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Louise Erdrich: Short story in The New Yorker
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment


Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich's short story, The Reptile Garden, has been published in the January 28 issue of The New Yorker. She's been published in the magazine more than a dozen times.

"In the fall of 1972, my parents drove me to the University of North Dakota for my freshman year. Everything I needed was packed in a brand-new royal-blue aluminum trunk: a crazy-quilt afghan that my mother had crocheted for my bed, thirty dollars’ worth of new clothes, my Berlitz French Self-Teacher, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (a gift from my father), a framed photograph of my grandfather Mooshum, and a beaded leather tobacco pouch that he had owned ever since I could remember, and which he had casually handed to me as I left, the way old men give presents.

...

White girls at the time listened to Joni Mitchell, grew their hair long, smoked impatiently, frowned into their poetry notebooks, and pretended to fuck everything that moved. The other girls—Dakota, Chippewa, or mixed-blood like me—were less obvious on campus, and mainly very studious, although a couple of women swaggered around, furious in ribbon shirts, with American Indian Movement boyfriends. I didn’t really fit in with anybody. My roommate was a stocky blond girl from Wishek who was so dead set on becoming a nurse that she practiced bringing me things—a cup of water or, when I had a headache, aspirin. This was annoying, but we got along. I spent most of my time in the library, anyway. I hid out there and read my way through the poetry section until I hit on my favorites—all writers who had died young or gone crazy or disappeared into war. After Keats and Shelley and Byron, I skipped ahead to Lowell, Wright, Sexton, and Plath. Then I went back to the First World War, found Wilfred Owen, and wandered the campus dazed by “Strange Meeting,” thinking about his remarkable use of the verb “groined” and mumbling, “And by his smile I knew that sullen hall.” Next, I turned to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Apollinaire. Searching for clues on how to make my way to Paris, I floundered toward the American expatriates. And then one drizzly afternoon I found her—my muse, my model, my everything. Anaïs Nin.

My attraction was hard to explain—she was so artistically driven, so demure and yet so bold, and those swimming eyes! I was lost in soul-to-soul contact. I checked her out of the library again and again, but when the summer came I found I needed her more than ever. I had to take her home with me. Anaïs. I bought all her diaries—the boxed set—a huge investment. By the time I went back to college in the fall and moved into a beautiful old half-wrecked farmhouse off campus, I was soaked in the oils of my own manufactured delirium."

Get the Story:
The Reptile Garden (The New Yorker 1/28)

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