Karen Russell Reads Louise Erdrich

This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from The New Yorker Magazine. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're going to hear The Stone by Louise Erdrich, which appeared in The New Yorker in September of 2019. One night as she lay in the hot water, she became acutely aware of the stone. The smooth, empty scoops in its face seemed profoundly interested in her. A gentle, thrilling ripple spread through her body. The story was chosen by Karen Russell, who's the author of six books of fiction, including Orange World and Other Stories, and the novel The Antidote, which was published earlier this year. Hi, Karen. Hi, Deborah. So not so long ago, maybe a year ago, Louise Erdrich read and talked about your story haunting Olivia on this podcast, and now you are reading and talking about a story of hers. Can you tell me a bit about the affinity you two have for each other? Yeah, I'm happy to, and I feel some anxiety too because I love Louise and am aware that I just won't have time to fully honor that love on this podcast. Louise then someone, she's so important to me, long before I met her. I was reading her novels. My best friend gave me the Antelope wife when we were in graduate school together and we're still sort of pacing the docks anytime a new Louise story or book comes out. I have the privilege of occasionally getting to text with Louise, which is such a delight. And this story feels, I could have chosen any of her stories. I truly love them all, but I think I have a particular affection for this one because she had texted me, I had just written something for the New Yorker about my own relationship to other than human nature, to sort of flowers and trees and my own maybe peculiar rituals around that. And in that text she said, a stone is a heavy secret, which later appeared in this story. I was massively pregnant at that time, kind of lumbering around my neighborhood. And then I listened to this story, kind of with my newborn daughter strapped to my chest and it felt a little bit like the story. This stone keeps coming in and out of view. Sometimes it's hidden. Sometimes it's visible, but it really retains a kind of opacity and mystery. The story itself is like that. The woman in the story is like that. I think we're all like that to a certain extent, kind of walking mysteries. Do you think that you and Louise, Erdrich, share a kind of writing voice or tone or approach to storytelling? I've learned a lot from Louise and I think one thing that she does that only she can do, right? I think she's just one of our greatest writers and there's no one like Louise. But I think one thing I've learned from her is how to hold multiple tones, how to write a story that's short but contains many time signatures. This is a story that tells a woman's entire life and it also distills 1.1 billion years to a story that's under 10 pages, which is really quite sorcerous. She can do that clause to clause. I think something about her multi-voiced novels that also include just her whole approach to the living world where it's not just the static backdrop for human dramas, but it's a real wondrous, sort of ever-fluxuating acknowledgement of the ways that we're internet. Yeah. And this story, as we'll see, is both about a person and about a stone, an object. And it's hard. I think after the story, we'll discuss who you think is the central character here. Yeah, I would love to. And one other thing I should say about Louise is she's so funny. I sometimes feel like, yeah, I just want to lay a little of this stress there because there's so much tonal complexity in every sentence of what she writes. And I think she gets at the deep, funny sadness and strangeness of being alive. Absolutely. Let's listen to the story now and then we'll talk some more after the reading. Now, here's Karen Russell reading The Stone by Louise Erdrich. The Stone. Her family drove north every summer to stay at the end of an island in Cold Lake Superior. And it was there that she found the stone. It wasn't on the beach where stones are usually found, but in the woods. She was wandering in the brush behind the cabin, uncurling ferns, kicking up leaves, snapping the heads off mushrooms. She sat down beside a birch clump and after a few moments her neck prickled. She had the distinct feeling that someone was staring at her. Looking around, she saw the stone. It was black and rounded, nestled in the crotch of the birch clump. Water had scoured two symmetrical hollows into the stone, giving it an owlish look or a blind look. Or anyway, some quality that was oddly attractive. At first she was startled and a little spooked, but then she ran her hand over the stone and it felt like a normal stone. It was about half the size of a human skull and very smooth. The girl's mother called to her and she got up, holding the stone, and carried it into the cabin. At first, she put it beside her pallet in the bedroom she shared with her siblings. But then, thinking that her brothers or her sister might take the stone, she tucked it right at the bottom of her sleeping bag. That night, her feet rested on the cool curve of the stone and she brushed the smooth eye sockets with her toes. After a month, the family got ready to return to the city and the girl put the stone in her backpack, which she kept at her feet for the whole long drive. She did not let anyone else handle her pack and when she got home, she went straight to her room, took the stone out and