tonight we are happy to welcome erika bolstad conversation. as a documentary filmmaker and journalist who has studied in britain vastly about climate changech than fossil fuel erika bolstad's personal connection to oil in late 2009. her ailing mother unexpectedly received a check for men all right. they were writes that dated back

to 1951 by her grandfather from the land that his mother settled in the early 1900s in north dakota. her great grandmother anna was a woman of potential forest -- in fact anna's husband had committed terror to an asylum under various circumstances and her book "windfall" the prairie woman who lost her way and the great-granddaughter who found her" erika bolstad escapades or families. past and the connection to the promised land of the american west. with that we will be joined in conversation by laurence the author of the novel the golden state. we'll have audience q&a and you can raise your hand during that time. levi has a boom mic and he will

make its way to you before you ask the questions. they have questions on audio and c-span might say no so make sure you wait for that microphone. after that erika will be here to sign books we have books of on the site. you can pay for your books after that time downstairs on your way out at the store. now please welcome erika bolstad and keesling. [applause] >> hello. how were you feeling?

good, good. it's a big day. we have an amazing crowd here to so erika is going to start the reading and i'm glad that we have such a great crowd for this book. it's an amazing book and it weaves together so manyffta different strands and i don't quite understand how she managed to do that and i'm excited to talk with her about that. if you haven't bought i it alrey encourage you to pick one up at the end of this event because you will learn a lot and to be moved and surprised. would you like to start with the reading? >> that would be great. i'm going to start with chapter chapter 1, part one and every chapter of this book starts with the price of oil wherever i was

at the time of the reporting or the research. fracture, december 2009 north dakota crude. her name was an adjusted game and that's all a new when all this began during the days of the great recession. anna my mother told me was a woman who on her own settled the contemporaries of northwestern north dakota. enthe family lore was even more romantic. and it disappeared from her homestead ho in 1907 loss to time in the vast plains. more than a century later and oil companies that my mother at 2400-dollar check to the oil company was leasing the edges of the oilfields of north dakota. from the oil company my mother when she was an air below the surface of the land where anna once had homesteaded.

the check arrived in a manila envelope a few daysre before christmas f in 2009. it's auspicious timing further confirmation that family. never take it later. well understood that unexpected windfall to the way of showing up. in 1951 when my mother was just six years old, her father had signed a lease with an oil company during the first oil boom in north dakota. it was on the land where anna, her mother once staked her claim. the oil company never drove on and the but kept renewing her lease for more than a decade. that lease money was enough to send my mother to college. she was the first person in her family to vote. my mother loved the windfall. her entire life she had heard a page about lottery tickets and scratch-offs on a whim she stockpiled pocket change to play the s slot machines at the casio

where the -- near the town where she and my father raised us. do you know how long you can make $10 last with pennies she askedhe me what she took out los securing the knowledge that they would somehow be money to pay them off when the time came. it had always been that way and it had always worked. someday all this will be yours my mother promised. we knew she was dying. a few months before the envelope arrived in the male and off duty nurse found my mother passed out in the locker room from yet another heart attack made -- my sister stephanie victor miami and i would live to washington d.c. and by the time we both got to the hospital in oregon my mother was alert enough to ask us to bring in her jewelry she picked picked out what she wanted us to have. in my mother's office was a handwritten ledger dealing the $72,000 she and my father owed to the hospital to a

cardiologist and the indolence company. the oil companies 2400-dollar check barely made a dent. three months after she learned of her inheritance in north dakota my mother died. the night of her death i sat on the floor of my old apartment in washington d.c. the phone pressed to my ear is my father shared the news. i pressed my back into the vertical lines at the radiator tank to offset the hollowed out feeling in my with warmth and some sort of sharp physical sensation. the nubs of the carpet pressed into my bottom. i could feel all the dog parent of my bed. i put on my favorite turtleneck and kept it on for several days. it was a warm cashmere cocoon that insulated me from the cold march deep in my gut. the next day i wrote my mother's obituary. never had my wordsne mattered me

