Louise Erdrich on the Power of Stones

Your story in this week’s issue, “The Stone,” revolves around a large, smooth stone that seems to have some kind of power over the girl who finds it. Is it based on a real stone? And does the stone have any actual power?

I don’t exactly have a collection of stones; they just seem to be everywhere. I have a stone a friend brought back from Indonesia, from a place near where the Buddha rested; a stone that is a Neolithic tool from Europe; and many stones from my travels. Sometimes I notice an odd, local type of stone and pick up a shard or a pebble. That’s a hazard of book tours—they add to the carry-on. I’ve learned to put most of these stones back after looking. But stones ground me, quite literally, when I am in a new place. And they are mysterious and yet friendly inhabitants of my house. Every time I’ve moved, I’ve left behind a small pile of foreign stones in the garden. Have these stones used me to get from one place to the next? So I have a lot of stones around, I must admit, but this story isn’t based on a particular one among them. In the Ojibwe language, nouns are animate or inanimate; the word for stone, asin, is animate. One might think that stones have no actual power—after all, we throw them, build with them, pile them, crush them, slice them. But who is to say that the stones aren’t using us to assert themselves? To transform themselves? One day, the things we made out of stones may be all that’s left of our species. Of our complex history of chipping away at and arranging stones, what will be recorded or known?

When the girl is in school, a boy cuts off a piece of her hair. Her instinct is to offer the hair to the stone. Is that a superstitious act? A spiritual one?

This story is about finding solace in an entity that isn’t human. A stone is alien, but deeply familiar. It is a heavy secret and a messenger from an epoch of time beyond comprehension. I have no idea why the girl shares this upsetting incident with the stone—but it seems to help her. We all enact odd little rituals we don’t understand.

As long as she has the stone, the girl is self-sufficient. She doesn’t feel the lack of male companionship. Once the stone is broken, she marries the first man she comes across. Do you think that her life was better before the marriage? Or after?

In this story, there is no better and no worse. People form destructive attachments with other humans, so, in a sense, this calm, abiding, pleasant attachment is quite healthy. The only problem is that it is based, as are many human attachments, on appearance. When the stone’s symmetry is disturbed, the spell is broken, but later on the relationship is repaired.

Is the stone a benevolent or malevolent force?

The stone is neither benevolent or malevolent; it is indifferent.

Various other characters in the story are named—Vic, Mariah, Ted—but the girl is only “the girl” (and then “the woman”). Is there a reason for that?

There is a line in the story about why she doesn’t name the stone. I thought that the central character in the story should be elemental, too.

You have a new novel, “The Night Watchman,” coming out next March, which draws on your grandfather’s life. Is “The Stone” connected to that book in some way, or completely independent?

I often write stories that become parts of novels, but this story stands alone. It isn’t part of “The Night Watchman.”

The story has a fable-like quality to it. Were you thinking of any other fables when you wrote it?

Perhaps I live in a sort of fable, an ordinary fable. Perhaps this story refers to some everyday part of me that is beyond the reach of other human beings. We all have that aspect, but we don’t all acknowledge it or call upon it. This nameless kernel of identity can be submerged or damaged but never completely lost, even in death. There is a small pebble of self that may be nothing more than a molecular bond, yet it means that we were here and lived on earth.