SEPTEMBER 19, 2002
SOUTH DAKOTA RANCHER, WRITER TO GIVE PUBLIC READING IN DRUMMOND

When Linda Hasselstrom writes about the land, she knows what she’s talking about. Having grown up on her family’s ranch in western South Dakota, she continues to earn her living in part by ranchwork, along with freelance writing and teaching workshops in writing and publishing.

She will be visiting northwest Wisconsin this month to work with the Cable Natural History Museum’s writing internship program New Voices for Nature. As part of her visit, she will be featured on WOJB-FM’s local morning edition show at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 27. She also will give a public reading from her work at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, September 27, at the Drummond Public Library. The event is free and open to the public; refreshments will be provided.

In 1984, Hasselstrom received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and a South Dakota Arts Council literature fellowship. In 1990 she became the first woman to win a Western American Writer award.

"I believe one’s work should complement the rest of one’s life, and blend smoothly into a whole that keeps the physical body healthy while also working the mind," she says of her writing. "I work to bring my life into a circle: writing things I can respect, publishing work I respect, laboring at riding, branding, gardening, taking care of the land, and doing it all with an awareness of how those things fit together. More and more, as I grow older, I feel that it is important to keep my roots in this arid soil, to learn from it all I can, in order to continue to grow as a writer and as a human being."

Hasselstrom is perhaps best known as the author of books of nonfiction and poetry including A Roadside History of South Dakota and Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains, and as one of the editors of the anthology Leaning Into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West. In addition, her writing has appeared in The Mother Earth News, Saturday Evening Post, High Country News, Bloomsbury Review, and Christian Science Monitor.

Since 1996, she has been offering literary retreats for women at Windbreak House, her writing retreat in South Dakota.