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and tell your smart speaker to play c-span video and listen to washington journal daily. weekdays at 5:00 p.m. and 9 p.m., watch washington today, for stories of the day, listen to c-span and any time. cspan, powered by cable. >> we're happy to welcome erica. in conversation with liddia, as documentary filmmaker and journalist, studied and writtener by climate change and fossil fuels her connect to oil of the brought to light in 2009 here ailing mother received a check for leasedl mineral rights,

rights that dated to 1951, leased by erica's grandfather from land his mother homesteaded in north dakota in early 1900s, anna a woman of potential fortune lost to history with little photo evidence or writing, anna husband continental you had committed her to an asylum under mysterious circumstances. she will be joined by lidia kiessling, author of the novel the golden state. tonight including audience q&a, raise your hand during

that time, levi will have a boom mic that looks like that. to get the questions clearly, oh,th c-span will say no, they will not air the whole event. wait for the microphone, afterr that. erica will be here to sign books, we have books on the cart, line up on this side. go in this way. you can pay for your books after they are signed. down stairs on the way out of the store. reminder we close 8:5 5. welcome to erica and lidia. [applause] >> hello. hello. >> how are you feeling.

>> good. >> yes. >> big day, right? >> mm-hmm. >> we have an amazing crowd, i'll scoot this if i may and c-span can yell at me, thank you. erica will start with a reading, i'm happy to see a great crowd heresu for this book. it is amazing. we weaved together so many differentta strands in a way, i don't understand how she did that. and if you have not bought is already, i encourage you tomo pick one up. you will be moved from surprised. start with a reading. >> yeah. >> great. >> start with chapter one. part one. and every chapter of this book starts with price of

oil o wherever i was at the time of the reporting or research. fractured, december 2009, north dakota crude, 63.96 a barrel. her name was anna josephine. that is all about all i knew when this began during darkest days of great recession, an amy mother told me was a plucky woman who on her own settled north dakota, and family lore i was made more romantic, abanna dis appeared from her homestead. more thans century later, an oil company sent my mother a 2400 dollar check, the oil company was leasing oil rights on north dakota, from oil company my mother learned she was an heir to mineral rights below the

surface of the land where anna once homesteaded. a check arrived before christmas in 2009. confirmation of family theory never articulated but well understood that unexpected wind1, fulls have a way of showing up. when my mother was 6 years old. her father signed a lease with an oil company. oil company never drilled on the land but it kept the lease for over a decade. that lease money was enough to send my mother to college. she was first person in her family to go, she loved the windfall. her life she heard promises across the great plains and bought lottery

tickets. you know how long you could make $10 last on penny and 5 cent slots she once asked me, shee took out loans secured in knowledge that there would bemoan to pay them off with the time came, some day this will be yours, my mother promised. we knew she was dying, a few months before the envelope arrive, a nurse found her passed out from another heartar attack, my sister lived in miami, i lived in washington, d.c., by the time we got to the hospital in oregon my mother was alert enough to ask to bring her jewel rose and told us she picked out when she wanted to us to have ... fathero

the hospital to a cardiologist, and to the ambulance company. the oil companies, 20 $400 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 cold apartment in washington, d.c. 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 offset the feeling in my belly with warmthso and some sort of sharp physical sensation. the carpet pressed into my bottom. i a could see all the dog here under my bed. i put on a favorite turtleneck and kept it on for several days. it was a warm cashmere that insulated me from the assault of a cold march and with the loss deep in my gut. the next day i wrote my mother's

obituary. never have my words mattered more as the writer in the family it was the one thing i could do and do well. i sat with my laptop wearing my favorite sweatpants and my hoop earrings from my mother's jewelry box on my last visit home. i wrote in a fury unaware of time and obituary i understood was an account of what was important to the people left behind. you could hit the highlights, my 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. 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 he and obituary told temperedre by grief. a few years later when i was trying to become a mother i read that it lingers in a woman's blood stream throughout her lifetime. mothers always carry something of their children within their body. this i finally understood. grief feels so raw and physical. we hurt because those pieces of ourne dna died. part of us is also g gone forevr and our bodies know it. the feeling subsided and i wrote the obituary, the hollow part remained. the editor at one of the newspapers i wrote for offered to print the obituary for free evenot though my mother never lived in boise it was a perk and i took her up on it. it ran as a news item and the statesman journal in salem oregon.tu but the full obituary cost