set it on her nightstand, where there was also a digital clock and a pile of books. She was old enough now to say goodnight to her mother and father before entering her room. They did not sit by her bed to read to her anymore. She took her own laundry downstairs as well. Her mother was not the type to go through her children's rooms often or to clean for them, so school had started by the time her mother noticed the stone. She mentioned it at dinner. That rock by your bed looks like it came from the island. Did you find it there? The girl nodded, but her mother's remark gave her an uneasy feeling and that night she put the stone at the bottom of her least used drawer. There was a boy named Vic who often acted up in order to get attention. One day during art class, the girl felt a little tug at the end of her ponytail and looked around to see that Vic had used his art scissors to snip off a piece of her dark hair. He dangled the lock from his fingers and grinned at her, but she said nothing. She was frozen, staring at her hair. He made a move to hide the hair, but she found her voice and told him to drop it. She snatched the lock as it left his fingers and balled it up in her fist. At this point, the teacher noticed that something was going on and asked the girl what was in her hand. When the teacher saw the hair, she said that cutting your own hair was the sort of behavior most children had outgrown long ago and she would have to write a note to her parents. Her mother was mystified. Why did you do that? Her father lectured her about the beauty of hair. That night, she put the little clump of severed hair into one of the empty hollows in the face of the stone. As soon as she'd done this, she was flooded with a sense of peace and relief. The entire incident ceased to matter, though she had been terribly upset by it before. She breathed out and laughed as she closed the drawer. It was nothing at all. After that, whenever something happened to upset her, the girl would go to the stone. She would sit on the bed with the stone in her lap, stroking it until her agitation subsided. As she got older, in the most difficult of times, to calm herself, she would take the stone into the bathroom with her and set it on the edge of the tub while she soaked. One night, as she lay in the hot water, she became acutely aware of the stone. The smooth, empty scoops in its face seemed profoundly interested in her. A gentle, thrilling ripple spread through her body. After a while, she took the stone into the water with her and held it on her chest, then slid it down her body until it rested, heavily between her legs. There was the weight and the pressure of the stone and the heat of the water. She put her hand on the stone and pushed against it. Then she put the stone back on the edge of the tub and closed her eyes. The boy, Vic, mean the varsity basketball team. In fact, he was a starter and the most popular girls followed him home. One night, however, he called the girl and asked her to go out with him. She did. They went to a movie and in the darkness he took her hand. His palms sweat unpleasantly, but she did not move her hand, although she wanted to. Later, he drove her home in his family car, which had a child's car seat in the back and smelled of peanuts and other food eaten while driving. He parked the car outside her house and bent toward her. His breath was hot and he panted like a dog, she thought. But she put up with the kissing. He took a strand of her hair between his fingers and whispered something in her ear. He said that she was different from all the other girls, more loyal, because she'd never told on him for cutting her hair with his art scissors. She, too, had never forgotten the incident. Gently, she tugged her hair from his fingers. She got out of the car, walked into the house, and called out to her parents that she was home. She was the oldest of four children and the others were asleep. Her parents slept downstairs. The house was quiet. Something rustled in the drawer where she kept the stone. She opened the drawer quickly, but there was only the stone, its eyes saw kits calm. Everything was understood. She slept that night with the stone beside her and every night after that, too. Before she went to college, the girl would hide the stone immediately upon rising so that nobody in her family would notice it. But in college, there was no need. She had a single room and anyone who noticed the stone on her pillow considered it an interesting, even artistic sort of sleeping companion. Much better, for instance, than the childish stuffed animals that so many girls affected. Or the giant stuffed footballs or beer kegs that could be bought at the college bookstore. But one girl saw the stone and thought it a pretentious thing to do. Sleeping with a stone, how artsy-fartsy. There was some envy, perhaps, of a girl so self-sufficient, though pleasant, smart, musical, organized, sociable, that all she needed to sleep with was a smooth black rock. Basalt, the girl corrected whenever her stone was mentioned, which the other girl, Mariah, was her name, found so infuriating that one night she picked up the stone and carried it off. Just stole it. She put the stone on her highest bookshelf above her bed and waited to see what would happen. That night, the stone fell off the shelf and struck the bone around her eye, causing an orbital fracture and maybe a concussion as she forgot where she was and could not speak for several hours. During the chaos of the incident, the