photo by: Mike Yoder/Journal-World

Award-winning novelist Louise Erdrich speaks at Haskell Indian Nations University on Saturday, October 12, 2024, to launch her new novel, “The Mighty Red.”

Pulitzer Prize winning-author Louise Erdrich said it was her first job pulling sugar beets that inspired her to write her new novel “The Mighty Red.” As she worked in the fertile soil of the Red River Valley as a teenager, she could see change was coming.

“It changed from a place where there were a lot of smaller farms into a place where the farms got bigger and bigger and bigger,” Erdrich told a full crowd at Haskell Indian Nations University on Saturday evening.

Erdrich, who was visiting Haskell to launch the novel, said she wanted to write about her experience in the sugar beet fields and the rise of industrial farming that she’s witnessed over her lifetime in the Red River Valley — where she said sugar beet harvest trucks now dominate the roads and sugar factories dominate the landscape. She has indeed done that, but, she added, she is not a nonfiction writer, so she threw in a love triangle, too.

“The Mighty Red,” which came out this month, is set in the farming communities of Tabor, North Dakota. The narrative revolves around a fraught wedding and is told from a variety of perspectives. The story, which unfolds amid the 2008 financial crisis, is described as one of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people’s lives. As for the love triangle, Erdrich said it involves three young people, one of whom’s family owns a big farm.

“I decided to write about some teenagers because I know what it’s like to be a teenager in a small town,” Erdrich said.

As part of the talk, Erdrich read a handful of excerpts from “The Mighty Red,” giving the audience a glimpse into the book’s setting and the complicated reality of the character Kismet as she tries to navigate her marriage to Gary and her love for Hugo. But she returned to the historical roots of the story in the end. The final excerpt she read connected the devastation of American buffalo herds to the refinement of sugar, which at one point used bone char from buffalo bones to bleach the sugar white.

Saturday’s event, “An Evening With Louise Erdrich,” was part of the Lawrence Public Library’s “Booktoberfest” program, and was hosted by the library, Haskell and The Raven Bookstore. Erdrich, 70, is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. She has written nearly 30 books and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for “The Night Watchman” in 2021 and the National Book Award for Fiction for “The Round House” in 2012. In addition to her many novels, she has also written poetry, children’s books and a memoir of early motherhood.

This is the second time Erdrich has spoken at Haskell. Her first visit was March 11, 2020, when “The Night Watchman” came out, as the Journal-World reported. Erdrich’s 2021 novel “The Sentence,” which unfolds during the COVID-19 pandemic and includes sporadic appearances from Erdrich herself, mentions her visit to Lawrence, which occurred right before many public events (including Erdrich’s own book tour) were canceled.

After her talk, which took place in Haskell’s auditorium, Erdrich took questions from the audience. One topic hit on another industry that has also seen major change in Erdrich’s lifetime and interweaves with her own life: bookselling. Erdrich said she started her bookstore, Birchbark Books, in 2001 amid the rise of Amazon as she watched a lot of her favorite bookstores fail and collapse.

Apart from the role independent bookstores play in communities, Erdrich said she wanted to open a bookstore where people could get books about Native Americans. She said it started with one bookcase in the approximately 800-square-foot store, where the books were mostly written by non-Native authors. Therein lies another change, though this time one of expansion.

“Now the whole book store could be just Native books, and mostly by Indigenous writers,” Erdrich said. “And I know there are Native students and Native writers here who are going to keep that going.”

The next question came from a Haskell student who asked what advice Erdrich would give young Native writers. Erdrich urged them not to hold back or be embarrassed.

“I started writing and it’s like I was in a confessional,” she said. “I started writing thinking nobody would ever read my book, so I let everything go into it.”

But, she said, it is more than just abandon. Erdrich noted that she wrote several books before she got one published, so she also urged young Native writers to “be rigorous.”

“Be tough on yourself, be rigorous, realize you’re not going to get a perfect book right off the bat,” she said. “…You have to practice. You have to fail a lot in order to get to what you really want to write. But don’t give up, and give it everything you have.”

photo by: Mike Yoder/Journal-World

Award-winning novelist Louise Erdrich speaks at Haskell Indian Nations University Saturday, October 12, 2024, to launch her new novel, “The Mighty Red.” After her event, titled “An Evening with Louise Erdrich”, Erdrich signed copies.