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 Bolstads 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 annas husband had committed terror to an asylum under various circumstances and her book windfall the prairie woman who lost her way and the greatgranddaughter 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. Well 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 cspan 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. Its a big day. We have an amazing crowd here to so erika is going to start the reading and im glad that we have such a great crowd for this book. Its an amazing book and it weaves together so manyffta different strands and i dont quite understand how she managed to do that and im excited to talk with her about that. If you havent 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. Im 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 thats 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 2400dollar 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. Its 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 scratchoffs 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 mothers 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 2400dollar 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 mothers 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 mothers 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 mothers 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 im 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 mothers 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 5yearold 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 sundappled creek bottom the day we say goodbye. Even now when i hear wind i think its spreading my mothers 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. Id 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 mothers 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 mothers gold earrings and oldfashioned brooch madewo with pearls. Id 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 didnt 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 perrys 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, its kind of a twopart 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 dont 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 im 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 iden been trained to do. Spirit their many moments of the book where it feels feels like youre 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. Its just like all the time in your opinion is everywhere. Your notes arent like that. Theyoa are very position out ina story. I think that is changing but thats what you really wrestle with in the book because there is an o advocacy that happens at the consequences of what youve 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 didnt have that voice. I didnt 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. Im 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. Im 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. Its 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 thats happening right in front of you. Its their and its burned off his waist. Its used to heat peoples 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 dont often get to see Climate Change literally happening right in front of us. Greenhouse gases are invisible. Its 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. Its 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 im 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 its a book about womens lives because even when you are looking at, when you are going and watching the rigs and action are seeing a wellbeing capped keynote a lot that its kind of mens work and women are incredibly underrepresented in that line of work and t it reflects the types of things that happened around the socalled main camps in the way that life is structured in north dakota during the boom. Another womens 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