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can see democracy at work so citizens are truly informerred. our republic thrives. get informed straight from the source on c-span. unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. from the nation's capital to wherever you are, because the opinion in that matters the most is your own. this is what democracy hooks like. c-span, powered by cable. ♪ ♪ >> tonight we're very happy to welcome erika bolstad in conversation with lydia caselin. as a documentary filmmaker and journalist who has studied and written sasse vastly about climate change and fossil fuels, erika bolstad's personal connection to oil was brought to light in late 2009 when her ailing mother unexpectedly received a check for leased mineral rights. they were rights that dated back toht 1951 leased by erika's

grandfather from the land his mother had home sedded in the early 1900s in north dakota. erica's great grandmother, anna, was a woman of potential fortune lost to history with very little photo evidence or writing. in fact, anna's husband had committed her to an asylum under mysterious u circumstances. in her book windfall, the prairie woman who lost her way and the great granddaughter who found her, erika bolstad exing ca slates her family's buried past and its stark connection to the promised land of the american west. she will be joined in conversation tonight by lydia caseling are, author of the novel "the golden spate." tonight a's event includes an audiences q&a. we ask that you raise your hand time. that there is, levi has a boom mic that looks like that, and he'll make his way to you before you ask the question.

we have to get dethese questions clearly on their audio or c-span will say, no, and they won't air the whole event. so make sure you wait for that mic when we're doing the q&a. after that, erika will be up here to sign books. line o up around this side when that time comes, go this way. you can pay for your books after they're signed downstairs on your way out of the store. reminder that we do close at 8:55 p.m. these days. now please welcome erika bolstad and lydia caseling. [applause] >> hello. [laughter] how arehe you feeling in. >> good, good. yeah. >> it's a a big day, right? we have an amazing crowd here.

i'm going to scoot this, if i may, and c-span can yell at me if i -- [laughter] thank you. so erika's going to start with a reading. i'm so happy to see such a great crowd here for this book. it's an amazing book. it weaves together so many different strands in a way that i still don't quite understand how sheo managed to do that, ad i'm excited to talk with her about that. and so if you haven't bought it already are, i really encourage you to pick one up at the end of this event because you will learn a lot and be moved and surprised, i think. so would you like to start with a reading in. >> yeah, that'd be great. i'm going to start with chapter one, part one. and every chapter of this book startses with the price of oil wherever i was at the time of the reporting or the research.

fractured, december 2009, north dakota crude, $6 # 3.96 per parallel. her name was anna joseph seen -- andab that's about all i knew wn all of this began during the darkest days of the great recession. anna, my mother told me, with was a a plucky woman who, on her own, settledle the untamed prairies of northwestern north dakota. the family l lore was made even more romantic for what it left out. anna disappeared if from her homestead e in 190 # 7 lost to time and the vast plains. more than a century later, an oil company sent my mother a $2400 check. the oil company was leasing mineral rights along the edges of the booming bakken oil fields of north dakota. from the oil company, my mother learned she was an heir to mineral rights below the surface of the land where anna once had homesteaded. the check arrived in a manila envelope a few days before

christmas in 2009, its auspicious timing further complication -- confirmation of the family's theory that unexpected windfalls have a way of showing up when they are most welcome. in 1951 when my mother was just 6 years old, her father had signed a lease with an oil company during the first oil boom in north dakota. it was on the wind-swept land where anna, his mother, once staked her ca claim. the oil company never drilled on anna's land, but it kept renewing the lease for more than a decade. all that w lease money was enouh to send my mother to college. she was the first person in her family to go. my mother loved a a windfall, how could she not? her entire life she'd heard the promises browing across the great plains -- blowing across the great plains. she brought lottery tickets, she stockpiled pocket change to pay the slot machines mere the western oregon town where she and my father raised us.

