In The Blue Jay’s Dance, you have a very haunting bit about caretaking. You’re referring to the rigors of combining writing with motherhood and acknowledging your gratitude that you could have your baby with you and still do at least some of the work you loved. You wrote, “I couldn’t take her with me on the job I had one long year that required fitting on rubber-soled white shoes, a white polyester uniform, then walking over to the locked ward of the state mental hospital to start the day by stripping the night-soiled beds of insane women.”
I’ve had a lot of work experiences in my life that make me thankful for what I am doing now. I’ve hoed sugar beets, lifeguarded, waited tables. I’m certain that having done those jobs helps me very much as a writer, but I’m very happy to be doing this work now.
You began your writing life early, though. You’ve said that your dad used to give you a nickel for every story you wrote, and your mother wove construction-paper covers for your homemade books.
Oh, yes. He did that, they did that. My parents were very encouraging. I was a highly paid writer from the beginning. [Laughs.] Both of my parents were incredibly supportive. They’re still alive, living in North Dakota.
Do they read your work?
Yes, absolutely. My father was a big part of the process of writing this new book. He went over the manuscript, reviewed all of the research, all of the historical detail. Fidelis [the main character in The Master Butchers Singing Club] is based on my grandfather’s history, and the photograph on the book’s dust jacket is of my grandfather when he was about 17 years old. I just love the way it captures him in his starched white shirt and his apron and his youth. I grew up with that picture, and my grandfather was actually in a singing club. So this title has been with me in a way for many years.
Do you get back to North Dakota often?
As often as I can. It’s important to me to be with my family, we’re very close. There are a lot of us now, with all the children, and it’s chaotic when we’re all there, you know, the way it’s always chaotic in a big family. But that’s not a bad sort of chaos. More of a lively chaos.
So you’ve got your family and your writing, and now the bookstore. You’ve invested a lot of energy into the store these past few years. Can you talk a bit about that?
Oh, the bookstore is just a wonderful place. It’s very familial. And I just cannot stress how important it is that we’re an independent bookstore. That’s a critical distinction in this corporate culture. Because we are independent, it means we have the freedom and the autonomy to choose titles for reasons that aren’t strictly about selling or making a profit. For reasons quite different from those that drive the major chains. Not that that’s an experience people can’t choose, but it’s a different experience to shop at one of the large, chain bookstores. We love the store and believe it’s important to keep that option—the independent, the neighborhood store—alive and available.
And now you have Brian Baxter to manage the day to day operations?
Oh, Brian. Yes, Brian is an adorable human being. We just love Brian. We all think he’s wonderful, although we try not to let him know just how wonderful we think he is. We wouldn’t want him to swell up and get too, you know, comfortable somehow. Because we wouldn’t want him to not do all the wonderful things he’s doing. [Laughs.] We have a great time together. My daughters helped out in the beginning. We’ve furnished the store with old chairs that we more or less dragged out of dumpsters here in the neighborhood. Well, this is a nice neighborhood, and people throw away some beautiful things. So we picked them up and hauled them off to be reupholstered, and then brought them into the store.
That sounds a bit like a character from the new book, Step-and-a-Half, turning trash into treasure.
Yes. You could say it was my mother’s influence. She was ecological before that was even a word people used. She was a gardener and a seamstress, she grew all our food, she sewed all my clothes, she reused, she conserved. She was amazing.
And that was atypical in your town at the time—Wahpeton, North Dakota?
It was atypical everywhere then, I think. This was the 1950s and 60s, before the environmental consciousness of later decades. It was impressive what she did. And my mother was—is—an incredibly talented seamstress. As I said, she sewed all my clothes.
And this was a good thing at the time?
Definitely. It was a very good thing. I mean, there weren’t a lot of retail options then in a town that size for buying nice clothes. I was lucky to have my mother sew for me. Oh, I remember one time ordering two of those “dollar dresses” from the Sears catalog. They had these “surprise” dresses, they were called, and you could order them for a dollar. So we decided to send away for two of them. Oh, were they ever awful. Just hideous! [Laughs heartily.]
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