as the rider in the family it was a one thing i could do and do well. i sat on my bed with my laptop wearing my favorite turtleneck and the gold hoop earrings iy pilfered from my mother's jewelry box the last time i was home. i wrote unaware of time and obituary of interested was an account of what was important to the people left behind. you could hit the highlights. my mother's marriage to my father, college and how she was the granddaughter of her prairie of her prairie homesteader but it left out so much. i was telling the story of my mother as they knew it is her daughter. it was her story as she might have told the i'm certain i would have police are because i wrote it for her. for the first time it made me understand the limits of my m profession to the story filtered through newspaper impartiality not the same as an obituary told

through grief. a few years later when i was trying to become a mother that fetal dna lingers in her bloodstream throughout that lifetime. mothers carry something of their children within their body and this is understood and why our grief for mothers is physical. the herd because their little pieces of her own dna the ones inside of her mother said diet too. f sopart of us is gone forever. the raw feeling subsided with the obituary it but the hollow part remained. the editor to one of the newspapers i wrote for the idaho statesman offer to post the obituary for free even though my mother had never lived in boise. i took her up on it to the death notice ran in her hometown newspaper. the full obituary cost $285.99.

check the balance on my american thexpress card and there is just enough room left to my credit limit that i would figure out out later how to pay off the balance like mother, like daughter. that night my friends gathered in my small apartment and they brought pizza burritos and beer are they wrapped me in a warm comfort of company and the ritual of gathering after death. they reminded me i was not alone. later that summer my sister and i traveled to oregon to enter my mother's ashes. the gathered at a county park up the road from the house where once lived. the park was the scene of many happy summer days in rapids and the bending creek. we loved the natural -- to slide down even at the hill the bottoms of her swimsuits.

my 5-year-old matthew looked at the adults around him squattedfo near the greek bank peering into the fish. i recorded them i found the sound of the wind rustling the leaves are caught with enough along the bank of the creek. for while after the audio files showed up randomly whenever played music and the sound always a puzzling interlude returned me to sit sun-dappled creek bottom the day we say goodbye. even now when i hear wind i think it's spreading my mother's ashes. other granules floated in the current. as we release the ashes to the water i thought of mother spirit floating down the creek to the river and then into the columbia. i'd like to believe some of

those reached the pacific ocean. that evening my sister and i sat to the smooth kitchen table mymo mother had built from ashwood ash wood. we divided up our mother's jewelry in our physical inheritance the objects that we would now where close to our skin. staff who were simple silver wedding band shows my mother -- chose my mothers wedding ring and ii picked out my mother's gold earrings and old-fashioned brooch madewo with pearls. i'd warrant approach to my graduation. jessica mcclintock dress my mother bought me the outlet store in san francisco. approach belonged to her grandmother anna my mother once told me. the oil company paid. i read over the least trying to puzzle out how much money we might earn in royalties if the company exercised his options to drill for oil on land in iraq

northwest corner of north dakota. it seemed such an improbable windfall. we didn't even own the land just the oil deep beneath the earth. besides being born what had we done to inherit rights from a woman lost inor perry's history until the oil company came calling 100 years later. who was anna really? the to help the brooch in my hand my fingers rubbing the pearl. and i have touched this object. she too had warned approach next to her heart. she too is that once believed her land would bring her wealth. a tiny whisper called me to the kitchen table. it was the story beckoning me to follow the same that my mother had heard all her life. my mother left me a mystery and it was my inheritance my windfall by story to tell.