do you know how long you can make $10 lost on penny and 5 cent slots, she once asked me. she took out loans, secure in the knowledge that there would somehow be money to pay them off when the time came. it had always been that way, it had as always worked. someday all this will be yours, my motherou promised. we knew she was dying. a few months before the envelope arrived in her mail, an off-dutier mother found duty nurse found our mother passed out from yet another heart attack. i lived in washington d.c. by the time me and my sister got to the hospital in oregon, our mother was alert enough to ask us to bring in her jewelry. she told us she had pick out what shehe wanted us to have. in my mother's office was a handwritten ledger detailing the $72,000 in medical debt she and my father owed to the hospital, to a cardiologist and to the ambulance company. the oil company's $2400 check

barely made a debt. dent.e three months after she learned of her inheritance in north dakota, my mother die. died. the night of her death i sat on the floor of my cold apartment in washington, d.c.,sh the phone pressed to my ear as my father shared the news. i pressed my back into the vertical lines of the radiator trying to offset the hollowed-out feeling in my belly with warmth and some sort of physical seven -- sensation. i could see all the dog hair urn my bed.i i put on my favorite black turtle neck and kept it on for several days. it was a warm cashmere cocoon that insulated me from the assault of a cold march and the ache of loss deep in my gut. the next day i wrote my mother's obituary. never had my words mattered more. as the writer in the family, it was the one thing i could do and

do well. i sat on my velvet see that with myfa laptop wearing my favorite sweat pants and and the ear rings i pilferedded from my mother's jewelry box on my last visit home. i wrote many a fury, unaware of time. an obituary, i understood, was an account of what was important to the people left behind. you could hitts the highlights;y mother's long marriage to my father, how they met in college, how she was the granddaughter of a prairie homesteader, but it left out so much. i was telling the story of my mother as i knew it as her daughter. it wasn't her story as she might have told it, but i'm certain it would have pleased her because i wrote it for her. for the first time, i began to understand the limits of my profession, a story filtered through newspaper impartiality was not the same as an obituary told temperedded by grief. a few years later when i was trying to become a mother, i

read that fetal dna lingers in a woman's bloodstreamgh throughout her lifetime. mothers always carry something of their children within their bodies. this i finally understood was why our grief for our mothers feels so raw, so physical. because those little pieces of our own dna, the ones inside our o mother, died too. her -- is also gone forever and our bodies know it. the raw feeling subsided as i wrote the obituary, the hollow part remained. the editor at one of the newspapers i wrote for, the idaho statesman, offered to print to obituary for free even though my mother had never lived in boise. it was an employee if perk, and i took her up on it. a news item in our hometown newspaper in salem, oregon. but the full obituary cost $285.99. i checked the balance on my american express card or. there was just enough room left

on my credit limit. i would figure. out later how to pay off the balance. like mother, like daughter. that night my friends gathered in my small apartment. they brought pizza and burritos and beer. they wrapped me in the warm comfort of company in the universal ritual of gathering together after a death. their presence reminded me i was not alone, i was loved and i would con to be loved. continue to be loved. later that summer my sister stephanie and i traveled once again to oregon to spread my mother's ashes. we gathered at the county park just up the road from the house where we once lived. the park was the scene of many happy summer days. at a bend in the creek, we loved the natural rock chute just slippery enough to slide down even as it snagged the bottom of our swimss suits and stay the tm

green with moss. my 5-year-old nephew, puzzled by the solemnity of the adults around him, squattedded near the creek bank peering into the shallowsfo for fish. if i recorded on my iphone the sound of the wind rustling the leaves of the cotwoods that nestled along -- cotton woods. the audio file showed up randomly whenever i played music in shuffle mode. the sound, always a puzzling interlude, return. me to the colleague bottom the day we said good-bye. even though when i hear wind in cotton woods,re i think of spreading my mother's ashes. some sank to the bottom of the creek bed, other granules floated, suspended in the current. as we released the ashes to the water, e thought of my or mother's spirit flowing down the creek to the river, and then into the wide columbia. i like to believe that some of those tiny boths reached -- boths reached the pacific ocean.

that evening e my sister and i t at the kitchen table our mothered had built from ashwood. we divided up our mother's jewelry. the objects our mother once wore that we would now wear close to our skin. steph, who wore a simple silver wedding band, chose my mother's diamond wedding ring. i picked out my mother's gold ginko-shapedrl earrings and a broach engraved with pearls. jest a ca mcclintock dress my mother bought me at the outlet store in san francisco. the broach had belonged to her grandmother, anna, my mother once toll me. the oil company paperwork sat in a pile of papers on my father's kitchen counter. i read over the lease trying to puzzle out how much money we might earn from royalties if the company ever exercised its option to drill for oil on land in a remote northwest corner of north dakota. it seemed such an improbable

windfall. we didn't even own the land, just the oil deep beneither the earth. beneath the earth. besides being born, what had we done to inherit mineral rights to a woman lost to the prairies and history until an oil company came calling 100 years later? and who was anna really? i held the broach in my hand, my fingers rubbing the pearls. annaou had touched this object. she too add that worn the broach pinnedded next to her heart. he too must have once -- she too believed her land would bring her wealth. a tiny e whisper called me to the kitchen table, a story beckoning me to follow, the same whisper my mother had heard all her life. we could be rich. my mother left me a mystery. it was my inheritance, my windfall, my story to tell. [applause]