girl picked up her stone, tucked it under her blouse, and carried it back to her room. Again, she had to hide it. She kept the stone hidden for a long time as she continued her education, perfecting her musical skills. She became so proficient at the piano that she gave concerts and was hired by an orchestra in a large city. Now she carried the stone to every rehearsal in a leather bag and set it beside the piano. She carried it to every concert as well. She became known for the eccentricity, for sweeping on stage in an elegant, low-necked black velvet gown with a black leather bag, which she deposited beside the piano before she played. And then, one evening, years later, the black bag was not with her. She was such a remote and yet vulnerable person that nobody wanted to question her, but there was certainly some curiosity. The bag did not return, and it was guessed that the orchestra director had at last forbidden it. People forgot. The woman had no other peculiar habits. Her playing was the same as always, perhaps a bit improved. What had happened was that the stone in she had quarreled, or perhaps that is not exactly the right word. It began in the bathtub one night, right after she lifted the stone, as usual, to the edge of the tub and closed her eyes. Her hand was perhaps too relaxed. She dropped the stone on her knee. Tears sprang to her eyes, not so much from hurt as from betrayal. And she lifted the stone out of the water roughly and shook it. Then, rising from the bath, she smashed the stone down on the bathroom floor. The salt is hard, but so is ceramic tile. It all depends on the angle of impact. The bathroom floor was only chipped, but a piece the size of a baby's fist sheared off the stone, destroying its strange symmetry. The spell was broken. It was like falling out of love. As she had before, the woman put the stone now into pieces into a drawer she rarely used. Then she dialed the number of a man who had been hounding her for months. They married. She tried to pretend that she was not a virgin, but he could easily tell and was inexpressibly moved. Her piano playing was now filled with such emotion, in addition to her precision and clarity, that she was invited to tour Europe. She took her husband and left her stone behind. A stone is, in its own way, a living thing. Not a biological being, but one with a history far beyond our capacity to understand or even imagine. Basalt is a volcanic rock composed of agite and sometimes plagioclase and magnetite, which says nothing. The wave-worn piece of basalt that the woman had slept with for more than a decade was thrown from a rift in the earth 1.1 billion years ago, which still says nothing. Before she broke it and dumped it at the bottom of a drawer, the stone had been broken time and again. It had been rolled smooth by water and the action of sand. Because of its strange shape, it had been picked up by several human beings in the course of the past 10,000 years. It had been buried with one until a tree had devoured the bones and pulled the stone back out of the ground. It had been kept by a woman who revered it as a household spirit and filled its eyes with sweet grass. It had been shoved off a dock, lifted back up with a shovel, deposited in a heap. It had surfaced in a girl's left hand. A stone is a thought that the earth develops over in human time. It is a living thing to some cultures and a dead thing to others. This one had been called Nymishumis or my grandfather and other names too. The woman had not named the stone. She had thought that naming the stone would be an insult to its ineffable gravity. And yet once she had broken it, she set it casually in a drawer with old belts, unmatched socks, peeled sweaters and stretched out bras. She had left it there and gone off with a man named Ferdinand who'd always hated his name and went by Ted. Ted could feel her pulling away from him, gradually and so gently that it was a long time before he understood that while he'd been adjusting to each tiny incremental motion, she'd been shifting entirely. By the time he saw things clearly, she had turned her back on him. It wasn't on purpose. She didn't know that she was doing it. He couldn't point to any evidence in their day to day life. She was never unkind. She was always attentive, thoughtful, even loving. But there was a glassy distraction. He could feel it, though he could not describe it in a way that made sense. By this time, her concerts were few and far between and she taught at a local institute for music. She and Ted had moved back to the city and inhabited the same apartment, now a condominium. Half of an old house in a bucolic part of town. There was a large yard with plenty of birds and nearby park, which should have been a pleasant life, however, became painful because of this invisible distance. It took a few more years, but eventually Ted understood that he didn't want to live with a simulacrum of intimacy. He left and the woman wept over him. Until it last to restore her balance, she decided to clean the house and open the drawer where she'd put the two pieces of the stone. There are glues that can join stone to stone so well that the seam can hardly be detected, and the woman used such a glue to fit the stone back together. This was one thing that had not happened to the stone before. Now only the thinnest line told the story. The woman placed the stone on a sunny kitchen cell and felt so well that she began to cook a nourishing dinner for herself. She chopped fresh