[applause] >> thank you for that beautiful rating. i want too start with something that i was struck in the piece you read from where you talk about the limits of your profession and one of, not sure how you pronounce that word and i should have workshopped before he said it out loud. your own career as a journalist that was the work you are familiar with and you described the ways you would write about it in the way you attract down sources and do your reporting. naturally you brought that to this story tree or windfall but in some ways the book read to me as a subversive account as a journalistic profession and what

was going on for all journalists at the time riding for a number of years. also theay way that your ownu career as a journalist reflected how you approach the book and how you struggled sometimes with figuring out how to tell the story. so i wonder, it's kind of a two-part question. if you could start with that? >> yeah so i think at the beginning of the book 2009. period during the recession of two when i first went to north dakota that was a major time of change for journalism. first of all there was a recession and so many people lost their jobs and the newspaper company that i worked for paid $300 a month and that was hard living in washington d.c.. suddenly you don't have that money anymore. it became a very discouraging --

you could see the audience looking away and you could see the institution newspaper clipping away and it was really hard to want to do the job i was trained to do and not feel as though i were able to. it was a very difficult period professional and not just for me but for many many journalists and manymp journalism companies who continue to go through those cutbacks in the layoffs etc. and here in oregon we saw the newspaper closed the next few weeks which was just heartbreaking. one of the things that i did was to put me in a place where i was able to go and be more independent because i could see an end or they could see that this career may not look the way

it would when i started it was so much hope right out of college but in fact i worked at a newspaper for my first job of college and that was an akron ig some -- anachronism even at the time but i could see something happen and was very apparent to me that if i wanted to follow this particular story, this family story that has so many tendrils and connections to a bigger national story that i was going to do it on my own and it was going to probably rely heavily on my training as a journalist, as a researcher for someone who interested. i could be dropped off in the place and figure out what to do. i have some tools and some skills and i'm able to do that. and so i knew that i would be able to do that and i also had

this whisper that we could be rich calling me. i had some doubts from the very start about the environmental consequences but i was also very much called by those whispers. so i think that starting out a kind of new and was coming for the kind of gig journalism that i'den been trained to do. spirit their many moments of the book where it feels feels like you're doing a little bit of almost like a hustle because you are managing to get by in the stories that you would traditionally report on with the reporting and i like seeing how he would slip that work in. so one of the things that you and i have talked about before because part of your training as a journalist is a very strong code of ethics among struck by

journalists because i come from a personal essay and creative nonfiction and there were no rules. it's just like all the time in your opinion is everywhere. your notes aren't like that. theyoa are very position out ina story. i think that is changing but that's what you really wrestle with in the book because there is an o advocacy that happens at the consequences of what you've learned so i i wonder what that felt like toes wrestle with in terms of not puttingg yourself n for not being at in a position on some issue. when i first started this project there was a personal connection to it i was so afraid of riding a memoir. it was really afraid of riding a memoir. i didn't have that voice. i didn't come from aal backgroud of riding personal essays and have probably written three public pieces with the word i in

them and my career. it was very hard and i had maybe like a [cheers and applause] culturalal positioning like how women write. i had to get over that. i'm so glad i i did. it was not easy. it was not an easy, it was not easy. the voice that served me as a journalist until 2013 or so serve me very well and continue to serve me. i still consider that as my main career and. i could see the limitations of that like i wrote and edits ago while to figure that out. i'm still grappling with some of that. when you come to the end of the book you will see that i definitely grapple with that i

continue to grapple with how much advocacy you do here. one of the things that very quickly changed my mind and that allowed me to perhaps have a little bit more voice and be a little bit more opinionated and kind of causes as i saw them was honestly just being on the ground of northa. dakota. that was the key to just understanding that there was a story that needed to be told that had this personal connection that you note the very first day i was a north dakota driving around the state and ii a lot of time with the colin north dakota windchill time, a lot of roads and a lot of ground to cover and one of the things that i saw on the

first day were flaring of methane gas that was a byproduct of thef oil production in many parts of the country including now it was specific drilling for natural gas and a north dakota in the early parts of the bakken oill boom there was way too much natural gas coming up under the earth as part of the d drilling process as they were fracking for oil. oil was a much more valuable product and my very first trip to north dakota to oil was about $100 a barrel if not more and as she drove on the prairie at night you would see these flares, these lights on the prairie all over. people described it as candles on the prairie or warm lights on the prairie. it's a flame. you were like no, if you drive

