Lucy Jane Bledsoe on Louise Erdrich and Miriam Toews: How to take risks

(Guest post by Lucy Jane Bledsoe)

The pandemic is devastating our psyches. We’re frightened, sad, hopeless. 

There, I’ve said it. Half of you already have stopped reading. I probably would have, too.  

But here’s where literature comes in. Storytelling is how humans try to understand ourselves, and also how we try to explain ourselves to others. We’ve been doing it for millennia—drawing on cave walls, sitting around cook fires, since the beginning of everything. People are desperate for stories. Good stories. Stories that make us understand what it means to be human. Stories that may even show us a way forward. 

It may seem paradoxical that I’ve turned to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale this year. I don’t quite understand it myself, but rather than depressing me further, I marvel at her vision (she published the novel in 1985), and I equally admire her fierce feminist lens. I need that now.

I’ve also turned to Octavia Butler, a queer, Black, visionary storyteller, whose 1983 novel Parable of the Sower takes place in the early 2020s. How did Butler know that hyperempathy, or extreme sensitivity to the feelings of others, was exactly the biological invention we needed? Butler dared to write a teenage girl character who invents a new religion, who redefines faith and god. The result is one of the most powerful novels around.  

These are writers who, above all else, took risks in their storytelling. They reached far beyond conventional views of our world to warn or guide. These are the novels I love—and need—most now.

Sometimes students of writing and literature focus too much on how something is said and not enough on what is said. I appreciate the perfectly crafted sentence as much as the next reader, and love an author who knows how to captivate me with subtle yet gorgeous metaphors. It’s pleasing to read a phrase that makes me say, Yes, that’s exactly how it is! But it’s fucking exhilarating to read a story or character or setting that makes me see or realize something previously entirely unknown to me. I want to read paragraphs that move me emotionally and intellectually both. I want newness in my reading.  

In this year of global illness (not just the pandemic—but I won’t write out the depressing list, you already know it), we are at a possible crossroad. I won’t use the word opportunity, and I won’t use the word hope. They are too limp. Both allow avoidance and denial. I’m going to go with reset and refresh, both personally and as a species, because these words require planning, dialogue, boots on the ground, in other words, work. Two extraordinary novels that take readers from a harrowing place of seemingly no escape to a new vision, using gritty and detailed dialogue and action, are Louise Erdrich’s The Round House and Miriam Toews’s Women Talking.

Erdrich’s 2012 novel tackles the painful and complex path of justice for an Ojibwe woman who has been raped. The author never blinks, never shies away for an instant from the full story, in all its granular and human detail, and the result is brilliant. So is the first paragraph of the novel, telling the reader everything about what is to come:

Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation. They were just seedlings with one or two rigid, healthy leaves. Nevertheless, the stalky shoots had managed to squeeze through knife cracks in the decorative brown shingles covering the cement blocks. They had grown into the unseen wall and it was difficult to pry them loose. My father wiped his palm across his forehead and damned their toughness. I was using a rusted old dandelion fork with a splintered handle; he wielded a long, slim iron fireplace poker that was probably doing more harm than good. As my father prodded away blindly at the places where he sensed roots might have penetrated, he was surely making convenient holes in the mortar for next year’s seedlings.

Notice the first word “small,” signaling the multitude of tiny steps she’s going to show toward the culmination of her story. Also notice the plurality of that word “trees,” attacking the narrator’s parents’ house, revealing that we’re not dealing with one antagonist; it’s a team of bad actors working in concert to inflict the harm. Then there are the “knife cracks,” as in sharp, deep, and precise, and the “decorative…shingles” warning to not trust initial appearances. I’ll stop there, but every word in the first paragraph announces how carefully and thoroughly Erdrich is going to unravel this story.

Miriam Toews’s most recent novel also centers on rape, in this case of an entire community of women living in an isolated Mennonite community. Part of the brilliance of her story is that Toews skips right over the gruesome crimes and centers her story on the women coming together in community and conversation to decide what to do about them. The novel is both existential and matter-of-fact. It’s all right there in the title: women talking. It’s that simple. And also that complicated.

It’s difficult to choose a paragraph from Toews’s stunningly original novel. The revelatory voice sounds anything but on the paragraph level. And yet the homely plain speech of these women making their decision is genius in how it unravels what justice is, what love is, what agency is.

