A reading from Native American author Louise Erdrich’s book "The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year." Book is a meditation on the experience of motherhood - the first nonfiction work by Erdrich.

This file was digitized with the help of a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

Transcript:

"My days here have become sensuous, suffused with the particular, which is not to say that they aren't difficult, or that I get much done. With each birth I have been thrown into a joy of the physical emotions, a religious and fixated delight that seizes me so thoroughly the life of the imagination sometimes seems a spare place. The grounded pleasures - nursing, touching the exquisite fontanel of our baby, a yellow-pink fragrance of sun-heated cotton and tepid cream, gazing eternally into her mystery eyes - are only tempered by sleep deprivation. We know why prisoners break more easily without sleep. 'I give up, I'll tell you anything,' I want to say to her sometimes, nearly weeping."

"I'm an instinctive mother, not a book-read one, and my feeling is that a baby must be weaned slowly from its other body - mine. So I keep her close, sleep with her curled tight..."

"Spring dusk. It is the blue of a smoking engine out there, and now, from the pond, the rippling sexual sobs of wood frogs, bullfrogs, the full-throated breathing of the deep night, begin. It is a song so powerful I lie upon the bed pressed into the waves. The air throbs, filled and running over with alluring Spanish r's. This is the night in its entirety - leaves, grass, quaking air. The sound inhabits me, as if the dark passes into me, thrilling and complete. I walk out at midnight to stand within the tension as the moon shows, gleaming and porous, through the stanchions of pine."

"Black stalls housing horses, black grass, black trees, whir of black wings at the back of my head. Waking in the deep blackness, nursing a baby, is the most sensuous of animal tasks. All night I wake, feed our baby, sleep, wake again to the tiny body curled to me in the depth of that seething music."