>> thank you for that beautiful reading. i want to start with something that i was struck in that piece you read from where you talked about the limits of your profession. and one of the schemes that -- i'm actually not sure how you pronounce thatt word, i should have workshopped before i said it outut loud -- [laughter] threads that runs through the book is a your own career as a journalist, and that was the sort of work that the you were familiar with and, youit know, u described some of the kinds of stories you would write about and theyo way you would track dn sources and do your reporting. and so natural hi, you know -- naturally, you know, you brought that to this story, to your win withfall. but in someein ways -- windfall. but ine some ways the book kind of read to me as as a condition at of the journalist profession both sort of what was going on for all journalists during this stretch of period that you're writing over a number of years,

but also the way that you were atow your own career as a journalist sort of i affected how you approached the book and how you sort of struggled sometimes with figuring out how to tell thehe story. soou i wonder if you could speak to -- it's kin' of a two-part question, but if you could start with that. >> yeah. so i think that at the beginning of the book, 2009, that period during the recession and so when i first went to north dakota, that was a major time of change for journalism. it was just, you know, first of all, there was, a recession. and so many people lost their jobs. the newspaper company that i work cut my pay, you know, by $300 a month, and that was hard living in washington, d.c., you know, y when suddenly you don't have that money anymore. and it became a very discouraging kind of, you know, you could see audience slipping away, you could see our reach as

institutions, as a newspaper slipping away. and it was really hard to want to do the job that i've been trained to do and not really asfeel as though i were able to. that was a very difficult period professionally and not just for me, you know, for just many, many journalists, many journalism companies. and we continued to to go through those cutbacks, the layoffs, etc. in fact, here in oregon saw a newspaper close in the last few weeks, which is,w you know, jut heartbreaking. and so i think one of the things that that did is it put me in a place where i was able to go and do something more independent because i could see an end. i could seed that this career y not, may not look the way until, it did when i started it with so much hope, you know, right out

of college. in fact, i worked at an afternoon newspaper my very first job out of college, and that was like an an act propronhl even at the -- anachronism even at the time. you know, i could see something happening, and it was very apparent to me that i would,if i want to follow this particular story, this family story that hasy so many tendrils and connections to a bigger e or national story, that i was going to have to do it on my own, and it was going to probably rely heavily on my training as a journalist, as a researcher, as someone who understood, you know,no i can be drop off and figure out what to do by i have some tools and skills, and it's very, you know, i'm able to do that. and so i knew that i would be able to do that, and i also, you know, have this whisper that

that we could be rich calling to me. i, of course, had some doubt about the environmental consequences, but i also was very much called by those whispers. and so i think that that was starting out i kind of knew that the end was coming for the kind ofbe journalism that i'd been trained to do. if there are many -- >> there are many moments in the book where it feels like you're doing almost likee a hustle because you're managing to combine some of the stories that you would traditionally report on with the reporting that you personally needed to do, and i liked seeing how you would kind of slip that work in. so one of the things that you and i have talked about before how because part of your training as a journalist, you know, there's a very strong code of ethics, and i'm always struck when i talk with journalists because i come from kind of personal essay and creative

nonfiction, and there's no just lies all the time. and your opinion is everywhere. but journalists are really not like that. they're very, like, close to positionalty in a story. andd i think that is changing, but that's manager you really wrestle with in the book because you do, i mean, there is advocacy that sort of happens as a consequence of what you learn. and so i wonder what that kind of felt like, to wrestle with those feelings of not putting yours in or not taking a position on some issue. >> when i first started this project, despite the personal connection to it, i was so afraid of writing a memoir. i was really afraid of writing a memoir. id mean, i just was -- i didn't have that voice. it -- i did not come from a background of writing personal essays. i'd probably written, like, three public pieces with the word i i in them in, like, my career up to that point, right?