basil and garlic as much as she wanted and dripped olive oil into a saucepan. Then she put the stone in the sink and poured olive oil over it as well. The pores of the stone soaked up the oil. Whenever the stone looked dry from then on, she oiled it. When the stone looked bored, she carried it to the window so that it could watch what was happening at the bird feeder. At night, when she settled in the golden light of her reading lamp, she placed the stone beside her on an antique piece of embroidered linen. She became very old in this comforting life, and in the last few years divested herself of many possessions so that her niece and nephew, of whom she was fond, would not have much to go through after she was dead. She was lucky enough to die when an aneurysm ruptured in her sleep with the stone beside her. As the blood seeped into her brain, she dreamed that she had entered a new episode of time in which she and the stone would become the same through the endless repetition and decay of all things in the universe. Molecules that had existed in her body would be joined with the stone's molecules, over and over in age after age. Flesh would become stone, and stone become flesh, and someday they would meet in the mouth of a bird. That was Karen Russell reading The Stone by Louise Erdrich. The story appeared in The New Yorker in September of 2019, and will be included in Erdrich's collection, Python's Kiss, which comes out next March. So Karen, let's go back to the question of who or what the story is about. We get the narrative, the full narrative of this girl then woman's life, but we also get the stone's history and life story in a way. What would you say is the sort of emotional center of the story? I think what's wonderful about so many of Louise's stories is it's hard to really identify one protagonist. I sometimes feel frustrated with fiction that can feel a little bit claustrophobically attuned to a single consciousness. And this is really interesting. You know, it's grounded in scientific fact. It's a realist tale in many ways, but it also has this mythic quality. The woman is never named, the stone is never named. I know in her interview with you, she mentioned that they both have a kind of elemental quality. We learn about like Hot Breath Vic and Vindictive Mariah, Ted, which I think is so funny. It's just whatever feels kind of flat footed in this story about kind of the sublime rotations of the earth that produce this stone. And then, you know, here's your husband, Ferdinand, who goes by Ted. But we never, there's something equally freighted maybe about the respect that this story has for both woman and stone. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because the stone did have a name at some point. Someone called it my grandfather in the Ojibwe language. And yet for this character, the woman, she feels it would be sort of an insult to the stone to give it a name. I think Louise excels at writing a story where multiple interpretations are possible. So you could see the stone maybe as just a screen for this woman's projection, if you want to, right? A kind of mirror. But I think the way that it's written, you know, it really allows for the stone to have its own kind of autonomous existence. And I was teaching this story. I taught this class about writing other than human nature. And we talked for a while about that paragraph and its placement. You could almost imagine a story without that paragraph at all, where we hear about the stone's kind of creation and it's many different. Identities, right? The kinds of meanings that it accretes and then sort of sheds as it moves under the surface and quite literally, you know. But I can't imagine it would be a lesser story, right? Without that sort of huge dilation in the very center. So I think that kind of paradoxical compression and expansion that happens in this paragraph and also its acknowledgement, right? Which is funny to me. It's how I feel, right? There's the scale that is just quite at the edge of what we can grasp, right? This way of worn piece of basalt that the woman had slept with for more than a decade was thrown from a rift in the earth 1.1 billion years ago, which still says nothing. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess when you first read the story, as you were following from the beginning, you hadn't got to the stone's story yet. What did you think of the role of the stone in this woman's life? Do you think of it as an active being, an active presence? You know, I think that that's really deliberately left open for us. You know, I'm not sure that I as a reader, I certainly in like a court of law wouldn't blame the stone for concussing Mariah, you know. But that is a really, I mean, there's something, I guess that's what I mean about the way that even though this is a realist tale, there's, even in the construction of the syntax, right? There's something that can feel fable-like or almost like a fairy tale in the way that the stone does seem to have, right? This sort of mysterious agency. Certainly it's not just, you know, a paperweight, right? It's playing an active role, a dynamic role in the shape of the woman's life. It outlasts Ted. It outlasts Ted. It outlasts everyone. It outlasts everyone. And I was thinking too, you know, I wrote down this quote because I felt like it said something that I was having a hard time articulating. It's Flannery O'Connor from Mystery and Manners. She says, speaking of the wooden leg and her own story, if you want