there at night you see these flares in these lights in the darkness and its climate change that's happening right in front of you. it's their and it's burned off his waist. it's used to heat people's homes or for their stoves. it is considered and happens all over the country. it happens particularly to a particularly large extent in north dakota and it is shocking how much is happening. i think the environmental reporter saw that terrell from these flares and from thee methane.of 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 tangible every day effects of it and it was the most striking thing that i saw the first week in north

dakota and from that point on it became easier to write about that place where i could say i was back and this was not good indyke could take a stand asnd a journalist and say something. it's not something that should be happening. you have really staggering statistic in the book where you talk about how the amount of flared gas, some large city or state for a long period of time really i wish that i had it in hand but one of the things that i admirer about the book is a d kind of place all these different things in context and i'm glad you mentioned the patriarchal structures that may be encouraged you or encourage us to think about the more personal riding.

those patriarchal structures really shape what happens to peopleeo in their books. once you do look for her story but at the same time you know the reason you have this homesteading ancestor is that indigenous people were displaced and their land was parceled out to white settlers. andin so i think and this is moe of a, it then a question but i admired in the book how you were able to step back even though you were riding personally and put all of these different elements into context and i mean it really does feel like it's a book about women's lives because even when you are looking at, when you are going and watching the rigs and action are seeing a well-being capped keynote a lot that it's kind of men's work and

women are incredibly underrepresented in that line of work and t it reflects the types of things that happened around the so-called main camps in the way that life is structured in north dakota during the boom. another women's thing in this book is you talking about your infertility story. and i imagine based on what you said but that was probably difficult to put into your story when you are coming at it from that journalistic standpoint. how did you decide that would be a meaningful part of the book? >> one thing that i had done all along when i was working on the project was i tried to interview as many women experts as i could.ge the geologist that i interviewed all of them are women and many of the experts like these former

cabinet secretaries that were appointees like sally jewell and gina mccarthy. those are women who are featured in this project as well. i think that what happened is because i had worked on this project over time there were a couple of years when i didn't work on it at all. and in those years that i didn't work on it or didn't go to north dakota to do any research when i was struggling in my husband and i were trying to have a baby. it became very clear to me well, thinking about this project and how to organize it, everything i did was shaped by that quest, that we wanted to have a child. soot when they looked for and what i felt like when i was

doing this work and when i was doing this reporting. to really shaped it and it shaped where it went and what i chose to do. there are a couple of chapters and along with me when you're on a trip to north dakota the one that only time he came to north dakota and he had to come with meha because the if we wanted to have a baby he had to be there. so that was part of it. there were things that happened that were shaped by all of that. i also saw what happened to my great grandmother. one of the things that i did in the book was i took a trip to north dakota and they went to the hospital where she was committed and asked for her file. ii just knew as a journalist

anyone who has any connection connection with the state institution will have file. you have asked for it and maybe you had to fill out a records request for it. in fact and i have file and it was about 15 pages long. they didn't give it to me as a journalist but as a descendent. if i wanted to get a file like that as a journalist i would to file for it so i got a file and i sat in the cemetery and read herd y file and it it was realy really sad. and in fact in the book i chose to excerpt just parts of that because i thought it spoke for itself. there was nothing i could do. i went at it in every single angle and in the end i tried to reconstruct her world on the page and in the end of it he

came clear to me the words spoke for themselves. so her story is very tragic. she was 80 and my great-grandmother had a baby my grandfather and within four months of having that child she was institutionalized and she was committed to the asylum. in her file it mentions that she was, she had manic-depressive insanity. it is archaic and we don't even know what that really means but she also had a gynecological report. that was not something they did but it was very clear she mentioned bleeding and a square from the description of what was happening to her in the file that she was going through some

