Transcripts For CSPAN3 Erika 20240705

Documentary filmmaker and journalist who has studied and written vastly about Climate Change and fossil fuels. Erika bolstad the personal connection to oil was brought to light and late in late 2009 when her ailing mother unexpectedly received a check for leased mineral rights. They were rights that dated back to 1951, leased by ericas grandfather from the land that his mother had homesteaded in the early 1900s. In north dakota. Ericas great grandmother, anna, was a woman of potential fortune, lost to history with very little photo evidence or writing. In fact, annas husband had committed her to an asylum under mysterious circumstances. In her book windfall, the prairie woman who lost her way and the great granddaughter who found her Erika Bolstad excavates. Her familys buried past and its stark connection to the Promised Land of the american west. Both dad will be joined in conversation tonight by lydia kiesling. Shes the author of the novel the golden state. Tonights event includes an audience q a. We ask that you raise your hand during that time. There is levi has a boom mic that looks like that. And hell make your hell make his way to you before you ask the question. We have to get these questions clearly on their audio or cspan will say no and they wont air the the whole event. So make sure you wait for that microphone when youre doing the q a after that. Erica will be up here to sign books. We have books on the cart right back there, lined up over on the side when that time comes. Going this way, you can pay for your books after theyre signed downstairs on your way out of the store. A reminder that we do close at 8 55 p. M. These days. Now please welcome Erika Bolstad and lydia kiesling. Hello. Hello. How are you feeling . Good. Good. Yes. Yes. Its a big day, right . We have an amazing crowd here. Im going to scoot this if i may, and cspan can yell at me if i. Thank you so. Erica is going to start with a reading. Im so happy to see such a great crowd here for this book. Its an amazing book. It weaves together so many different strands in a way that i still dont quite understand how she managed to do that. And im excited to talk with her about that. And so if you havent bought it already, 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 . Yeah, thatd be great. Yes, im going to start with chapter one. 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. Fractured. December 2009 north dakota crude 6396 per barrel. Her name was Anna Josephine fold. Thats about all i knew. When all of this began, during the darkest days of the great recession, anna, my mother told me, was a plucky woman who on her own settled the untamed prairies of northwestern north dakota. The family law was made even more romantic for what it left out, and a disappeared from her homestead in 1907. Lost to time and the vast plains is more than a century later. An oil company sent my mother a 20 400 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 confirmation of a family theory never articulated, but well understood that unexpected windfalls have a way of showing up when they are most welcome. 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 windswept land where anna, his mother, once staked her claim. The oil Company Never drilled on annas land, but it kept renewing the lease for more than a decade. All that lease money was enough to send my mother to college. She was the first person in her family to go. My mother loved a windfall. How could she not . Her entire life, shed heard the promises blowing across the great plains. She bought lottery tickets whenever the jackpot soared and scratch offs on a whim. She stockpiled pocket change to play the slot machines of the Spirit Mountain casino near the western oregon town where she and my father raised us. Do you know how long you can make 10 last on penny and 0. 05 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 always worked. Someday all this will be yours. My mother promised. We knew she was dying a few months before the envelope arrived in her mail. An off duty nurse found her mother, passed out in a gym locker room from yet another heart attack. My sister stephanie lived in miami and i lived in washington, d. C. By the time we both got to the hospital in oregon, our mother was alert enough to ask us to bring in her jewelry. She told us she had picked out what she wanted us to have. And my mothers office was a handwritten ledger on line notebook paper detailing the 72,000 in medical debt. She and my father owned owed to 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 my belly with warmth and some sort of sharp physical sensation in the nubs of the carpet. Pressed into my bottom. I could see all the dog hair under my bed. I put on a favorite black turtleneck 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 mothers 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 handle that sofa with my laptop wearing my favorite wide legged sweat pants, my soft turtleneck, and the hammered gold hoop earrings i pilfered from my mothers jewelry box. On my last visit home. I wrote in a fury, unaware of time. An obituary, i understood, was an account of what was important to the people left behind. You could hit the highlights. My mothers long marriage to her 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 wasnt her story as she might have told it. But im 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 as story filtered through newspaper, impartial reality was not the same as an obituary told. Tempered by grief. A few years later, when i was trying to become a mother, i read that fetal dna lingers in a womans bloodstream 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. We hurt because those little pieces of our own dna, the ones inside our mothers, died too. Part of us is also gone forever, and our bodies know it. The raw feelings 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 the obituary for free, even though my mother had never lived in boise. It was an employee perk and i took her up on it. The death notice ran as a news item in our hometown newspaper, the Statesman Journal in salem, oregon. But the full obituary cost 285. 99. I checked the balance on my American Express card. 