The Blue Jay's Dance

After the birth of my second and third children (twins!), I felt further than ever from my dreams of being a nature writer. Even the natural world outside my window seemed impossibly far away while I was indoors, contending with the demands of two babies and a preschooler.

When those babies were about two years old, I discovered, by accident, this book, and my life changed. In its pages, Louise Erdrich showed that careful attention to and contemplation of the natural world was not only possible for mothers of small children but that motherhood itself can make us more attuned… show more.

This book features somewhat marginally in my book, but my copy of it is dog-eared and never far from my reading pile and it deserves a place in my top five. 

The book chronicles the twelve-month period of one of Louise Erdrich’s pregnancies and experiences of new motherhood and it is rich in insight and full of marvelous turns of phrase. I particularly admire the book’s stylistic freedom (Erdrich drops in recipes for fennel risotto without much explanation). 

That freedom, both precise and dynamic, seems to capture some truth about birth as an experience: its exact demands and vigorous… show more.

The Blue Jay’s Dance is Louise Erdrich’s first memoir—a chronicle of a year of mothering and writing. I gobbled up this book when I was pregnant with my own first child, wanting to know how a writer I so admired managed two utterly consuming tasks so successfully. Erdrich kept a cradle in her writing studio and would write while the baby slept in the same room—an idyllic scene that gave me hope during my own first pregnancy that my writing life might still continue post-baby (turns out it’s a tad more complicated than where you put the cradle). One wise… show more.