$285.99. i checked the balance on my american express card. just enough room left on my credit limit i would find out later have to pay off the balance. like motherri like daughter. that night my friends gathered in my small apartmentht and brought pizza and burritos and beer and wrapped me in the comfort of company in the universal ritual of gathering together after a death. their presencei reminded me i s not alone, i was loved and i would continue to be loved. later that summer my sister and i traveled once again to oregon to spread my mother's ashes. we gathered at the county park up the road from the house where we once lived. at the park was the scene of many happy summer days in part for the shallow rapids that bend in the creek. we love the natural rock slippery enough to slide down even if it snagged the bottom of our swimsuits and stand them

green with moss. her twin girls took a spin on the same merry-go-round we played on as kids, it's revolutions as wobbly as ever. my 5-year-old matthew squatted near the creek bank peering into the shallows for fish. i recorded on my iphone the sound of the wind ruffling, the cottonwoods along the banks of the creek. for a while after it showed up whenever i played music on shuffle mode. the sound always and interlude returned the day we said goodbye. even now when i hear wind and cottonwood i think of spreading my mother's ashes. some sank to the bottom that day and others floated suspended in the current as we released the ashes to the water i thought of my mother's spirit floating down the creek to the river and then into the columbia. i like to believe some of those

tiny moats reached the pacific ocean. that evening my sister and i sat at the kitchen table our mother had a build from ashwood. we divided the jewelry. this is was our physical inheritance, the objects she once wore that we would now wear close to our skin. she wore a simple silver wedding band and chose our mother's diamond wedding ring. i picked out my mother's earrings and old-fashioned with pearls. i had worn it to my eighth grade graduation with the dress my mother bought me at the store in san francisco. it belonged to her grandmother, my mother once told me. the oil company paperwork sat in a pile of papers on the kitchen counter. i read it over trying to puzzle out how much money we might learn from royalties of the company exercised its option to

drill on land and the remote 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 from the woman lost to the prairie in history until the company came calling 100 years later. and who was anna. i held the brooch in my hand my . my mother left me a mystery my inheritance, my windfall, my

story to tell. [applause] thank you for the beautiful reading. i want to start with something i was struck in that piece you read from the limits of your profession. one oftu the things i'm not sure how you pronounce the word, i should have looked before i said it out loud the thread that runs through is your career as a journalist andor that was the st of work you were familiar with the end you described some of the stories you would write about the way you would track down the sources and do your reporting. naturally you brought that to this story but in some ways the book read it to me as a little bit of a subversive account of the journalisticn profession of what was going on for all

journalists at the time that you are writing over a number of years. and then also the way that your own a career as a journalist affected the way that you approach the book and how you sort of struggled sometimes with figuring out how to tell the story so i wonder, that is kind of a two-part question, but if you could start with that. >> i think at the beginning of the book, 2009 the period during the recession and up to when i went too north dakota that was a major time of change for journalism. it was just first of all there was a recession and so many people lost their jobs. the newspaper company that i worked with cut my pay by $300 a month andiv that was hard living in washington, d.c. and suddenly you don't have that money anymore. it became a very discouraging

you could see audience slipping away. you could see the reach is institutions and newspaper slipping away. it was really hard to want to do the job tha' i had been trained to do and not feel as though i were able to. that was a difficult period professionally and not just for me but for many journalists and journalism companies and we continued to go through those cutbacks and layoffs et cetera. in fact, here in oregon we saw a newspaper close in the last few weeks which was just heartbreaking. so i think one of the things that did is it put me in a place where i was able to go and do something more independent because i could see that this

career may not look the way it did when i started it with so much hope right out of college. in fact i worked out in afternooner newspaper, my very first job out of college and that was like in an anachronism even at the time of, but i could see something happening and it was very apparent to me that if i wanted to follow this particular story, the family story that had so many connections to a bigger national story that i was going to have to do it on my own and it was going to have to probably rely heavily on my training as a journalist and as a researcher into someone that understood i could be dropped off in a place and figured out what to do.