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 continue to be loved. Later that summer, my sister stephanie and i traveled once again to oregon to spread my mothers ashes. We gathered at a county park just up the road from the house where we once lived. The park was the scene of many happy summer days, in part for the shallow kid friendly rapids at a bend in the creek. We loved the natural rock chute just slippery enough to slide down even as it peeled and snagged our body at the bottoms of our swimsuits and stained them green with moss stuffs twin girls took a dizzy spin on the same lopsided merry go round we played on as kids. Its revolutions as wobbly as ever. My five year old nephew, puzzled by the solemnity of the adults, the adults around him squatted near the creek bank, peering into the shallows for fish. I recorded on my iphone, the sound of the wind rustling the leaves of the cottonwoods that nestled along the banks of the creek. For a while after the audio file showed up randomly, whenever i played music in shuffle mode, the sound always a puzzling interlude return me to the sun dappled creek bottom. The day we said goodbye. Even now, when i hear wind and cottonwoods, i think of spreading my mothers ashes. Some sank to the bottom of the creek bed that day. Other granules floated, suspended in the current as we release the ashes to the water. I thought of my mothers spirit floating down willow mine. A creek to the yamhill river, then to the willamette river, and then into the wide columbia. I like to believe that some of those tiny motes reached the Pacific Ocean that evening. My sister and i sat at the smooth Kitchen Table our mother had built from ashwood. We divided up our mothers jewelry. This was our physical inheritance. The objects are mother once more, once wore that we would now wear close to our skin. Staff who wore a simple Silver Wedding band chose our mothers diamond wedding ring. I picked out my mothers gold gingko shaped earrings and an Old Fashioned gold brooch inlaid with pearls. I had worn the brooch to my eighth grade graduation, pinned to the lace, dropped waist. Jessica mcclintock dressed my mother bought me at the outlet store in san francisco. The brooch had belonged to her grandmother, anna. My mother once told me the oil company paperworks on a pile of papers on my fathers kitchen counter. I read over the lees 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 didnt even own the land, just the oil deep beneath the earth. Besides being born, what had we done to inherit mineral rights from a woman lost to the prairies and to history . Until an oil company came calling . 100 years later and who was anna . Really . I held the brooch in my hand, my fingers rubbing the pearls. Anna had touched this object. She, too, had worn the brooch pin next to her heart. She, too, must have once believed her land would bring her wealth. A tiny whisper called to me at the Kitchen Table. It was a tendril of 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. 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 skeins that im actually not sure how you pronounce that word i should have workshopped before i said it out loud. One of the threads that runs through the book is your own career as a journalist, and that was the sort of work that you were familiar with. And you had you know, you describe some of the kinds of stories you would write about and the way you would track down sources and and do your reporting. And so naturally, you know, you brought that to this to this story, to your to your windfall. But in some ways, the book kind of read to me as a little bit of a subversive account of the journalistic profession in both sort of what was going on for all journalists at the time that youre writing this stretch of period over a number of years and then also the way that your that your own career as a journalist sort of affected how you approached the book and how you sort of struggled sometimes with figuring out how to to tell the story. So i wonder if you could speak to that. Thats kind 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 up to when i first went to north dakota, that was a major time of change for journalism. It was it was just you know, first of all, there was a recession and so many people lost their jobs. The the Newspaper Company that i worked cut my pay, you know, by 300 a month. And and and that was hard living in washington, d. C. , you know, and suddenly you dont have that money anymore. And it became a very discouraging kind of you know, you could just see audience slipping away. You could see are reach as institutions, as as a newspaper slipping away. And it was it was really hard to want to do the job that id been trained to do. And not really feel as though i were able to. That was a that was a very difficult period professionally and not just for me, for, you know, just many, many journalists, many journalism companies. And we continue to go through those cutbacks, the layoffs, etc. And in fact, here in oregon saw a newspaper close in the last few weeks, which is, you know, just 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 see that this career more may not mean not look the way it would. 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 anachronism. Even. Even at the time. And and so i could, you know, i could see something happening. And and it was very apparent to me that i would i would if i wanted to follow this particular story, this family story that had so many tendrils and connections to a bigger 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, i can be dropped off in a place and figure out what to do just by, you know, i have some tools and skills and its very, you know, its im able to do that. And and so i knew that i would be able to do that. And i and i also, you know, had this like these whispers that we could be rich calling to me, as you know, i of course, had some doubts about it from the very start, about the environmental consequences. But i also was very much called by those whispers. And so so i think that that was starting out. I kind of knew you know, i knew that the end was was coming for the kind of journalism that id been trained to do. Theres many moments in the book where it feels like youre youre doing a little bit of a almost like a hustle because you you are youre 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 slip that work in. Well, so one of the things that you and i have talked about this before, how because part of your training as a journalist is, you know, theres a very strong kind of code of ethics. And im always struck when i talk with journalists because i come from kind of personal essay and creative nonfiction, and theres no rules and its just, you know, lies all the time. And your opinions everywhere. But journalists are really not like that. Theyre very, like, loath to put a position ality in a story. And i think that is changing. But thats something that you really wrestle with in the book because you do. I mean, there 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, like, not