it was very hard. and i also had some sort of maybe, like, you know, patriarchal, cultural conditioning that memoirs are, like, what women right, you know? --et women write, you kno? i had to get over there, and i'm so glad i did. but it was not easy, you know? that was not an easy, it was not easy to find a voice. it was the voice that served me as a journalist until 2013 or so served me very well and continues to serve me. i still consider that as my main, you know, career. and, but it -- you know, i could see the limitations of it. like, i wrote, and it took a while to figure that out. i'm still grappling with some of it. many of you who come to the end of the book will see that i definitely grapple with it, and i continue topp grapple with th, how much of that add slow e cat city to do here.

one of the things that really very quickly changed my mind and that allowed many me to perhaps have a little bit more voice and be a little bit more opinionated and kind of call things as i saw them was honestly just being on the ground in north dakota. that was the key to just understanding that i had -- there was a story that needed to be told there that had this personal connection that, you know,ing the very first days that i was in north dakota driving around the state, and i spent a lot of what they call in north dakota windshield time because it's a a big place witha lot of, you know, a lot of roads and a lot of ground to cover. and one of the things that the i very, or you know, that i saw almost from that first day were flares, the flaring of methane

gas that was a by-product of the oil production. and in many parts of the country including now, you know, there's very specific drilling for natural gas. and. in north dakota in the eary parts of the bakken oil boom, there was way too much natural gas coming up out of the earth as, you know, as part of the drilling process where they were fracking for oil. oil was the much more valuable product. and it, you know, i think my very first trim to north dakota -- trip to north dakota, oil was about $100 a barrel if not more. and ifs i, as you drove on the prairies at night, you would see these flares, these lights on the prairies all over. it looks like, you know, some people have described it as, like, candles on the prayerly or these warm lights on the prairi- [laughter] >> yeah. it's just -- >> you're like, no. it was, if you drive there at night, you see these big flares, these lights in the darkness,

and it's climate change. it's happening right in front of you. it's there. it's burned off as waste. it's not even used to heat people's homes or, you know, for their gas stoves. it is waste, considered waste. and it happens all over the country. it happens particularly, you know, to a particularly large extent in north dakota and in texas. and it is shocking how much it's happening. andin i think the environmental reporter in me saw that peril from these flares from the methane, you know? we don't often get to see climate change literally happening right in front of us. greenhouse gases are invisible. it's hard to see the, like, tangible, everyday effects of it. and it was the most striking thing that i saw my first week in north dakota. and from that point on it became

easier -- [laughter] to write about that from a place where i could say it was bad, this is not good. [laughter] and that i could take a stand as a journalist and say that this is, you know, this is not something that should be happening. >> well, and one of the -- you have a really staggering statistic in the book where you talk about how the amount of kind of flared gas could heat, you know, some large city or state for a long period of time. really i wish that i had it at hand. but one of the things that i admire about the book is that you do, you kind of place all these different things in context. and i'm glad that you mentioned sort of the patriarchal structures that maybe encourage youti to, encourage us to sometimes more personal if writing as women's writing because sort of those patriarchal structures really shape what happens to people in

tayour book, notably anna, once you do go looking for her story. but at the same time, you note that the reason that you have this sort of homesteading ancestor is that indigenous people were displaced, and their land sort of parceled out to white settlers. and so i think you do, this is more of a comment than a question. but i admired in the book how you were able to step back even though you were writing personally and kind of put all of these different can elements this context. and there is, i mean, it really does feel like it's a book about sort of women's lives, because even when you're looking at, when you're going and sort of watching the rigs in action or seeing a well being capped, you note a lot that it's kind of men's work. women are, like, incredibly underrepresented in that line of work, and it really affects the types of things that happen

around the so-called man camps and the way life is structured in north dakota, the consequence of the boom. and then another sort of, like, women's thing that flows through the book is you talking about your infertility story. and i imagine based on what you've said that that was probably difficult to sort of put into your story when you're coming at it from that sort of journalistic standpoint. how did you decide that that was going to be sucht a meaningful part of the book? >> yeah. well, one thing that i had done all along when i was working on in this project was i tried to interview as many women experts as i could. that was, you know, the geologists that i interview, i think all of them are women. and the, many of the experts, you see these former cabinet secretaries that were obama

appointees like sally jewell and ginaw, mccarthy, and those are women who are featured in this project as well. and i thinkable that a what happened is because i worked on this project over time, sometimes piecemeal, you know, there were a couple years where i didn't work on it at all, and those years that i didn't work on it or i didn't go to north dakota and do any research were years where i was really struggling and my husband and i were trying to have a baby. and itba became very clear to me while thinking about this project and how to organize it that everything i did was shaped by that quest that i wanted, you know, that we wanted to have a child. and so it c colored the, what i looked for, what i was -- what i felt like when i was doing this work, when i was doing this reporting. it really, it shaped it.

