Books by Frances Washburn

This book details the intersections between the personal life and exceptional writing of Louise Erdrich, perhaps the most critically and economically successful American Indian author ever.

There is nothing particularly noteworthy about an Easter turkey. But when the turkey is stark white and appears on Easter Sunday on the doorstep of a Lakota medicine woman and her teenage granddaughter, it is clearly out of the ordinary. Taking turns, Stella and her grandmother, Hazel Latour, tell the story of what follows as the mysterious turkey stirs up discord on the reservation.

Rebuilding her life in a different town, the taciturn Elsie finds modest comfort among the white people who employ and befriend her. This book weaves the story of a ravaged woman into the traditional tales of her people to create a vivid sense of communities bound by storytelling and understanding and sundered by ignorance and silence.