putting yourself in or not taking a position on 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. I mean, i just was i didnt have that voice. I did not come from like a background of writing personal essays. I probably written like three public pieces with the word i in 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 or cultural conditioning that memoirs are are like what women write or what or, you know, theyre just i just i had to get over that. And im so glad i did. But but it was it was not easy. You know, that was not an easy. I didnt it was not easy to find a voice. It was the voice that served me as a journalist in the and 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 and it took a while to figure that out. I am still grappling with some of it. You know, you will many of you who will come to the end of the book will see that i definitely grapple with it and i continue to grapple with that, that how much of it how much advocacy to to do here . One of the things that really 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 and and kind of call things as i saw them. It was honestly just being on the ground in north dakota. That was the key to just understood anything that i had a there was a story that needed to be told there that had this personal connection. But that, you know, the very first and 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 like windshield time, because its a big place with a lot of you know, a lot of roads and a lot of ground to cover and one of the things that i very you know, that i saw almost on that first day was were flares, was the flaring of methane gas. That was a byproduct of the oil production. And in many parts of the country, including now, you know, theres very specific drilling for natural gas. But in north dakota, in the early 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 with her fracking for oil. Oil was the much more valuable product. And, you know, i think the my very first trip to north dakota, the chapter, those chapters, oil was about 100 a barrel, if not more. And and and i as you drove on 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 prairie or these, you know, warm lights on the prairie. And the point its just is youre like, no, this is a it was if you drive there at night, you see these these flares, these lights in the darkness, and and its Climate Change. Its happening right in front of you. Its there. Its burned off as waste. Its not even used to heat peoples homes or you know, for their gas stoves or it is waste. Its considered waste. And it happens all over the country. It happens particularly, you know, to a particularly large extent in in north dakota and in texas. And it is shocking how much is happening. And and i think the environmental reporter in me saw that peril from these flares, from the methane, you know, we dont often get to see Climate Change literally happening right in front of us, you know, Greenhouse Gases are invisible. Its its hard to see the, like, tangible, everyday effects of it. And it was the most striking thing that i saw all my first week in north dakota. And from that point on, it it became easier to to to to write about that from a place where i could say that it was bad. This is not good, and that i could take a stand as a journalist and and say that this is you know, this is not something that should be happening when one one of the things 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, i wish that i had it to 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 im glad that you mentioned sort of the patriarchal structures that maybe encourage you to or encourage us to sometimes think of more and more personal. Writing is like Womens Womens writing because sort of those patriarchal structures really shape what happens to people in your 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, i think you do. This is more of a comment than a question, but i admired in the book how you how you were able to step back, even though you were writing personally and kind of put all of these these different elements in context. And it and there is i mean, it really does feel like its a book about sort of womens lives because even when youre looking at the when youre going and sort of watching the rigs in action or seeing a well being kept, you note a lot about that. Its a its kind of mens work. Women are like incredibly under represented in that line of work and it really affects the types of things that happen around the socalled man camps and the way life is structured in north dakota. As a consequence of the boom. And then another sort of like womens thing that flows through the book is you talking about your infertility story. And i imagine and based on what youve said, that that was probably difficult to sort of put into your story when youre coming at it from that sort of journalistic standpoint, how did you decide that that was going to be such a meaningful part of the book . Yeah. Well, one thing that i had done all along when i was working on this project was i tried to interview as many women experts as i could. That was a you know, the geologists that i interview almost i think all of them are women and and the many of the experts, you know, you see like these former cabinet secretaries that were obama appointees like sally jewell and Gina Mccarthy and those are you know, those are women who are featured in in this project as well. And i think that what happened is this, because ive worked on this project over time, sometimes piecemeal, you know, there were a couple of years where i didnt work on it at all. And and those years that i didnt work on it, i or i didnt go to north dakota and do any research for years where i was really struggling and my husband and i were trying to have a baby. And it became very clear to me while thinking about this project and how to organize it, that that everything i did was shaped by that quest, that that i wanted, you know, we wanted to have a child. And so it 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 it really it shaped it. It shaped where i went and what i chose to do. And, you know, theres a couple of chapters where my husband is along with me. He comes with me in one year on a trip to to north dakota, the one and only time he came to north dakota and and, you know, he had to come with me because if we wanted to have a baby, he needed to be there. You know, thats like, you know, like so that was like that was part of it, right . Like that was like there were things that happened that were that were shaped by by all of that. And i also saw a 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. And