to say that the wooden leg is a symbol, you can say that. But it is a wooden leg first, and as a wooden leg it is absolutely necessary to the story. It has its place on the literal level of the story, but it operates in depth as well as on the surface. It increases the story in every direction, and this is essentially the way a story escapes being short. That's amazing. And I just thought that was, I mean, also just though there's something beautiful about this stone's literal movement, right? From like born of fire and like the core of the earth to the surface and back again. I mean, I think that is how I felt about this stone is the way it increases the story is remarkable. In her new novel, which is also incredible, The Mighty Red, there are these passages. She talks about how history is a flood, and I think she does something similar that same kind of, I mean, it just, it feels sorcerous to me what she's able to do, where she talks about transatlantic slavery and its legacies, colonization, genocide, the buffalo bones that are turned into sugar. And she does this in a paragraph, and there's something so impressive to me about that distillation. Yeah. Well, we have two timescales happening sort of within the same story, which kind of meet at the end. We have this human lifespan, and we have the stone's geological inhuman lifespan. And at the very end of the story, we have these two things coming together and the woman continuing to have a life as molecules alongside the molecules of the stone. Just an incredibly beautiful image. It's so beautiful. And I do think it does. It merges a fairy tale ending just with biological fact. I mean, you know, you're moving beyond the full stop syntax of this woman's death and all of that endless repetition and decay and growth and rebirth. I think the way that it widens right from the particularity, the specificity of this particular woman, her consciousness, this particular stone, you know, that's, it's like you could put it in your palm to all things in the universe. And Louise is able to do that in a matter of sentences over and over and age after age. I marked because I love the way that that does feel right, almost like a prayer or a fairy tale construction. And it's simply true. And suddenly, you know, I always feel this in stories. It's a tricky thing to try to get it that simultaneity or that vastness because you're sort of like straight jacketed into grammar. Our grammar is pretty linear and you move word to word down the page, right? But somehow over and over and age after age, you can feel in your body those billions of rotations of the earth. I mean, I just love the way it kind of bends linear grammar into something like deep time, like this circular time that for me, it really is right at the edge of what I can even conceive of. But this very short story helps me to access, you know, to the extent that I ever can, right? Some sense of that scale. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, let's let's think about the stone's role in the course of the human lifetime. When she first finds it, she's she's a little girl. She's wandering through the woods and she's being sort of destructive. Yeah, I think I'm trying to remember where she's snapping out the mushroom heads. Yes, crushing mushrooms, unfurling ferns. And she sits down and she feels a kind of prickling in the back of her neck, something is staring at her, you know, and that's a slightly uncomfortable feeling. It's not a feeling of sort of benevolent nature overlooking her. And then she's drawn to the stone because it has a sort of human like features and has these two hollows that could look like eyes. At that moment, you know, Louise has this this theory that she's talked about in a few places that stones might be using us, right? That when when a stone wants to be moved, it makes us pick it up. And that clearly is is what's happening in that scene. And it's it's successful in that. So it's kind of the very first moment in the story where we are on shaky ground, right? Because we don't know what we're supposed to think. Completely shaky ground. And I think she really suspends that uncanny hesitation, right? For the duration of the story. I mean, I love even that sentence where it has an an owlish look or where is it a blind look? Well, anyway, we learned something wonderful about this girl. What's why, you know, I feel that with my own children sometimes and I'll unzip their backpack and I'm like, that's interesting. Like, this didn't seem like, you know, it's not like the rock that's going to win the beauty pageant, but or the acorn or whatever, but something about it called to you. And what what, you know, so I also think it goes from being a discovery to a secret sort of instantly, which I like. And I thought this story too, and it's about so many things, right? I really did love the way that you can chart her own becoming with all of these sort of periods of rupture and stasis and some new equilibrium asserts itself. It feels, you know, you might think a stone and a human have maybe not that much in common, but I mean, even in the way that, you know, she finds herself having, she's violated this kid cuts her hair off. That becomes a kind of secret. She can go to college and now and now the stone is just right there out in the open. It's not something sort of private, something, you know, literally underwater with her. I think the way that children become adults, so much of those milestones really are sort of like