Louise Erdrich: Online-Only

Hilary Abe

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Literary Arts

Louise Erdrich: Online-Only

Past Event: Wednesday, November 10, 2021

At lectures.org

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Online

Although this event has passed, you can still purchase tickets now through Wednesday, November 17, at 6 p.m. (PT). The event will be viewable until 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, November 17.

The National Book Award-winning author of seventeen novels, Louise Erdrich’s fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother.

In her new, powerful, and timely novel, The Sentence, Erdrich explores how the burdens of history, and especially identity, appropriation, exploitation, and violence done to human beings in the name of justice, manifest in ordinary lives today. Q&A with Kristen Millares Young.

All Literary Arts Series, Create Your Own Series, and Super SAL subscribers (except Student/25 & Under and complimentary subscriptions) receive Erdrich’s forthcoming book, The Sentence, mailed to the subscriber’s address.

Revolving around a small independent bookstore in contemporary Minneapolis, The Sentence follows a turbulent year in the life of a strong though vulnerable Ojibwe woman named Tookie. After serving part of an outrageously long sentence, Tookie, who “learned to read with murderous attention” while in prison, naturally gravitates toward working at a bookstore. There, she joins a dedicated community of artists and book lovers and begins to build a new life for herself.

When Flora, the store’s most persistent customer, suddenly dies, her ghost refuses to leave. Flora returns on All Soul’s Day to haunt the bookstore and in particular, Tookie. Why? The mystery of this revenant’s appearance leads Asema, a fellow Ojibwe bookseller, and Tookie to a shocking personal discovery with historical reverberations. Tookie finds that this year of disease, violence, and political upheaval is, on a worldwide scale, a year of ghosts and hauntings.

The Sentence begins on All Soul’s Day 2019 and ends on All Soul’s Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

In 2012, Erdrich’s novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves (2008) won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine (1984), was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

Kristen Millares Young, our Q&A moderator for the evening, is a prize-winning journalist, essayist and novelist. Named a Paris Review staff pick, her debut novel Subduction won silver Nautilus and IPPY awards and was a finalist for Foreword Indies Book of the Year and two International Latino Book Awards. A former Hugo House Prose Writer-in-Residence and the editor of Seismic, Kristen was the New York Times researcher for “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer. She reviews books for the Washington Post. From 2016 to 2019, Kristen was board chair of InvestigateWest, a nonprofit newsroom she co-founded to serve vulnerable peoples and places of the Pacific Northwest.

Event Details

lectures.org

Know Before You Go

Can't find your tickets? Need access to the digital event?

All tickets have been emailed for Erdrich’s event, so be sure to check your inbox for an email from boxoffice@lectures.org. Call us at 206-621-2230 x10 if you can’t find them.

Your e-tickets, which come attached in a PDF with your ticket order confirmation email, contain your digital access instructions. The night of your event, return to lectures.org/event/louise-erdrich and enter the password where prompted. The program begins at 6:00 p.m. (PT) and will be available for viewing for a week after the event.

SAL will also send an email the day of the event, containing the same information. If you have opted out of receiving SAL emails, you will miss this important information—please email us at boxoffice@lectures.org and we will assist you.

Have a question for the speaker?

Want to ask Louise Erdrich something? Send your question to SAL at sal@lectures.org—it might be asked onstage!

Books

Literary Arts Series, Create Your Own Series, and Super SAL subscribers (except Student/25 & Under and complimentary subscriptions) receive a copy of Erdrich’s forthcoming book, The Sentence, shipped to the subscriber’s address.

Our partner bookstore will have copies of Erdrich’s work available on their website.

Accessibility

Closed Captioning is an option for people who have hearing loss, where captioning displays the words that are spoken or sung at the bottom of the video. Captioning is available for all online events; click the “CC” button to view captions during the event.

Sign Language Interpretation is available upon request for Deaf, DeafBlind, and hard of hearing individuals at online events. To make a request for ASL interpretation, please contact us at boxoffice@lectures.org or 206.621.2230×10, or select Sign Language Interpretation from the Accessibility section during your ticket checkout process, and we will reach out to you to confirm details. Please note: we appreciate a two-week advance notice to allow us time to secure interpretation.

We are pleased to offer these accessibility services for online events, and they are provided at no additional cost to ticket holders. Please contact us with any questions and feedback about how we can be more accessible and inclusive. Our Patron Services Manager is available at boxoffice@lectures.org, or Monday-Friday from 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. at 206.621.2230×10. For more accessibility information, please head to lectures.org/accessibility.

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