Linda M. Hasselstrom's Blog, page 5

Flying into Oblivion: How to Keep Your Writing Spirits Up

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Annie Proulx (that’s pronounced PROO according to my conversation with her some years ago) has been named winner of the 2018 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.  The honor recognizes a knowledgeable writer whose body of work has told the readers “something new about the American experience.”

Proulx is a wise woman who said, in a May 2, 2018 article in the Washington Post, “I feel sorrow and urgency about the state of the natural world. So many extinctions loom, so much plastic ch...

A Chicken in Every— House

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My favorite news story of the week and possibly the month comes from Pakistan, where the Prime Minister Imran Khan hopes to alleviate poverty by giving women chickens. The response to this plan has involved a lot of snickering and jokes at his expense.

But as Myrah Nerine Butt pointed out in Dawn, quoted in The Week magazine (12/21/18, p. 15), the people doing the jeering are far removed from the context and experience of real rural women.

This situation is strikingly similar to the way poli...

Late Harvest

[image error]Recently I’ve spent part of each warm afternoon harvesting from my tiny garden: two L-shaped beds about 12 feet long and three feet wide, plus three free-standing pots.

Oregano, culinary sage, basil, thyme and rosemary are all drying in the back of the basement on my homemade food dryer. The heat source is four 60 watt light bulbs, and the temperature this evening is 80 degrees. I also picked tomatoes, which I cooked into several pints of spaghetti sauce. I froze several [image error]packages of green bea...

100 Great Books?

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“100 Great Books” reads the headline, this time from PBS, one of my favorite institutions.

Of course I’m in favor of reading. Everyone should do it, constantly.

However, I generally try to avoid either reading or creating lists of “great books” or “best books” or whatever the latest terminology is.

My American Heritage Dictionary defines “great” this way:

adj. great·er, great·est

1.
a. Very large in size, extent, or intensity: a great pile of rubble; a great storm.
b. Of a larger size than o...

Remembering Samhain 2013: A Festival of Contradictions

This essay was originally posted on the Windbreak House website on October 31, 2013.

I wrote “Home Page Messages” for most of the eight Celtic seasons of the year from December, 2009 to December, 2014.

I am reprinting this on the 5th anniversary of the Cattleman’s Blizzard (also called Storm Atlas), which took place October 3-5, 2013.

Samhain: Festival of Contradictions
October 31, 2013

[image error]The ancient holiday of Samhain (pronounced Sow-when) is, said one writer, “a festival of contradictions: s...

If I Were Going to the Festival of Books

The 2018 South Dakota Festival of Books will be held September 20 in Sioux Falls, and September 21-23 in Brookings.

I’m not able to go this year, but if I were going, I’d look for these presenters first.

[image error]I’d hope to speak to Lee Ann Roripaugh as she ends her four-year term as our poet laureate. A new laureate will be inaugurated at the 2019 Festival of Books in Deadwood. The SD Poetry Society invites anyone who would like to be considered for the position to submit a letter of application and...

Remembering Judge Davis

Today, August 14, 2018, I have been Linda Hasselstrom for sixty-five years. In celebration of what my family always called my “adoption birthday,” I am posting an essay I wrote in 2004.

Remembering Judge Davis 
Linda M. Hasselstrom
Written for the Custer County Historical Society, June, 2004.

I was nine years old. I don’t remember my birthday that year, but a month later, on August 14, I was adopted by my mother Mildred’s new husband. A photograph shows me on adoption day in a ruffled plaid d...

Paying Attention – Sixty Years of Experience

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I just spent a couple of hours having the most fun I’ve had since I gave up my horses– using my Kubota to herd a neighbor’s Angus bull into the corral.

When Jerry and I started our usual walk to the mailbox, we noticed the cows were excited and jumpy, and realized they were gathered around a couple of black bulls. Our lessee had apparently decided this was the time to turn his bulls out; service in July will result in calves in April.

[image error]We noticed the bulls seemed to be sparring a little, but...

Walking into Writing

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Jerry and I step lively when we begin our after-breakfast walk to the mailbox on the highway, smiling as we march along, even when our feet slide on the roughly graveled road. Whenever our road through the pasture gets too muddy, we haul pickup loads of gravel from one of the small quarries in the neighborhood, so the gravel varies in size and shape. Several times during the summer, Jerry mows the tallest grass at the edge of this two-track trail, so we are in less danger from lurking rattle...

The Tall Purple Flower: a follow-up to my Journal Entry, 7/4/2018 blog

[image error]In my previous blog I wrote:

“Today we wander the hillside, admiring the Echinacea in bloom, the salsify, the height of the grass we never mow or graze. . . . Bluegrass, redgrass, a tall purple flower I can’t name. Delicate faces of blue flax that has escaped from my planted gardens, all blow gently in the breeze.”

Thanks to Cindy Reed, president of the Great Plains Native Plant Society which has its Great Plains Garden headquarters on my ranch, I’ve discovered the identity of the “tall purpl...