unspeakable, right? In a sense, you can like words really can only spade so much up to the surface about what's happening to people in the subterranean dimension. Yeah. So I found myself thinking about that to her sort of erotic, when the stone moves, now it's sort of an erotic pressure or a companion in a way. And that's sort of a new right. She's an adolescent. She's a young woman. Her relationship's changing. But I was charting that too, the way, you know, she doesn't only feel this sort of spooked attraction. She feels gratitude and tenderness and fury. I mean, I found that quite surprising when she smashes the rock, you know, I think it seems surprising to this character as well. And even to this sort of partially omniscient narrator. What did you make of that? Because I, you know, I was noticing, and I think Louise does this in other stories and books too. It's so delicate, but these moments where she sort of ventilates all certainty and just say perhaps. And I thought of it almost like air holes or something, right? Where it's like, you point towards one possibility, but you're not excluding other interpretations, explanations. And I think what's one of the things that's interesting to me in the story is the way that we go back and forth between feeling that the stone is something good for her and something bad for her. Yes, right. And in the beginning, it makes her feel really happy when she's mad about having her hair cut off and taking the blame for it and everyone's been yelling at her about it. And then she puts the hair in the hollows and she feels great, you know, and she feels at peace. And it has that effect on her. At the same time, it shuts her off from a lot of what her normal, you know, romantic development would be, her involvement with other people. It keeps her kind of a loner. When she agrees to go on a date with Vic, she comes back and it's rustling away in the drawer saying, you know, what about me? Hey, and it's jealous. Yeah, it's so true. I mean, I love that question too. You know, I had that same thought, you know, she's sort of, there's something a little bit sterile about her piano playing. She's just proficient. And then she gets married and she's suddenly right. There's passion. There's emotion that's inflicting her playing. She's able to tour Europe and she leaves the stone behind. And yet, you know, the peace that she feels with this, you know, this entity, this inhuman thought that developed over centuries is interesting to me. I really love that one sentence, you know, when she's consoled, the consolation she feels, whatever strange peace floods into her, that sentence, everything was understood. I'm like, wow, where is the woman? Where is the stone? You know, there, some divide is totally a face there. There is some kind of sense of unity in that mysterious, passive construction. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's what I love too. You can read this different ways. You absolutely can say, well, this is a woman who has sealed herself off. She's not available for, you know, the ordinary give and take and flux of human relationships. She has a glassy distraction, you know, we don't, we don't know. She, I think that's interesting to me to have a character like this too, who sort of remains a little bit remote and unknowable. And I, you know, I find that some readers don't, they don't love that, Deborah. They really do want one explanation or one resolution. And I think there's something so artful and, and generous. And also there's a kind of, what would you call it, like a kind of epistemic humility about what's always filtered or incomplete about how we know reality and how we know other people. Yeah. I mean, the ambiguity can be uncomfortable for a reader, especially someone who's, who's asking, asking themselves the entire time, am I getting this right? Am I understanding, right? And this story, you might not understand. You might understand it differently on every reading. And even within the course of the story, because we have these sort of embark on these stages of this woman's life, thinking one thing. And then suddenly it changes, you know, she, she finally smashes the stone. She knows this man. She's like discovering happiness. Her piano playing is better. She doesn't need the stone anymore. And then literally in the next paragraph, she, she's distracted from him. She's not feeling it anymore. Yes. So you just don't. The velocity of that, isn't it a wonderful vertical? I was just looking right. Ted could feel her pulling away from him gradually and so gently that it was a long time before he understood that, well, he'd been adjusting to each tiny incremental motion. She'd been shifting entirely. And I think I just get, I mean, this is my projection, I suppose, but I would imagine it's a little bit of a surprise to this woman as well. You know, I was thinking about that, that kind of drift or the slow violence of that. And it's, it's, you know, Louise does this so lightly, but of course there's a by analogy, right? You can understand like, yeah, the stone's kind of biography is a bit of, I mean, the sort of ruptures that people undergo in their private lives or that we all experience collectively. It can feel like an avalanche feels very spontaneous, but obviously those forces were mounting for a long time. I think something similar happens in human interiors, you know, and there can be like a dramatic break. It seems so abrupt, but it was maybe a long time in the making and invisibly