49th ANNUAL UND WRITERS CONFERENCE: "Truth & Lies"
MARCH 21-23, 2018
GRAND FORKS, NORTH DAKOTA
http://und.edu/orgs/writers-conference/current-conference/
News and Events
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Calendar of Events (by location)
BISMARCK GRAND FORKS MINOT FARGO
Looking at North Dakota through an Author's Eyes: Send us your favorites!
Have you ever recognized your hometown in a novel or an author's memoir? Send us your comments and a brief quote from a book's passage that reminds you of home: readndinfo@gmail.com.
Larry Woiwode's opening chapter in Beyond the Bedroom Wall in which he describes the fictional North Dakota hamlet of Hyatt so accurately described the main street (one of two streets in the entire town) of Nash, where I grew up that I gasped when I first read it decades ago, assuming he must have been there. He wrote: "Every night when I'm not able to sleep, when scrolls of words and formulas unfold in my mind and faces of those I love, both living and dead, rise from the dark, accusing me of apathy, ambition, self-indulgence, neglect all of the accusations just--and there's no hope of rest, I try again to retrace the street. It's an unpaved street and--it's the color of my hand. It's made up mostly of the clayey gumbo from the flat and tilting farmland all around the village so small it can be seen through from all sides, and its ungraded surface is generally overrun with ruts that are slippery and water-filled in spring, ironlike in summer, furred in fall with frost as phosphorescent as mountainy ridges on the moon's crust, and in winter buried beyond all thought except for any thought that clay or gravel or the booted feet of people crossing ice-covered snow above might have. It's the main street of Hyatt, North Dakota, and it's one block long." SS
Submitted by Janet Daley Jury, Bismarck The Badlands and the prairies of North Dakota are so dear to my husband Bruce and me. Bruce for the love of the hunt and me for the weekends I accompanied him but spent my time reading and/or losing myself in Badlands beauty while sitting atop a rugged butte or in the midst of prairie grasses as he hunted. (Yes, I was wearing bright orange.) Larry Watson, our brother-in-law, has brought some of those favorite memories to life in Let Him Go: "Eventually the highway the Blackledges travel will lead through the fiery eruptions of rock that are the Dakota Badlands-- mile after mile of jagged, sheered-off red and orange buttes and sudden deep-shadowed gorges and ravines-- but the first few miles out of Dalton are as easy as a pony ride. This is prairie, rolling gentle country where black seams of trees and brush stitch one grassy hill to another. Barbed wire lines the highway, but with so much emptiness on every side, what the wire is supposed to fence in or out isn't clear. Here and there an unmarked dirt or gravel path branches off from the highway, leading no doubt to a ranch or farm, but these are far enough from the main road that it would take a soaring hawk's eye to find them." Submitted with gratitude by Barb Evanson and seconded by Bruce Evanson, Bismarck |