i knew that i would be able to do that and also i have this whisper we could be rich calling to me and i of course had some doubts from the start about the environmental consequences, butl i also was very much called by those whispers so i think that that was starting out i kind of knew that the end was coming for the kind of journalism that i had been trained to do. >> there's many moments in the book itof feels like you are dog almost like a muscle because you are managing to combine some of the stories you would traditionally report on widththf the reporting that you personally needed to do and i like to seeing how you would kind of slip that work in. one of the things we talked about before because part of your training as a journalist, there's a very strong kind of code of ethics and i'm always

struck when i talk with journalists because they come with kind of a personal essay and creative nonfiction but they are not like that. i think it is changing but that's something that you wrestle with in the book because there's advocacy that it sort of happens as a consequence of what you learn and so i wonder what that kind of felt like not taking a position on some issue. >> when i started the project despite the personal connection to it, i was so afraid of writing a memoir. i didn't have that voice.

it there were some patriarchal conditioning. it wasn't easy to find a voice. it was the boys that served me as a journalist until 2013 or so and continued to serve me. i still consider that as my main career and i could see the limitationsro of it. it took a while to figure that out. i'm still grappling with some of that. many of you will come to thee d of the book and say i continue

to grappleh with it. one of the things that very quickly changed my mind and allowed me to perhaps have more voice and be a little bit more opinionated and call things as i saw them was honestly just being on the ground in north dakota. that was the key to understanding there was a story recommended to bee told that had this personal connection but the first days that i was in north dakota driving around theat stae and there were a lot of roads and a lot of ground to cover.

one of the things i saw almost on that first day were the flaring of methane gas that was a byproduct of the oil production and many parts of the country including now. my very first trip to north dakota those chapters oil was about $100 a barrel if not more. as you drove on the prairies at night, you would see these flares andal lights on the prairies all over it looks like some people have described it as candles on the prairie were these warm lights on the prairie. [laughter]r]

if you drive there at night you see these in the darkness and its 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, it is considered waste and it happens all overth the country. from the methane we don't see climate change happening right in front o of us. greenhouse gases are invisible. it's hard to see the tangible everyday affects and it was the

most striking thing that i saw in north dakota and from that point on it became easier to write about that from a place where i could say that it was bad and i could take a stand as a journalist and say this isn'ts something that should be happening. >> it could heat some large city or state for along period of time. i wish that i had it to hand but one of the things i admire about the book is that you do kind of placen all these different thins in context and i am glad that you mentioned the patriarchal structures that may be encouraged you.

you have this homesteading ancestor. it does feel like it's a book about women's lives.

they are underrepresented in thataf line of work and it affes the type of things that happens and the way life is structured as a consequence of the boom. then another thing that flowed through the book is talking about your fertility story and i imagine based on what you said that that was difficult to sort of put into your story when oryou're coming at it from that journalistic standpoint. how did you decide that was going to be such a meaningful part of the book? >> one thing that ii had done l along when i was working on the project i tried to interview as many experts as i could. many of the experts you see

these that were obama appointees and those are women that are featured in this project as well and i think that what happened is because i've worked on this overtime sometimes piecemeal, there were a couple of years i didn't work on it at all and in those years i didn't work on it or i didn't go to north dakota and do any research in the years i was struggling and my husband and i were trying to have a baby it became very clear to me while thinking about the project and how to organize it that everything i did was shaped by that quest that we wanted to have a child and a soviet colored what i looked for, what