sort of postpartum psychosis of a very severe sorts. and my heart ached for her. obviously for women it's at that time and people didn't know what to do with them. they sent them to institutions and forgot about them. i felt this affinity through the generations to this woman who alyou know i don't know if she wanted to be a mother atas all d i don't know if that was part of her hopes or dreams for a woman at the time in the early 1900s but she did have a child taken away from her when she was committed in voluntarily to the institution so she never got to decide whether she wanted to be a mother or whether, what kind of like she would have outside of thatst institution. i interested that. i very much wanted to be a

mother and interested what it felt like not to be a mother and i felt a connection to her because of that under very certain -- different circumstances but i could put myself literally in her shoes. it's not that there are spoilers in the book but i do hope that readers will find it in the story of anna is just devastating. and the way that you also sort of look outward at how many other people suffered the same fate. it was just so hard to contemplate. moving onto a lighter note what other things can we talk about? >> i wanted to ask from a craft perspective becausegg they can't emphasize how many things you

are juggling in this book. there's a lot of amazing regional detail and regional history and national history and presidential history. policy environment. he wrote this book and what was your process for doing that? i saw there were various various posts at the different colors and how did she you figure out how to structure the book and how to bring it into being? >> one day in 2015 i had all the stuff and i did didn't know what to do with it yet. i had an agent in didn't have an agent and had written a book proposal which is something you do for nonfiction books. it wasn't very good and is actually really bad. and if anyone ever wants to talk to me about their proposal come and see me. i had a conversation with a friend about what i had been the

amprice of oil and north dakota had dropped dramatically. i don't know exactly where this idea came from but i understood that the structure of the book needed to be tied to the price of oil and about windfalls and riches. so at some point i came to that realization in a conversation with my friend shawna. i understood that and then it was kind of like i could organize it around those times where oil was either really high, really low or when i got that manila envelope in the male. i always felt like this was firstt and foremost about climae change. that was my main goal with this proving that climate change that would be relatable and a personal story to tell bigger

stories about the america that we know and where some of these myths came about riches and about getting rich and about windfalls. so i felt like i had to climate change theme and i had the personal stories and i had a narrator and the personal stories of the narrator going in search of an answer. i knew i had these three threads and what i literally did and i have no idea where it came from but i envision the story unlike the role of white poster paper like the kind you get at the store. i envisioned it on this roll of paper unfolding over time with these chapters that had the price of oil on them and i could see this teal blue ribbon that ran through every single chapter

in some way or another and then i could seekn the narrator walkg through these places and people looking over my shoulder in the archives as i'm finding these records about her. then i could see how there was a story about an oil boom and riches and how that connected to climate change and how the side of the american dream was there too. so there were times when it was hard to keep it in my head this narrative 80,000 words in and all of that in my head is really hard. it's very difficult. i thought here's the price of oil at this time and if i can just run this ribbon through all the chapters that then it will feel i hope readers will feel

it's a cohesive narrative. i do as aa journalist like narrative and i like stories that have beginnings medals and ends that takes you somewhere so i alwayso wanted you to feel ce i wanted to be this feeling where you had of beginning a middle and an e end. >> i'm going to ask one more question and then i will give it to the audience. again it will beyo a spoiler but it into the book you do come to a bit of a decision for yourself about how to proceed knowing what you know about the environment and bakken and climate change. what is something that you hope readers will take away from the book and what do you, thinking about rightou now whether stoves

of the pride from cold dead hands. what do you want readers to think about in their own lives and their own advocacy has become to the end of your book? >> i really hope people see that they have a personal connection to some of these bigger themes these bigger broader american themes. the theme of the book is kind of like mayben picking apart somef the myths of the american west. we have all heard these and many of us here in oregon understand how that has affected the state and so what i hope is by seeing someone struggle with what they are learning being very different than the family stories that i heard for the

actual chapter about the town were a lot of these originated. and what i hope is that peoplele understand they have their own connection to this. they are our think i think the estimates are p probably 45 million to 75 million living americans that are descendents of people who filed homestead claims. that's a lot of people out there in our country who have connection to 160 acres of free land. that was the major social program in one of the biggest social programs ever transfers of wealth, ever and perhaps certainly the first transfer of wealth at the time they got

