LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.

For details regarding specific events please contact the organizers or venues. If you are an organizer or venue and would like to reach out to us please feel free to contact us or submit an event using our submission form. We’d love to hear from you!

Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Erika Bolstad in Conversation With Lydia Kiesling

January 17, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Free
View Venue Website, 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR 97209 + Google Map

At first, Erika Bolstad knew only one thing about her great-grandmother, Anna: she was a homesteader on the North Dakota prairies in the early 1900s before her husband committed her to an asylum under mysterious circumstances. As Erika’s mother was dying, she revealed more. Their family still owned the mineral rights to Anna’s land — and oil companies were interested in the black gold beneath the prairies. Their family, Erika learned, could get rich thanks to the legacy of a woman nearly lost to history. Anna left no letters or journals, and very few photographs of her had survived. But Erika was drawn to the young woman who never walked free of the asylum that imprisoned her. As a journalist well versed in the effects of fossil fuels on climate change, Erika felt the dissonance of what she knew and the barely acknowledged whisper that had followed her family across the Great Plains for generations: we could be rich. Desperate to learn more about her great-grandmother and the oil industry that changed the face of the American West forever, Erika set out for North Dakota to unearth what she could of the past. What she discovers is a land of boom-and-bust cycles and families trying their best to eke out a living in an unforgiving landscape, bringing to life the ever-present American question: What does it mean to be rich? Windfall: The Prairie Woman Who Lost Her Way and the Great-Granddaughter Who Found Her (Sourcebooks) is Erika Bolstad’s book about her family’s buried past and its dark connection to the promised land of the American West. Bolstad will be joined in conversation by Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State.

Preorder a Signed Edition

Venue

1005 W Burnside Street
Portland, OR 97209
+ Google Map
Phone
503-228-4651
View Venue Website

Organizer

Phone:
503-228-4651
Website:
View Organizer Website