of.” You have to look at what’s there and just reflect that back and try to live in that world.
Heid: Look for the rules the poet set in the poem. And if they haven’t, ask them to tighten their rules so that the reader understands them.
Shenandoah: If you could ask yourself a question, what would you want to answer? I always think in Q&As, secretly, that there must be some question that no one ever asks that you wished they’d ask, about you or about your book.
Heid: Well, you have that poem “Faith and Less,” and it shows sort of both my lapsed Catholicism, or it’s not even lapsed, it’s caput, but my overtake in Catholicism, I much prefer indigenous, spiritual thinking, and I’m anti-theist. So that’s what that poem is about, in a way, but it’s about how poetry has taken that place of faith for me. And what if poetry just doesn’t do it for me anymore or isn’t making the change that I want to see, isn’t having its movement in the world. So, your faith in poetry could disappear. And sometimes it does! Sometimes I’m like, “What the heck? Why do this? What a weird thing to have spent your life doing.” You know, you publish a book and then it’s just like you threw it off a cliff! Nothing happens, I mean, almost nothing happens. Occasionally you get a book review. Now we’re all on Zoom and you can’t even hear other people breathe. I cannot tell you how I miss being with a live audience because you feel whether or not you influenced the thinking, the breathing, the humor of another person, and not having that is just very strange. Although I wrote that poem “Faith and Less” a long time ago, it’s made me wonder. So, sometimes I wish people would ask me, “Is poetry worth it?” or “What are you trying to get out of poetry? What do you like? What do you dream of? What do poets want?” So those are some of the questions I wish I could actually answer. And then, also, how to keep doing poetry. Because that’s what you all have to do with any kind of writing or literary pursuit, how do you just keep doing it?
Shenandoah: Yeah, you mentioned certain music that inspires you or you go and take a walk, and in a creative writing class I took last semester, we talked a lot about writer’s block and putting yourself in a situation or a creative space that can inspire you to write. So, is that kind of what you were referring to there, and are there other things that put you in your creative space to help you keep doing it?
Heid: Yeah, definitely looking at art, being outdoors. I think early on when you write it’s about an intense experience, and then experiences deepen in intensity, but the frequency and time you have to pay attention to them lessens as you get older. I probably don’t have to tell that to a lot of you. But, you know, the lyricality of a younger poet is not as accessible or as of interest, so poetry has this other place in your life. I’m not sure exactly how I can define that, but for me it became an intellectual pursuit, fueled by a sense of justice, and how do you continue to strive for justice through the things that you noticed in the world, the things that are happening? So, I think that those changes are what you hang through. What makes you do it? Music, sometimes it’s visual art, sometimes it’s going and spending time with people in the Native community here. It really just depends. Different in different parts of my life, too.
Shenandoah: On a final note, do you have any writing advice for young or aspiring writers that you wish someone would have told you?
Heid: A lot of people have said it before me, but don’t take it too seriously. Don’t take the business of writing too seriously because it’s complicated, and it looks impossible at first. I think you’re lucky. There are a lot of online magazines and venues that you can get your work to. Quite a few of the wonderful poets—including in the course I taught at Washington & Lee—have started publishing their poems, and that’s possible. Think about that, but, also, don’t forget to read. I think that writing is reading. You have to read other writers. You have to know what’s happening out there—what the conversation is. I asked the students in my workshop to sign up for ‘Poem-a-Day’ service, just so they can see who’s writing out there in the world. Occasionally they put a historical poem in there to give you some context, but I think it’s just really important to hear others. Also, don’t forget the people who helped you write in the beginning. Make an online workshop with people—or if you live close to them and can meet with them—and drop in once a month and share a piece of writing with one another. One of the best things that happened to me was finding a group of peers that I could share my work with in my years after leaving formal study.