it shaped where i went and what i chose to do. and, yo' know, there's a couple chapters where my husband is along with me, comes with me one year on a trip to north dakota. the one and only time he came to north dakota -- [laughter] and he had to come with me because if we wanted to have a baby, he needed to be there. [laughter] so, you know, like, that was part of it. that was, like, there were things that happened that were shaped by all of that. and i also saw great parallels in what happened to my great grandmother. so one of the things that i did in the book one of my first trips to north dakota, i went to the mental hospital where she was, where she was committed, and i asked for her file. i just knew as a journalist that anyone who has any connection with a state institution will have a file.

like, it's just, you know, you just have do is ask for it. maybe you have to file a public records request for it, i knew i could get a file. and, in fact, anna had a file, and it was about 15 pages long. they did not give it to me as a journalist, they gave it to me as one of her descendants. if i wanted to get a file like that as a journalist, i would have had to file a public records request for it. so i got a file. and i sat in a cemetery and read her file, and it was so, you know, it's really, really sad. and i, in fact, in the book chose to excerpt parts of that because i thought it spoke for itself. i thought there is nothing i could do. went at it in every single angle of creative nonfiction that you could try, and in the end, you know, i tried to sort of, like, rebuild, reconstruct kind of her world on the page, and in the end it -- i just became very clear to me that the words in the file poke for themselves.

spoke for themselves. and so i, her story is very tragic. her, she had a baby, and she and my grandmother had a baby, my grandfather. and within four months of having that child, she was institutionalizedded, she was committed to the asylum. and in her file, it mentioned that she was, you know, she had manic depressive insanity. that was her diagnosis which is archaic, and, you know, i don't even know whatwh that really means. but she also had, there was a note of, like, a define logical -- gynecological report which i didn't have. that was not something that they gave me. but it was very clear that she had, it also mentioned bleeding, and it was clear from the description of what was happening to her in the file that she was going through some sort of post-partum psychosis or depression, a very severe sort.

.. and i felt this affinity through the generations, through this woman who i don't know what she wanted tot be a mother at all. i don't know if that's part of her hopes or dreams as a woman at the time in the early 1900s but she did have a child taken away from her and she was committed involuntarily to an institution and so she never got to decide, never got to decide whether she wanted to be a mother or whether what kind of life she would have outside of that institution. i understood that. i very much wanted to be a mother and interested t felt like not to be able to be a mother and so i just i felt a

connection to her because of that slightly very different circumstances, you know, but i just, i could put myself literally in her shoes. >> i, is not that there are spoilers in the book but i do hope readers will come to some things by themselves and yeah, the story of anna is just devastating. there is no, and we also sorted look outward at how many other people sort of suffered the same fate is just so hard to kind of contemplate. moving on to like what others really set things can we talk about? i wanted to ask from a craft perspective because i can't emphasize enough how many things she's juggling in this book.

there's a lot of amazing regional detail and regional history, national history, sort of presidential history, policy and environment. how did you, he wrote this book over a number of years but what was your process for doing that? i saw a picture of you posted once where they were posted to the different colors. how did you forget how to structure the book and then how did you bring into being? >> so one day d in 2015 i had al the stuff i didn't know what to do with it yet. i was like, didn't have an agent, had an agent and have written a a book proposal whichs something to do for nonfiction book if you sell to publisher pier it was a very good. it was actually really bad, and if anyone ever wants to talk to me about book proposals, come see me. but i was having a conversation with a friend about what i had and the price of oil in north

dakota had just dropped dramatically, and i don't know exactly where this ideafr came from but i understood the structure of the book needed to be tied to the price of oil because this is a book about windfalls, about going in search of riches. so at some point i came to that realization with a conversation with my friend shauna, and i just understood that. and then it was kind of like i could organized it around those times w where oil was either really high, really low or when i got a manila envelope in the mail, you know? i always felt like this was first and foremost a book about climate change. that was my main goal with this book is to write something about climate change that would be relatable and use a personal story to tell major stories about the america that we know

