Your story in this week’s issue, “Nero,” is about a seven-year-old girl who visits her grandparents and gets to know their obsessive guard dog. You mentioned to me that the piece started out as a memoir. How did it mutate into fiction?
I wrote the first few paragraphs of the story many years ago, imagining that I might one day turn it into a memoir. I had recently visited the Erdrich-family butcher shop, which still exists, in Little Falls, Minnesota, though it is long out of business. Standing in the back yard of the butcher shop’s living quarters, I thought of Nero. When I was a child, I had a record of a staging of “King Lear,” so I was attuned to the notion of tragic loss. Because the life of a dog is short and speechless, I witnessed Nero’s fierce vigor and his decline into madness. But even if I began with an attempt to remain faithful to the truth, I couldn’t help veering off. I added a skinny uncle (who resembles no uncle of mine), and then the girlfriend and her vicious spaniel. There was no going back.
Does your fiction often spring from a fragment of memory, like this one?
There are often shards of memory buried in my fiction, but I write more from imagined incidents. Most of my books begin with incidents that just come to mind. Some are based on odd bits of fact: doves descend in vast numbers to devour the grain in the fields; a female outlaw rustles a pig; during a bank robbery, a woman is held hostage and the sheriff shoots her in the hip; the Red River expands in a mighty flood. And so on.
Why has Nero stayed in your mind for so long?
I have a dog named Maa’ingan (Ojibwe for “wolf”). He is a black Belgian Shepherd with a sweeping coat, a plumed tail, and a throbbingly devoted look in his eyes. He has a noble mien and a ferocious amount of energy, though he is gentle. He reminds me of Nero, and it is poignant to me that our dog knows many human words and even seems to understand entire sentences. I wanted to give Nero a word to understand, so I gave him my favorite cookie, the gingersnap.
Were there actually travelling school shows with dangerous snakes in the Midwest in your childhood?
There were absolutely travelling shows. The one with the tarantula and python was my very favorite. Imagine, instead of the safety of a zoo or “Animal Planet,” having a python carried down the aisle of the school gym! The spectacle of the bald man lecturing from beneath a peacefully resting tarantula—sort of an arachnidic hairpiece—has never left my mind.
And did you ever see personal scores settled through wrestling matches like this one?
Before Title IX, the only girls’ sport offered at my school was cheerleading. I was a wrestling cheerleader. Our cheerleading advisor didn’t even let us do the splits for fear that we would lose our virginity. Kneeling on the edge of the mat, we urged our team members on with rhymes that played on “Take Him Down!” “Reversal!” and “Pin!” I saw lots of wrestling matches. My grandfather Ludwig Erdrich, from Pforzeim, Germany, was also a prize wrestler. But Jurgen’s fighting style is inspired by Royce Gracie. Brendan Fairbanks, an Ojibwe and martial-arts teacher who is a friend of mine, sent me some YouTube links, because he knows I am interested in martial arts. One of the fights was Royce Gracie vs. Dan Severn. In another video, the slender Gracie bests the sumo wrestler Akebono. Of course, high-school wrestlers always wrestled in their weight class, so I’d never seen anything quite like this.
You show us how good Jurgen is at controlling and subduing animals—at the slaughterhouse, at least. But he doesn’t seem to use those skills on Nero; he keeps his distance and relies on a fence to contain the dog. Why?
Jurgen would never subdue Nero that way because he wouldn’t want a guard dog to be intimidated by humans (although, of course, Nero knows that Jurgen is in charge). Jurgen relies on Nero’s frustration and tremendous territorial instinct to keep thieves out of the shop.
The narrator, remembering these two or three weeks from the vantage point of adulthood, says that every detail is still vivid to her. Why did her time with Nero have such an impact on her?
Before I understood that I was human, I believe I had a boundless, unquestioning way of identifying with every plant, animal, and insect. Becoming stuck in me, being me, was both wondrous and a source of dismay. Shortly after, of course, one learns of death—that dark way out. I understood all of this while peering into the shiny face of a paper-towel dispenser in my kindergarten bathroom—so my realization was less romantic than if I’d been looking into the eyes of a dog.
In these parallel love affairs, Jurgen wins his fight with Mr. Gamrod and gets Priscilla, but Nero—even though he wins his struggle to scale the fence—doesn’t get Mitts. Is there no romantic justice in this world?
You probably read more short stories than anyone else on earth, so you know the rules. If a person gets romantic justice in the story, the dog must suffer, or vice versa. Also, I have never liked cocker spaniels.
As for romantic justice in the real world, now that I am fifty-eight, I have seen a few instances where romantic justice was achieved and things worked thrillingly out. In life, we struggle hard and compromise everything for love. When it doesn’t work out, that’s a novel. When it does work out, that’s a bad novel, but, all told, most of us would rather live in a boring plot that includes someone nice bringing a cup of coffee to us in the morning or being there to pick us up when the car gets towed.
Your stories are often incorporated into or expand to form novels. Do you think that “Nero” is heading in that direction?
I doubt that “Nero” will become part of a novel. I am working on a book of short stories, trying to keep them stories, for once. But then again, I can never predict, and Jurgen may go on to wrestle Akebono.
Photograph by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images.