building. Yeah, it's sort of also fascinating that for so long she's carrying the stone on stage with her whenever she plays a concert. And then when she stops doing that, she actually plays better, which is not what you would expect, right? So she's been sort of using it in a way as a crutch. And I feel as though each time in the story she does that, that's when there's a sudden movement away from it. It's so true. And it's, there's, I think there's a little echo also, you know, you might not realize what kind of desires or possibilities, you know, you have these entanglements, you have a relationship and you might not know what that is binding up for you or what you're, you know, you're not able to do because of it. And when Ted is gone, I just love that she's like, I am going to put so much basil and garlic in this as much as I want. Like there's something funny and violent to me about that. And in a similar way, right? You don't, maybe that's another way of saying, wow, we are so internet and we co-create these realities and you move that sort of physical weight somewhere else and something, something new is possible. It's just interesting too to have a story this short that really gives you the strata of an entire life. Yeah. One thing that made me laugh, not in the story, but in the Q&A I did with Louise, we were talking about the, you know, this kind of breakup with the stone after she breaks it. And Louise said, you know, well, her attachment to the stone is based like many attractions on appearance. Yeah. And when its appearance is made less perfect, the spell is broken, which, you know, makes me laugh because I mean, she, she is not that she fell in love with the stone for its looks in that way. Right. But what a way to reflect on. Yeah. Just all the projection and, you know, the fantasy and everything else that can. One can, you know, embed emotion into anything. Absolutely. You know, we can see what we want to see. And if we, if we don't like what we see, we can pull out some glue. I love that line so much that, you know, now only the thinnest line is left to tell the story because you need someone like Louise to come along who's so kind of a literate of those scars to sort of kind of reopen the, the whole history. And what's also amazing in that moment is that, you know, we're shocked that she smashed this stone that we've been following through the story that seems like at the center and perfect. And then she reminds us this stone has been broken many times. Right. Right. Its whole life has been breaking the breaking down of a larger sheet of rock. So the fact that this particular fragment has survived in this form through several human lives doesn't mean that that is its form. No, absolutely. You know, in that interview you guys did, which is amazing, everyone should read it, but you ask Louise, you know, if the stone has been Evelyn or malevoline, how does she see it? And she says the stone is indifferent. I think there is something mysterious and consoling about understanding that, yeah, the graft of these human moods and needs and everything else, you know, at the end of this woman's life, she could have just ended the story with the aneurysm, that last rupture. But there is this inter-fusion of woman and stone and, you know, I guess there could be a metaphysical reading of that, but there's also just like a scientific read of what is, yeah, just right at the edge of what I think anyone can understand. That were these binaries between like growth and decay and life and death, animate and animate sort of break down. And that vast indifference. I mean, you know, that sort of, there's this vast order. I think that's something I love about this story that I find hard to do and maybe important for all kinds of reasons today, just to acknowledge this vast order that we're all embedded in. Yeah. And there's a way you can read this story as a process, which is the process of turning this woman herself into a stone, right? That's how she ends up. She ends up as part, you know, her molecules are in the stone, we're at the stone's molecules. And her life is this process of sort of withdrawing in a way. We get in her life after the marriage, very condensed because presumably she's still quite young at that point. And then suddenly she's basically an old lady in a rocking chair with this stone sitting on a piece of lace next to her, which is also interesting to me because I feel so that the stone goes from being her lover to being her baby, that she's carrying to the window and saying, oh, look at the birds. At the end. You know. I love that she can tell when the stone is bored, you know. Those are so those units of measure are so idiosyncratic in particular to write what she does with the stone, brushing it with her toes, right? Sliding it down her pelvis, carrying it like a baby. It's true. You can sort of chart different phases of her, their relationship, certainly, but also of this person's life and her needs, her needs. Yeah, absolutely. And who's to say that the stone wasn't bored? I mean, they've been giving each other that attention for some time, but it's true that it also feels so much to me, you know, in a skillful way, a story about human nature and what kinds of things we are. And those temporal leaps are destabilizing too, right? I mean, I had some questions. I mean, there's a digital clock next to the stone, but you wouldn't say that time is so firmly kept here, right? You know, there's a lot of sort of. I think that felt a little fairy