and where some of these myths came from about riches and about getting rich and about windfalls. so i had, i felt like i have like threeng theme spirit i had the climate change theme. i had the personal story. i have meto as a narrator, the personal story of me as a narrator went in search of all of these answers. and at the story of anna. i knew i had these three threads, and what i literally did is i also had, i have no idea why where it came from, what i envisioned the story unlikable of white poster paper like the kind you get down and the bookstore. i envisionedf it light on tl paper just unfolding over time with these like chapters that have the price of oil on them. and then i could see like anna's story was this teal blue ribbon that ran through every single chapter one way or the other. and then i could see as a

narrator walking you through these places and people going, looking over my shoulder in the archives as in finding his records about her. and that i could see how there was a a story about an oil boom and riches and how that connected to climate change and kind of the darker side of the american dream. i could see that thread, to. and so yeah, it was, there were times when a really hard to keep in my head, like this narrative, 80,000 words of all of that in my head. it was really hard here it was very difficult but i stuck to that sort of like here's the price of oil at this time, and if i can just run this ribbon through all of those chapters, then you will feel i hope readers will feel that it is a cohesive narrative.

i do as a journalist and as a storyteller, i like narrative. i like stories that have beginnings, metals and inns and that take us somewhere. so id always wanted to be, you know, i want you to feel, i want to be there this cinematic feeling where you work, where you had that beginning middle and end. >> i'm going to askt a question and then open it to the audience. at the end, again i will be leery of spoilers but at the end of the book you do come to bit of a decision for yourself about how to proceed, knowing what you know about the environment and the balkan in the climate change. what is something we hope that readers will take away from the book and what do you, thinking about right now if the discourse is about whether stoves will be pried from cold dead hands, what

do you want kind of readers to think about that in sort of their own lives and oat advocacy as they come to the end of your book? >> i really hope that people see that they have a personal connection to some of these bigger themes, these bigger, broader american themes. ith would say another somethingf the book is kind of like maybe picking apart some of the myth of the american west. we've all heard these, and many of us here in oregon understand how those, how that has affected this place, the state and so what i hope is that by like seeing someone actually struggle with what they are learning, being very different sometimes in the family stories that i heard or the actual like a chapter about the tentative medora were a lot of these myths

may be originated, and what hope is that people understand that they have their own connection to the. the estimate75 is maybe 45 million, 75 million living americans are descendents of people who filed homestead claims. that's a lot of people out there in our country who had a connection to 160 acres of nearly free land. that was a major social program, one of the huge, biggest, it was huge, one of the biggest social programs ever, transfers of wealth ever perhaps. certainly for that, it was the first transfer of wealth at that time that was quite that big, and it might still be one of the biggest transfers of wealth that

has ever happened on this earth. e that connection, 5 to 75 million, whatever the estimates are now, have benefited from that. and so, you know, i think if we think about that, how that big transfer of wealth shaped so many places, especially in the west, then perhaps we can apply that to other things, other social programs, other ways of thinking about transfer, going wealth or of or of what what it means to be prosper us. and so i hope that, you know, people come away with with, with perhaps being inspired by how they have a personal connection to it. and that means that maybe there are small personal things that they can do that collectively, really add up to a bigger action. and you so we will start on sort

of this side and and work our way over. so questions, comments, praise praise. we love comments. yes. hi. i born and raised and educated in central north dakota and the county where i grew up is not very close to the bakken field. i don't have to worry or wonder whether i'm going to have any rights to any any surprise check in the mail. but i find it interesting and i hope it's not too insensitive to ask what's that like when you think about your ancestors, your rights to this? i can't help but think about the native american rights and wonder whether anything about reparations ever came up while you were doing your research or what that's like.

yeah, that is such a good question and i think that, uh, i begin, to address it at the end of the book, i don't to give away too much of the end of the book. but i do think that, that is, i think that's something that when i started the research and reporting for this book that was not part of the conversation at all. that was not part of any american conversation then. and i think now i think we're all familiar with the term land back. i think we're all familiar with some of the movements that that might reconsider or how how who owns what, right that might be a part of that. and and i hope and this is where i will stop in to that like kind of position of advocacy. i hope that we do. i hope that that is a big part of the the of what i do next out of this book. i hope that i'm i, i, you know, that i, that i can help with that facilitating.

