In a 1985 interview with Laura Coltelli, Karen Louise Erdrich was asked if she considered herself to be a poet or a storyteller. Erdrich replied, "Oh, a storyteller, a writer." Her own life story, as well as her novels and poems, are what make Louise Erdrich so widely known. Erdrich, the oldest of seven children, was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, on June 7, 1954. The daughter of French Ojibwe mother and German American father, Louise Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Erdrich's large extended family lived nearby, affecting her writing life from an early age.
Her father introduced Louise to William Shakespeare's plays and encouraged Louise and her sisters to write their own stories (Giles 44). Erdrich comments in a 1991 Writer's Digest interview, "The people in our families made everything into a story. They love to tell a good story. People just sit and the stories start coming, one after another. You just sort of grab the tail of the last person's story: it reminds you of something and you keep going on. I suppose that when you grow up constantly hearing the stories rise, break and fall, it gets into you somehow" (Giles 43). The exposure to storytelling had a prodigious influence on Louise's shaping and creation of plot; it was as important as literary influences if not more.
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After completing her undergraduate degree, Erdrich taught poetry and writing to young people through a position at the State Arts Council of North Dakota. She worked a variety of low-paying jobs, from waitressing to weighing trucks on the interstate. These occupations have made their way into Erdrich's fiction, increasing its verisimilitude, and broadening her understanding of the human experience. Erdrich was awarded a fellowship to be part of John Hopkins University's writing program in 1979. She then worked as an editor of the Boston Indian Council newspaper, The Circle.
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Writing intuitively, allowing characters to tell their own stories with their own voice and at their own pace, writing without chronological structure, writing prose daily, and working on several projects at once are some pieces of the process of Louise Erdrich's writing life. She revises extensively, referring incessantly to old journals for ideas and material.
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Although two books of Erdrich's poetry, Imagination (1981) and Jacklight (1984), had already been published by the time Love Medicine (1984) appeared in publication, Erdrich's first novel was clearly responsible for her eruption into academic and popular success as a writer. Love Medicine, a collection of interrelated short stories, features characters and speakers from four Anishinaabe families: the Kashpaws, the Lamartines, the Pillagers, and the Morrisseys. Erdrich represents the families in non-hierarchical terms by employing speakers of various ages and stations within the community. Furthermore, the fifty year span of the novel is related to the reader not chronologically, but instead in a cyclical manner as the book opens in 1980, weaves its way back to the 1930's, and finally returns to the early 1980's. Erdrich's narrative technique ultimately accomplishes a holistic temporal view of the Anishinaabe culture in which present occurrences cannot be isolated from the past.