i felt like when i was doing this work and reporting. it shaped where i went and what i chose to do. there's a couple chapters where my husband is along with me on a trip to north dakota, the one and only time he came to north dakota and he had to come with me because if we wanted to have a baby he needed to be there. [laughter] so that was part of it. there were things that happened that were shaped by all that and i also saw great parallels and what happened to my great grandmother so one of the things i did in the book, one of my first trips i went to the mental hospital where she was committed and i asked for her file. i knew it as a journalist that

anyone that has any connection with a state institution would have a file. you justst have to ask for it, maybe violate public record request for it. and in fact she had a file and it was about 15 pages long. they didn't give it to me as a journalist but one of her descendents if i wanted to get a file like that as a a journalisi would have to violate public record request for it, so i got her file and i sat in the cemetery and read her file and it was so very sad. i in fact in the book chose to just excerpt parts of the because i thought that it spoke for itself, but there was nothing i could do. i went at it in every single angle for creative nonfiction that you could try. and in the end i tried to rebuild and reconstruct on the

page and it became very clear to me that the words in the final spoke for themselves. so her story is very tragic. she had massive depressive anxiety. i don't know what that means but she also had the, there was a note of a biological report which i didn't have, that wasn't something that they gave me. and it was very clear that she also mentioned bleeding and it was clear from the description what was happening to her in the file that she was going through some sort of postpartum

psychosis or depression that was very severe. my heart ached for her. thatan was obviously women at tt time people didn't know what to do with them. they put them in these institutions and forgot about them. i felt this affinity through the generation to this woman who i don't know if she wanted to be a mother at all. i don't know if that was part of her hopes and dreams as a woman at the time in the early 1900s but she did haved a child taken awayvo from her and she was committed involuntarily and never got to decide whether she wanted to be a mother or what kind of life she would have outside of that institution. i understood that. i very much wanted to be a

mother and i understood what it felt like and so i just felt a connection to her because of that with different circumstances. i could put myself literally in her shoes. >> it's not that there's spoilers in the book but i hope the readers will come to some of things by themselves and the story isju just really devastating. the way that you also look outward at the way people sufferthe same fate is so hard o contemplate. moving on, what other sound of 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 lotal of amazing regional detailing in history. you wrote the book over a number of years but what was the saprocess for doing that? i saw you posted a pitcher where there were different colors. how did you figure out how to structure the book and then how did you sort of bring it into being? >> one day in 2015, i had all this stuff i didn't know what to do with it yet. idn was like had an agent, didnt have an agent and had written a book proposal which is something you have to do for nonfiction books to sell it to a publisher. it wasn't very good. it was actually really bad. if anyone ever wants to talk with me about book proposals, come see me. but i was having a conversation withth a friend about what i had

and the price of oil and north dakota had dropped dramatically. i don't know exactly where this idea came from, but i understood the structure of the book needed to be tied to the price of oil with windfall and do so at some point i came to that realization with a conversation and i just understood that and then it was like i could organize it around the times that oil was either really high or low or when i got the manila envelope in the mail. i always felt like this was first and foremoste a book abot climate change. that was my main goal with this bookok is to write something abt climate changere that would be relatable and use a personal story to tell bigger stories

about the america that we know and where some of these myths came from about riches and so i felt like i had three things i had the climateal change, the personal story, me as a narrator going in search of all these hranswers. i knew i had of these three threads and what i literally did on this i have no idea where it came from but i envisioned the story on a roll of poster paper and i envisioned it unfolding over time with these chapters that had the price of oil and

every single chapter in some way or the other then i could see me as a narrator walking through these places and people looking over my shoulder in the archives finding these records about her and then i could see how there was 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 and so there were times it was hard to keep in my head this narrative 80,000 words of all that in my head it was hard. it was very difficult, but i stuck to that if i could run this ribbon through all the chapters then it will feel i