some of those conversations. i don't think that am necessarily always the right person to as a white woman to be, you know, leading those conversations. but but i do hope that i can be helpful in them and and and i hope that they are part of our future. thank you. hi. hi. can you talk a little bit about what didn't go in the book like what you know, you're doing so much and 80,000 words, which really isn't that many. how did you make decisions about what went in and what didn't? and how do you fit all of that in through that little keyhole this question comes from one of the women who was in my writing group and who read so many early drafts of book and it is such a great question. so and i did not pay her to ask

that question, not so. yeah. okay. there are two there are a lot of things that are not in this book because i actually have very strong feelings that are that after not knowing how to write a memoir or when i started this project and not really knowing that that was what i was going to do, i spent a lot of time studying how to write a memoir and reading memoirs and understanding kind of the craft behind really good memoirs and a memoir is not a diary. it's, you know, it is it is a construct of a constructed narrative where where the writer, you know, comes to a realization and during the process where you as a reader come along with them and and, you know, maybe you have your own aha moment based on kind of what the the narrator is doing that's kind of an unsophisticated, unfortunate, sophisticated way of of describing it. but i do think you're telling a story, you know, you're telling a story and it can't be a stenography of, you know,

everything that happened in your life. so you're telling a story and and so i had to think about it that way. there were things that had to be left out. one silly thing that helped me was that a long time ago i saw this like commentary cut of one of the bridget jones diary movies. and we're like, you know, the like the director was talking about things they left out and they showed some deleted scenes. i have no idea why i saw this or why, why, why i remembered this. but they they had these scenes and i think it was the second film where they where they cut them because they were too they were like it was too much piling on. and bridget jones, they actually should have cut the whole movie for the second though. yeah, there is that. i have no idea why i watched this. right, but, but it was like such a great like, you know, often you're told and you know, in like screenwriting or storytelling, like, you know, just give your protagonist more

things to get over and more things to get over. more things to get over. and i saw that and i was like, actually think i think we've gotten plenty of sad here, long hours like there were. so i did cut a chapter that was kind of about my marriage, our marriage and and kind of the difficulty of infertility and and and kind of some of the struggles that we had. i cut that chapter and. oh, yeah. and there was a there was another other another time. i just chose not to really write about one of the, the trips that i took to north dakota because. it it didn't it wasn't it was also kind of sad. i was very sad. it was it was in 2019, i think it was my first time back in the state after like three years. and i was so thrilled to be back and working on this project and seeing a place where it was, you know, i was very close to

selling the project and and beginning the process of publishing the book. and so i was there. but it had been three years since i'd been back. i'd, i'd had an ectopic pregnancy, you know, a few years earlier and, and i wasn't going to be able to have children. and i, and i was i was there in north dakota. and it was very i realized that i was a different person, complete lee, than when i started the project. it was just a completely different person. and i think that kind speaks to sort of the question that lydia asked me, too, you know, like, how did i decide what to put in and not? and take out about the kind of the infertility? and i didn't want to have too much because that is not what the book is really about. i wanted there to show that there are parallels, you know, that we that there are dreams that do not manifest when someone falls, don't happen. and and so so i never quite articulated that that shift in

who i was as a person, you know, i couldn't quite put my hands around it. and then i just realized it doesn't need to be explained in the book because you see me going back to the state and, and doing the thing i loved, which is being a journalist and reporting and and going and telling other people's stories and writing about the environment and, and really delving into the climate change part of this of this book and that's what i and so i realized i didn't need to include that. it didn't need to be there. yeah. there are questions in the back. you talked about having started out not really liking the idea of advocacy or telling your own opinion and it seems like you've come to the end to kind of maybe even a mission for advocacy. do you feel like you're glad you you had that big shift, which

seemed to be just a process of choosing to write this project? yes, i am glad. i am glad. and i think that's like kind of where where lydia was leading me toward. and in the beginning, it is this question of, yes, i am very glad. i, i don't think i quite answered that question at the beginning of the talk, but that is i do think that that journalism can be very good and very skillful and very true and also be opinionated. i think. can i think that it you know, when it comes that place of of you know not it's not advocacy it's it's a place of the kind of the heart of what it is to tell stories and to tell the truth and to and, you know, some of the kind of the eye roll, the things we talk about as idealist

