I was going to ask you about one story in particular, The Love of My Days, that I read somewhere

was written over eight years. It's a 10-page story. What are you doing to these stories over that

time? Like, are you leaving them for a year? Are you coming back and changing a sentence?

What is the work that is being done on them? Well, it's hard to know about this story because

I started it, you know, quite a while ago, and then I put it away. I didn't even know I had it.

And I think I was changing from Microsoft to pages. What is this? That's the real truth right there. There it is. That's how it came to be.

It's the book review from the New York Times. I'm Gilbert Cruz, and today on the show we are talking to

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Louise Erdrich.

Since the publication of her first novel, Love Medicine, in 1984,

Louise has made her mark in just about every corner of the American literary scene.

She's one of the most prolific Native American authors and has published a couple dozen books,

from fiction to nonfiction to poetry and books for kids.

Her latest is a collection of short stories that she wrote over the past two decades.

It's called Python's Kiss.

So when I sat down with Louise, that's where we started.

So I want to talk about stories for a bit.

Yeah.

What are the nuggets?

How do you find that there's a thing that turns into a story?

I like how you ask, what are the nuggets? Because that is really what happens.

I have a set of words just randomly pop up and I'll

write, I keep notebooks, I write something down. And sometimes something keeps going for a while,

...