quite that big and it might still be one of the biggest transfers of wealth that has ever happened on this planet. and so many of us who have connection for 45 or 75 million whatever the estimates are now have benefited from that. i think if we think about that and how that transfer of wealth shaped so many places especially in the west that perhaps we can apply that to other things other social programs and other ways of thinking about transferring wealth to her what it means to be prosperous. so i hope that people come away with perhaps being inspired by how they have a personal connection to it and that means they are a small personal things that they can do that

collectively add up to action. >> thank you. we will start on this site and work our way over. questions, comments? praise? we love comments here. >> hi. i was born and raised in educated in minnesota a and the town that i grew up was close to the bakken fields. i don't to worry or wonder whether i have rights to any surprise checks in the male but i findst it interesting and hope not too insensitive to ask when you think about your ancestors rightsrs to this i can't help bt think about the native american rights and they wonder whether anything about reparations ever

came up while you were doing your research and what that is like? >> that's a good question and i think i begin to address it at the end of the book. i t do think that something whei started to research and reporting forpog this book thas not part of the conversation at all and it was not part of any american conversation and i think now we are all familiar with the term and familiar with some of the events that might reconsider how, who owns what and be a part of that and i so hope and this is where i will talk about advocacy at hope that we do. and what toy do next that thisis

book? i hope that i can help with that to facilitate other conversations. i don't think i'm necessarily always the right person is a white woman to be leading the conversation but i do hope that i can be helpful in them and i hope that they are part of our future. >> hi. can you talk a little bit about what didn't go in the book? you are doing so much. how did she make decisions about what went in and what didn't and how did you fit all of that into that little keyhole? >> the next question comes from one of the women who was in my riding group and read many early drafts of this book.

it is such a great question. and i did not pay her to ask that question. [laughter] there a lot of things. i actually have strong feelings after not knowing how to write when i started this project and not knowing that was what is going to do is spend a lot of time studyingir how to write in understanding the craft behind a good memoir and a memoir is not a diary. it's a construction, constructive narrative where the writer comes to a realization during the process where you as a reader come along with them and maybe you have your own ah-ha moment based on what the narrator is doing in an unsophisticated way of describing it.

you are telling the story and you're y telling the story and t can't just be stenography of everything that happened in your life. you're telling the story so i had to think about it that way. the narrative had to be worked out. one thing that helps me was a long time ago i saw this commentary cut off one of the bridget jones diary's where like the director was talking about things they left out and i had no idea why i thought of this and why a remember this but they have these scenes. y they cut them because they wee too sad. there was too much piling on in bridget jones. >> but it was such a great and

often you are told and history riding or storytelling just give your protagonist more things to get over in more things to get over and i thought about then i thought we had plenty of that here. so i did cut a chapter about my marriage, our marriage and the difficulty of infertility and some of the struggles that we had. i cut that chapter and there was another time that they chose not to write about one of the trips i took to north dakota because he was also kind of sad. i was very sad. it was in 2019 and my first time back in the states after three years but it was so thrilled to

be back and working on this project and seeing a place where i was close to selling the project and beginning the process of publishing the book. so i was there. if it had been three years since i had been back. i had an ectopic pregnancy a few years earlier and i wasn't going to be lit have children. i was there in north dakota and i realized i was a different person completely. i was just completely different person that speaks to the question that lydia asked me how did i decide what to. and not to print and infertility. that is not what the book is really about. i wanted to show that there were parallels the parent dreams that do not manifest.