to be a part of journalism, that the, you know, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, you know, and i think that it can do those things and and have a really strong point of view. i think if done well, if done with like that solid research behind it and the solid, you know, just whether it's science or research, i think it can be i think it can be done. i think we've seen great examples of it. and and i think that i'm hopeful that that is kind of the direction my own reporting as journalists will take. and then we'll see a little bit more of that in the industry as a whole. and many people may disagree with me about that, and that's fine. we can we can duke it out on c-span. you can have a televised finances band. i have a question about the first chapter that you read, whether i'm correct on what what

i heard you say. now, can you sell your land and maintain the mineral? so underneath there, i mean, the land could be used for agriculture, but you keep the the orders and the fossil fuels are in somebody else's name or the original name. yeah. i'm so glad you asked that question because i think it's a if you live in like texas or oklahoma or north dakota, wyoming, colorado, you know, this like, you know, this is a this is a the it's there you're able to sever the surface rights from the the subsurface rights and in my in my case, in my of my family, the my grandfather, you know, he had he had leased that land to oil companies to drill. so he owned all of the land and he owned all of the mineral rights beneath it in the 1950s, when there was an oil boom, a first oil boom in north dakota. and and so he the checks that he

got from those first leases, those were what paid for my mother to go to college. and in the seventies, he sold the land to another farmer, but he the mineral rights and he knew he could do that because he was kind of an armchair geologist. right. and so and he had he, you know, generated some wealth, not extreme wealth ever. it was just, you know, nobody ever drilled on that land in the fifties. but he got lease payments that were that, you know, that lifted my family up, lived that allowed my mother to go to college and and so that is what you can do in places like dakota and oklahoma texas, etc.. it's not the same quite the same in pennsylvania. there's but definitely in most western states, it is it is possible to cover the the the surface of the land. and of course, that causes so many problems. right so much heartache if you are like a farmer who owns that

land and suddenly you have all these you know, oil trucks or pipeline coming through, there's this brine spill or oil spill or something like that. like, obviously, the the collision course there can be really extreme. yeah, i just wondered what memoirs you read in preparation for writing your memoir. what were the ones that were like the most memorable and impressive to you? oh, i love this question. oh, i should probably print out a list so i can call them up at any time. okay, so while i what i i read wild, of course. and, and, and eat, pray, love, those were like for the first two, this was 2013 when i started this project. these were obviously very successful, very commercial memoirs that are written by women, but written by women who go on journeys and and so i

think both of those books are wonderful for very different reasons, but they they actually are like genius in structure. if you go back, look at them, how they're how both of those books are structured, eat, pray, love is structured in 108 chapters is like a malibu read and and it has a very specific, you know, three journeys. so like three acts and wild is also written in a very cinematic way with kind of a very strong narrative and story and and and one of the things i think that cheryl strayed has said many times is that she never wanted to forget that she was on that path, walking on that path. many things happened off the path in the past and sometimes in the future. but she never wanted people to forget that she was walking a path. and so i took quite a bit from both of those, both of those memoirs, and i read many others over the course of of working on the book. one of my most favorite recent

memoirs is, is taylor burby. it's called boys in oil. and he wrote a book about growing up in north dakota, growing up gay in north dakota and and he is also he's an environmentalist and it's just a really lovely memoir. and and i think it pairs really nicely with mine because he is someone who lived and grew up in north dakota. and this is you know, i'm i'm a visitor there. i have a great affinity for the place and a strong connection to it. but i am i am always a visitor when i go there. and so he writes about it in a way that is comes from having a a deep connection. there. i could go on and on. there are so many great books that that that influence this one. but but i think those those three right off the top of my head. i think, yeah, we can do one one

more question. so having this project that you've been working on for over a decade, i have kind of a two parter question. first of all, like how does that feel to be done? and then do you feel this is kind of the like the book of your heart or do you see yourself writing anything else for the mass market in the future? it felt great to be done, so i got to be done. i threw a party. yeah. and it was really fun and yeah, it felt really good to be done. i'm not quite done. obviously, the book just came out, but. but also i'm on a short film in connection with the the book. so, so i'll have it's just like a ten minute film. so have that and and so yeah, you're, you're never, you're never quite done. yeah. and you know, that's a really good question. i don't know what, what my next project is yet, but i do.

i do. i would very much like to work on something that has, if not a personal connection where i'm spending a lot of time with other people and writing about their story and and maybe thinking about like how much of myself to bring into it or not bring into it and, and also maybe doing it in parallel with a film project at the same time. yeah. well, thank you so much for sharing your book with us and for your wonderful answers and. thank you all for coming tonight. oh, thank you so much.

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