hope it is a cohesive narrative. i like narrative and stories that have gaming, middle and end and that take us somewhere and so i always wanted there to be this sort of cinematic feeling where you have that beginning, middlele and end. >> i'm going to ask one more question then open up to the audience. so, you know again i will be weary of spoilers but at the end of the book you do come to a bit of a decision about how to proceedd knowing what you know about the environment and climate change. what is something that you hope readers take away from the book and what do you, thinking about right now the discourses about

whether stoves will be pried from cold dead hands, what do you want the readers to think about in their own lives and advocacy as they come to the end of your book? i hope people see they have a personal connection to some of these bigger themes, these bigger, broader american themes. another theme of the book is kind of maybe picking apart some of the myths of the american west. we've all heard of these and understand how that has affected this place so what i hope is that by seeing someone actually struggle with what they are learning and being very different some claims on the family stories that i heard were

the actual chapter where a lot of these may be originated. but i hope is that people understand that they have their own connection to this. i think the estimates are 45 million to maybe 75 million that are descendents of people who file homestead claims and that is a lot of people out there in the country that have a connection to 160 acres of nearly free land. and that was a major social program. one of the biggest, it was one of the biggest social programs ever, transfers of wealth ever perhapsha certainly for that it was the first transfer of wealth at that time and it might still

be one of the biggest transfers of wealth that has ever happened. many of us that have that connection 45 to 75 million whatever the estimates are now have benefited from that. so i think if we think about that and how that transfer of wealth shaped so many places especially in the west, then perhaps we could apply that to other things, other social programs and other ways of thinking about transferring wealth or what it means to be prosperous. i hope people come away with perhaps being inspired by how they have a personal connection to it and maybe that means there are things they could do that

collectively add up. >> we will start on this slide and work our way over. questions, comments. born and raised and educated in north dakota and the county where i grew up isn't very close to the bulk and field, so i don't have to worry or wonder about a surprise check in the mail that i find it interesting and hope it isn't too insensitive' to ask when you think about your ancestors rights to this, i can't help but think about the native american

rights and wonder if anything came up while your are doing yr research what that's like. >> that is such a good question. i begin to address it at the end of the book. i don't want to give away too much at the end of the book but i do think that is something that when i started the research and reporting for the book that was not part of the conversation at all. it wasn't part of any american conversation, and i think now we are all familiar with the term land back. we are all familiar with some of the movements that might reconsider how, who owns what that might be a part of that and i so hope and this is where i will step into that kind of position of advocacy i hope that that is a big part of the, what i do next out of this book.

i hope that i can help with that, facilitating some of the conversations. i don't think that i'm necessarily always thehi right person to be leading those conversations, but i do hope that i can be helpful and i do hope that they are a part of the future. can you talk a little bit about what didn't go in the book? youu are doing so much in 80,000 words whichw really isn't thatd how you fit all of that in through the keyhole? >> this question comes from one of the women who is in my writing group and read many early drafts of this book. it's such a great question.

and i did not pay her to ask that question. so there are a lot of things because i do have very strong feelings that after not knowing how to write a memoir when i started this project and not really knowing that that was what it was going to do, i spend a lot of time studying how to write a memoir and reading them and the memoirs. it is a constructed narrative where the writer comes to a realization during the process where he was a reader that has come along with them and maybe you have your own moment based on what the narrator is doing is kind of an unsophisticated way of describing it. but i do think you are telling the story and it can't just be a

stenography of what happens, you are telling the story. and so i had to think about it that way. there were things that had to be left out. one a silly thing that helped me was a long time ago i saw a cut of one of the bridget jones is diary movies and the director was talking about things they left out. they had these scenes and i think it was the second film where they cut them because they were too sad. it was too much piling on. >> they should have kept the whole movie. [laughter] t it was such a great often you are toldor screenwriting and storytelling and just give your

protagonist more things to get over. i saw that and i think we've gotten plenty. i did a chapter about our marriage and the difficulty of infertility and kind of some of the struggles that we had. i cut that chapter and there was another time i chose not to write about one t of the trips that i took to north dakota. it was also kind of sad. it was in 2019 and it was my first time in the state after like three years and i was so thrilled to be back and seeing a

placewa where it was very closeo selling the project and beginning the process of publishing the book. i was there but it had been three years since i'dd, been ba. i'd had an ectopic pregnancy a few yearsnd earlier and i wasn't going to be able to have children. i was there in north dakota and i realized i was a different person completely than when i started the project. a completely different person and i think that kind of speaks to the question how did i decide what to put in and take out. that isn't what the book is about. i wanted to show that there are parallels and dreams that do not manifest.