tale to me too, or it would be, you know, at last or these kinds of, I think, very deliberately open measurements of time. And also the fact that she's a musician, that she is a pianist, which, you know, music being an art form that occurs over time that takes place in time and surges and ebbs and so on. It feels, I mean, everything is a metaphor for everything else in this story. I think I like that about it too. Right. And it's true. I mean, you can, you can think about kind of parental and child parental relationships. You can think about art making and fecundity and sterility and sort of technical precision versus, I don't know, spontaneity and passion. And yeah, there is, there's so much here. And one of the things she said in that, in that Q&A, she said, 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 that can be submerged or damaged, but never completely lost even in death. There's 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. I love Louise. I mean, I was thinking about another question of yours where it's, you're asking, is it a superstition, right? Is it kind of like a spiritual practice? And now I disclose too much, but I sometimes, when I was a kid and I really did need to be studied or I, you know, something felt precarious, I would like touch leaves or trees. I had a couple of my neighborhood. I felt like such affection for, yeah, certain like plants just in my neighborhood. And so one of the reasons that I loved this story is I haven't really seen that depicted. And, you know, I think that it did feel both superstitious and in a funny way, like a kind of a prayer or an acknowledgement of our great precarity here, you know, and just sort of like the astronomically long odds that any of us would be here at all. Including, including, right, the other, you know, other life forms, things that aren't human. And I think she, you know, it's funny, I was thinking about how it doesn't make, it's certainly, I feel like the story resizes our own human dramas, but it doesn't make them feel less poignant or precious or important to me anyway. No, it gives good weight to the woman's lifetime. And it's interesting what you're saying about, you know, needing to touch leaves and so on, because it's in a way grounding, making one feel solidly on this planet. And in another way, completely unmooring, because we'll be gone in these things. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. And I think that's that indifference that can be both things, consoling and frightening, right? So I feel, my husband was asking me, I was sort of describing this end of the story and how it does kind of merge scientific fact and this sort of gesture towards eternity, this real almost, you know, fable-like or fairy tale, you know, ever after vastness. And he said, oh, well, does that, and it helps with death. I was like, I don't know about that because I wouldn't say it's anything quite so straightforward. I don't know that anything Louise Schreitz has, you know, any, any pat moral or any sort of, you know, it's, I think that's what makes it so powerful is she finds ways to articulate, yeah, these very rich states that really are, there's never, it's never sentimental, right? I think she's often a very tender writer. She can also be a ferocious writer, but she doesn't connect any easy dots for anyone. And so something about, you know, spading up from those subterranean depths, a story like this one, it's such a gift. Yeah. And it, well, I hope it will be here when we're not. Yeah, me too. It will be like the stone itself. I prefer, I mean, and I advocate for a relationship with stones over like, I don't know, AI lovers. That's just my position, Deborah. I'm Team Stone. Well, thank you so much, Karen. Thank you, Deborah. It was a delight. The National Book Award in 2012, The Night Watchman, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2021, and The Mighty Red, which was published in 2024. A new story collection, Python's Kiss, will be published next March. Erdrich has been a guest on three previous episodes of the New Yorker fiction podcast, reading and discussing stories by Karen Russell, Joyce Carol Oates, and Laurie Moore. Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the story collections, Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Orange World and other stories, and the novels Swamplandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and The Antidote, which came out earlier this year. Russell, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, was included in the New Yorker's 20 under 40 fiction issue in 2010. You can download 220 previous episodes of the New Yorker fiction podcast, including episodes in which Karen Russell reads stories by Carson McCullers and Mavis Galan, or subscribe to the podcast for free in Apple Podcasts. On the Writers Voice podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writers Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page, or raid in review us in Apple Podcasts. This episode of the New Yorker fiction podcast was produced by John LeMay. I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening. Every month, we publish a recipe on Bon Appetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll bake, send us any questions you have, and we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. So consider this your official invitation. Come join the BA Bake Club. New episodes on the first Tuesday of every month, wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking! You