Bestselling novelist and poet Louise Erdrich presents the exciting debut of a new form--the linked-essay--offering intimate, honest, and exquisitely lyrical meditations on the delicate balance of mothering a baby and maintaining an artistic life. "What Erdrich does so masterfully is tie together all the strings of her life".--Detroit Free Press.

New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Louise Erdrich's moving meditation on the experience of motherhood--the first nonfiction work by one of the most acclaimed authors of our time.

Louise Erdrich's first major work of nonfiction, The Blue Jay's Dance, brilliantly and poignantly examines the joys and frustrations, the compromises and insights, and the difficult struggles and profound emotional satisfactions the acclaimed author experienced in the course of one twelve--month period--from a winter pregnancy through a spring and summer of new motherhood to her return to writing in the fall. In exquisitely lyrical prose, Erdrich illuminates afresh the large and small events that every parent will recognize and appreciate.

"Pregnancy, birth and caring for an infant inspire Erdrich's reflections on being a woman, a mother and a writer in this affecting memoir of a daughter's first years."--People