i just knew as a journalist that anyone who has any connection with a state institution will have a file. Like its just, you know, you just have to ask for it. Maybe you have to file a public records request for it or, you know, i knew i could get a file. And in fact and i 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. They you know, if i wanted to get it as a file like that, as a journalist, i would have had to file a public records request for it. And so i got her file and i sat in the cemetery and read her file. And it was so, you know, i was really, really sad and i in fact, in the book chose to just excerpt two parts of that because i thought it spoke for itself. But there is nothing i could do. I went at it and every single angle of creative nonfiction that you could try and in the end, you know, i tried to like rebuild, reconstruct kind of her world on the page. And in the end, it just became very clear to me that the words in the file spoke for themselves and and so i heard her stories very tragic. Her she had a baby and she and my great grandmother had a baby. My grandfather. And within four months of having that child, she was institutionalized. She was committed to the to the the asylum. And in her file, it mentions that she was, you know, that she had manic depressive in sanity. That was her diagnosis, which is archaic. And, you know, i dont even know what that really means, but she also had there was a note of like a gynecological report in the to see the guy in a logical report, which i didnt have, that was not something that they gave me. And but it was very clear that she had, as she 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 postpartum psychosis or depression, a very severe sort. And and i just you know, my heart ached for her that that was obviously woman at that time. People didnt know what to do with them. They put them in these institutions and just forgot about them. And and i had i felt this affinity through the generations to this woman who, you know, i dont know if she wanted to be a mother at all. And i dont know if that was part of her hopes or her dreams as a as a, you know, 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. She never got to decide whether she wanted to be a mother or whether she what kind of life she would have outside of that institution. And, you know, i, i, i understood that i, i very much wanted to be a mother. And i understood what it felt like not to be able to be a mother and, and so i just i felt a connection to her because of that slightly, very different circumstances, you know. But i just i, i could put myself literally in her shoes. Yeah, i was i didnt its not that theres spoilers in the book, but, you know, i do hope that readers will kind of come to some things by themselves. And yeah, the story of anna is just really its just devastating that theres no and and the way that you also sort of look outward at how many other people, you know, sort of suffered the same fate is just so hard to kind of contemplate moving on to like what others really sad things. Can we talk about. Yeah i did. I wanted to ask sort of from a craft perspective, i cant emphasize enough how many things shes juggling in this book. Its theres a lot of like amazing regional detail and sort of regional history, national history, sort of president oral history, policy and environment. How did you how did you sit i mean, you wrote this book over a number of years, but like, what was your process for doing that . I saw a picture you posted once where there was like various postits of different colors. Like how did you figure out how to structure the book and then how did you sort of bring it into being . So one day in 2015, i had all this stuff. I didnt know what to do with it yet, you know, i was like, didnt i had an agent . Didnt have an agent and had written book proposal, which is something you have to do for a nonfiction book. If you sell it to a publisher. It wasnt very good. It was actually really bad. And and if anyone ever wants to talk to me about book proposals, come see me. But 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 know exactly where this idea came from, but i but i understood that 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. And and so so at some point i came to that realization with a conversation with my friend shawna and and i just 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 an envelope in the mail, you know, and then i, i always felt like there was i always felt like this was first and foremost, actually, a book, Climate Change. And that was my my main goal with this book is to write something about Climate Change that would be relatable and use a personal story to tell bigger stories about, you know, the america that we know and and and where some of these myths came from about riches and about getting rich and about windfalls. And and so i had i felt like i had like three themes. I had the Climate Change theme. I had the personal story. I had me as a narrator, you know, the personal story of missouri or going in search of all of these answers. And i had the story of anna, so i knew i had these three threads and what i what i literally did was i also had an aha moment on this too. I have no idea why where it came from, but i envisioned the story on like a roll of white poster paper or like the kind you get down at, you know, the book store and i envisioned it like on this roll of paper just unfolding over time with these like chapters that were had the price of oil on them. And, and then i could see like annas story was this teal blue ribbon ran through all of every single chapter in some way or the other. And, and then i could see, you know, me as the narrator walking you through these places and people going, you know, looking over my shoulder in the archives as im finding these records about her. And then i could see how there was a story about an oil boom and and and riches and, and how that connected to Climate Change and kind of the darker side of the american dream. I see that thread, too. And so yeah, was there were times when it was really hard to keep in my head like this narrative, you know, 80,000 words of, of all of that in my head, it was really hard. It was very difficult. But but i, you know, i stuck to that sort of like here is the price of oil at this time. And if i can just run this ribbon through, you know, all of those chapters, then it will feel i hope readers will feel that it is a cohesive narrative. I you know, i do as a journalist and as a storyteller, i like narrative. I like stories that have beginnings, middles and ends and that, you know, that take us