i never quite articulated that shiftn' as the person. i couldn't put my hands around it and then i realized it doesn't need to be explained in the book. i was going back and doing the thing that i loved that was being a journalist and reporting and telling other people's stories and riding about the environment and delving into the climate change part of this book. i realized it didn't need to be that. >> other questions? in the back. >> he talked about having started out not really liking the idea of telling your own opinion and it seems like you have come to the end may be of a mission for advocacy. do you feel like you are glad

you had that big shift would seem to be the process of choosing to write the project? >> yes. i am glad. i am glad and that's where lydia was leading me towards in the beginning is this question and yes i'm very glad. i don't think i quite answered that question at the beginning of my talk but i do think that journalism can be very good and very skillful and very true and very opinionated. i think when it comes from that place it's not advocacy. it's a place that's at the heart ofel what it is to tell stories and to tell the truth and some

of the things we talk about idealistically as part of journalism and you know the comfortablend. i think that it can do those things and to have strong point of view. if done well with that solid research behind it and the solid weather science, it can be done. i think we have seen great examples of it and i'm hopeful that is the direction of my own reporting and journalism will take and the industry as a whole. people make disagree. we can duke it out. on c-span.

i have a question about the first chapter that you read and whether i'm correct on what i heard youhe say. can you sell your land and maintained the mineral rights the link could be used for agriculture but you keep the oars and fossil fuels that are in somebody else's name quite? >> i'm so glad you asked that question because if you live in texas or oklahoma or north dakota wyoming colorado you are able to take -- settled the surface rights from the subsurface rights and in my case of my family my grandfather he leased that land to oil companies to drill. he owned all ofd the land and a set in 1970s during the first

oil boom in north dakota that checks that he got were what paid for my mother to go to college. in the 70s he sold the land to another farmer but he kept the mineral rights. he could do that because he was an armchair geologist. he had generated some wealth, not extreme wealth ever. but he got leased payments that listed my family and allowed my mother to go to college. that is what you can do in places like north dakota and oklahoma etc.. it's not quite the same as pennsylvania and definitely it's in the northwestern states it is possible to settle the surface

of the land and that causes so many problems and so much heartache if you are a farmer who owns that land and you have all these oil trucks or pipelines coming through through a oil spill or something like that. obviously it's a collision course can be extreme. i just wondered what memoirs you read in preparation for riding your memoir and what were the most memorable and to you? >> oh i love this question. i have a printout was that i can call them up at any time. i went wild with course and eat. love. it was 2013 when i startedrebv e project and it was very commercial memoir written by

women by women who go on journeys and so both of those are wonderful for very different reasons. but they actually are genius in structure to go back and look at them and how both of those books were structured. , love was structured as specific three journeys in three acts and while it was written in a very cinematic way with a strong narrative and a story in one of the things i think she has said many times that she never wanted people to forget that she was walking on that path. many things happened in the past and sometimes in the future but she never wanted people to forget that she was walking the path. it took quite a bit from both of those memoirs and i read many

others over the course of the book and my favorite recent memoir is by taylor called boysd and oil and she wrote a book about growing up in north dakota and growing up in north dakota and he's an environmentalist and it's just a lovely memoir. i think it pairs nicely with my because he is someone who lived and grew up in north dakota. i am a visitor there. i have great a great affinity for the place had a strongm condition to it -- connection to apply morries a visitor when i go there. he writes about it in a way that he has a lot of connections. there so many great books that influenced this one. those three are right at the top

of my head. >> we can do one more question. having this project that you've been working on for over a decade, i have a two-part question. first of all how does that feel to be done and then do you feel like this is the book of your heart and do you see yourself riding anything else in the future? >> i threw a party and it was really fun. it felt really good to be done. i'm not quite done. the book justou came out. i'm working on a short film and connection with the book so i'll have a ten-minute film with that. and soso gantt are never quite done.

and that's a really good question. q a i don't know what my next project is yet. i would very much like to work on something that is a personal connection where i'm spending a lot of time with other people and on their personal story and maybe thinking about how much i would bring into it or not and maybe doing it in parallel with another project. thank you so much for sharing your book with us and for your wonderful answers and thank you all for coming tonight. thank you. thank you so much. [applause]