The remaining men of the colony (except for the senile or decrepit, and myself, for humiliating reasons) have gone to the city to post bail for the imprisoned attackers in the hope that they will be able to return to Molotschna while they await trail. And when the perpetrators return, the women of Molotschna will be given the opportunity to forgive these men, thus guaranteeing everyone’s place in heaven. If the women don’t forgive the men, says Peters, the women will have to leave the colony for the outside world, of which they know nothing. The women have very little time, only two days, to organize their response.

Yesterday, as I have been told by Ona, the women of Molotschna voted. There were three options on the ballot.

1.      Do Nothing.
2.      Stay and Fight.
3.      Leave.

For the rest of the book, the women meet secretly to figure out what they are going to do. Very few of them have had any education or even any encounters outside their isolated community. So the tools for their decision-making are the most basic fundamental human traits. What are those? That’s what these women do, figure out what it means to be in community, to have compassion for evil-doers, to forgive or not, to choose oneself or one’s friend or one’s children over others in the community.  

When my publisher asked me to write a novella to anchor my new story collection, I balked. I didn’t think I could write on demand like that. My stories usually percolate a good ten years. Next my editor blithely mentioned a three-week Grand Canyon trip I was about to go on with a group of women, and suggested I write about that. Again, I recoiled at the idea of just dashing off something so current.

Then I went on the trip. I was blown away, as everyone is, by the beauty, by the extraordinary history, both human and geological. What I hadn’t expected was to find this iconic national park to be a hotbed of political conflict, including two kinds of rape. The Indigenous tribes who live adjacent to the park, as well as several environmental groups, have been fighting uranium lobbyists who want to mine parts of the canyon. Plus, a huge sexual harassment crisis had just rocked the park, with one ranger in particular demanding sexual favors in exchange for safety and even food while patrolling the canyon, compounded by years of retaliation by higher-ups toward women reporting this harassment. One eventual result was the firing of the superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park. The river corridor was left unpatrolled for at least two summers, including the summer I was there. I came to view the Grand Canyon as this massive American metaphor for our country, a literal split down the middle of our land, representing these huge environmental and gender issues.

So of course I had to write about it. And being me, I had to do it with fiction, with character. So I sent six fictional women down the Colorado River in rafts for a few weeks as a way to understand what was happening to that treasured landscape.

Marylou, who’d organized this expedition, had flown into Flagstaff early that morning, looking down from her plane at the deep gash in the continent, glowing russet red in the morning sun, framed by two dams, the Glen Canyon upstream and the Hoover downstream. From so far above, the Glen Canyon Dam looked elegant, a pale slice of moon. Marylou knew this appearance of delicacy was deceptive. Holding back a river, and one so mighty as the Colorado, was a Herculean task, an undertaking that required outsized arrogance by the men who thought it possible. But, astonishingly, it was possible. Behind the dam wallowed the immense Lake Mead storing untold megawatts of energy for the hot, dry cities of the West. Sitting in her airplane seat, she’d laughed out loud at the breathtaking ambition of human beings.

I was supposed to choose one author to write about in this guest blog post, but I believe the power of storytelling is in our multiplicity of voices. The more widely I read, the more courage I have as an author. I ended up writing about five novelists, if I count myself. And speaking of daring, how dare I mention my own work in the context of Atwood, Butler, Erdrich, and Toews? I do because these are a few of the voices that have given me roadmaps for how to do the work. These are authors who are willing to take the biggest risks, and this means that some of their work is uneven. They step beyond the perfect little gems of novels to try something completely new. Maybe their work occasionally flops. But when it succeeds, the results are gobsmacking stories that make living and reading and writing all worth it.

Despite the way I opened this blog post, I tend toward hope (okay, so I’ll use the word, after all) rather than despair and that’s why I borrowed an Edward Abbey quote, from Desert Solitaire, as an epigraph for my novella, Lava Falls:

Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little living mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the Earth. Joy, shipmates, joy.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of eight books of fiction, including The Evolution of Love, Lava Falls: Stories, and A Thin Bright Line, which the New York Times said, “triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances.” Her fiction has won a California Arts Council Fellowship in Literature, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, a Pushcart nomination, a Yaddo Fellowship, and two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships. She is one of a tiny handful of people who have stayed at all three American stations in Antarctica. She has also stayed in a number of field camps on that continent, both on the coast and in the Transantarctic Mountains, where scientists are studying penguins, climate change, and the Big Bang. She was raised by wolves in Oregon.