somewhere. And so i always wanted to be you know, i wanted you to feel as i wanted there to be like the sort of feeling where you were, you know, where you had that beginning, middle and end. Im going to ask one more question and then ill open it to the to the audience. So, you know, at the end of the again, i will be leery of spoilers, but at the end of 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 the back end and Climate Change, what what is what is something that you hope that readers will take away from the book . And what do you i mean, thinking about like right now, the discourse is about, you know, whether stoves will be pried from cold, dead hands or what do you what do you want kind of readers to think about that in sort of their own lives and their own advocacy as they as they come to the end of your book. I really hope that people see that theyre that they have a personal to some of these bigger themes, these bigger broader american themes. I would say that another subtheme of the book is kind of like maybe picking apart some of the myths of the american west, right. And so weve all heard these, you know, and many of us here in oregon understand how how how those of how that has affected this place, this the state and and so what i what i hope is that by like seeing someone actually struggle with what theyre learning, being very different sometimes in the family stories that i heard or the actual like a chapter about the town of medora, where a lot of these myths are, you know, maybe original faded and and and what i hope is that people understand that they have their own connection to this. There are i think, something the estimates are probably 45 million to maybe 75 million living american are descendants of of people who filed claims. And thats a lot of people out there in our country who have a connection to, you know, 160 acres of nearly free land. And that was a major social program, one of the huge biggest it was it was one of the biggest social programs ever, transfers of wealth ever, perhaps, you know, certainly for that that it was the first transfer of wealth at that at the time that was that quite that big and it might still be one of the biggest transfers of wealth that has ever happened on this earth, you know, on this planet. And and so many of us who have 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 dont have to worry or wonder whether im going to have any rights to any any surprise check in the mail. But i find it interesting and i hope its not too insensitive to ask whats that like when you think about your ancestors, your rights to this . I cant 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 thats 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 dont to give away too much of the end of the book. But i do think that, that is, i think thats 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 were all familiar with the term land back. I think were 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 im i, i, you know, that i, that i can help with that facilitating. Some of those conversations. I dont 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 didnt go in the book like what you know, youre doing so much and 80,000 words, which really isnt that many. How did you make decisions about what went in and what didnt . 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. Its, 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 thats kind of an unsophisticated, unfortunate, sophisticated way of of describing it. But i do think youre telling a story, you know, youre telling a story and it cant be a stenography of, you know, everything that happened in your life. So youre 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 were 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 youre 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 weve 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 didnt it wasnt 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 id been back. Id, id had an ectopic pregnancy, you know, a few years earlier and, and i wasnt 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 didnt 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, dont happen. And and so so i never quite articulated that that shift in who i was as a person, you know, i couldnt quite put my hands around it. And then i just realized it doesnt 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 peoples stories and writing about the environment and, and really delving into the Climate Change part of this of this book and thats what i and so i realized i didnt need to include that. It didnt 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 youve come to the end to kind of maybe even a mission for advocacy. Do you feel like youre 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 thats 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 dont 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 its not advocacy its its 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 its science or research, i think it can be i think it can be done. I think weve seen great examples of it. And and i think that im hopeful that that is kind of the direction my own reporting as journalists will take. And then well see a little bit more of that in the industry as a whole. And many people may disagree with me about that, and thats fine. We can we can duke it out on cspan. You can have a televised finances band. I have a question about the first chapter that you read, whether im 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 elses name or the original name. Yeah. Im so glad you asked that question because i think its 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 its there youre 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. Its not the same quite the same in pennsylvania. Theres 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, theres 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 theyre 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. Its 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 hes an environmentalist and its 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, im im 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 youve 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. Im not quite done. Obviously, the book just came out, but. But also im on a short film in connection with the the book. So, so ill have its just like a ten minute film. So have that and and so yeah, youre, youre never, youre never quite done. Yeah. And you know, thats a really good question. I dont 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 im 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