i never quite articulated that shift in who i was as a person. i couldn't quite my hands around it and then i realized it doesn't need to be explained in the book because you see me going back to thee state and doing that thing i love which is being a journalist and reporting and going and telling other people's stories and writing about the environment and really delving intof the climate chane part of the book. so ied realized i didn't need to include that. it didn't need to be there. >> you talked about not liking the idea of o advocacy or tellig 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 are glad that you had that shift that

seemed to be a process? >> yes. i am glad and i think that is kind of where lydia was leading me to words in the beginning in this question. i don't think i quite answer to that at the beginning of the talk but that is all i do think that journalism can be very good and very skillful and very true and also be opinionated. i think when it comes from that place of it's not advocacy, it is kind of the heart of what it is to tell stories and tell the truth and some of the kind of a iowa role things we talk about

as idealistically a part of journalism. i think that it can do those things and have a really strong point of view. it's with that solid research behind it. we've seen great examples and i am hopeful that that is kind of the direction my own reporting will take and we will see a little bit more of that as an industry and many people may disagreean with me. that's fine. >> we can have a televised fight on c-span. >> i have a question about the first chapter that yourr read ad

whether i'm correct on what you heard me say. can you sell your land and maintain the rightsla underneat. >> i'm so glad you asked that question because i think that if you live in like texas or oklahoma or the colorado, you know this. this is a. my grandfather leased the land to theso companies and owned all the land and all of the rights beneath it in the 1950s when there was the first oil boom in north dakota and the checks that

he got paid for my mother to go to college and in the 70s, he sold the land but kept the rights and knew he could do that because he was kind of an armchair geologist and so he generatedlt some wealth. he got the payments that lifted my family up and allowed my mother to go to college. that is what you can do in places like north dakota and oklahoma, texas et cetera. it's's not quite the same in pennsylvania. but definitely in those western states it ise possible to sever the surfacean of the land and of course that causes so many problems, so much heartache if

you are a farmer that owns thate land and suddenly you have all these loyal trucks were pipelines coming through and there is an oil spill or something like that like obviously the collision course can be extreme. in just wondered what memoirs u read in preparation and what were the ones that were the most memorable and impressive to you? >> i love this question. i should probably print out a list so i can call them up at any time. those werere the first when i started the project that were successfully and commercial

memoirs. they are wonderful for different reasons, but they are genius if you go back and look out of them. it has a very specific three journeys and while it's also written in a very cinematic way with a very strong narrative and story one of the things that has been said many times, she never wanted people to forget she was walking on that path. i took quite a bit from those memoirs and read those from the course of working on the book

one of my most favorite recent memoirs. he wrote a book about growing up in north dakota and he's also an environmentalist and it's a lovely memoir and i think it bears really nicely because he is someone who lived and grew up in north dakota. i am a visitor there. i have a great affinity for the place and a strong connection to it but i'm always a visitor when i go there so he writes about it in a way that is from having a deep connection. i could go on and on there are so many that influence this one but i think that those are the three right off the top of my head.

>> do you see yourself writing anything else for the future? i threw a party and it was really fun. it felt really good to be done. the book just came out but also i'm working on a short film in connection with the book so it's like a ten minute film. so you are never quite done. that is a good question.

i don't know what my next project is yet but i would very much like to work on something that has if not a personal connection where i am spending a lot off time with other people and writing about their personal story and thinking about how much ofto myself to bring into t or not and doing it in parallel with a film project at the same time.

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