Not everyone has a book, but everyone has a story.
I’m at dinner in downtown Sioux Falls ahead of a book event featuring South Dakota’s poet laureate Christine Stewart. A woman I don’t know is seated at our group table. She has written a book, I am told. It’s about an illness that changed her family’s life. She lives in Fort Pierre.
Later in the evening this author, Molly Weisgram, will place her book into my hands. Now I am responsible for sharing her story, in a small way, even before I have folded back the cover.
It’s not unusual for people to send books to my attention. As the host of In the Moment and a member of the National Book Critics Circle, it’s fairly common. I do my best to treat each one with the respect it deserves and to share it as widely as possible.
This year, reading feels even more urgent for me. My life is changing in ways I don’t yet understand, but books have always guided me through transitions, so I’ve learned to trust the process. Even so, Molly Weisgram’s “The Other Side of Us” took me by surprise. It quickly became more than a story of struggle and survival. Within pages, the emotions in her story became a reflection of my own dread, my own hope, my own grief.
Maybe it’s because meeting Molly at dinner was my first serendipitous encounter after months of pandemic isolation. Maybe it’s the way she passed a copy to me with a barely perceptible reverence, as if she were offering a child into my temporary care rather than an object of paper and ink and glue. Maybe I just like Molly and admire her book.
In September, we celebrate South Dakota’s literary heritage for our monthly Spotlight coverage. We’ll meet bookstore owners and authors and readers. We’ll consider the books that have changed how we see ourselves and the books that have changed our world. It’s a road trip on the way to the state’s headline literary event of the year — the South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood. I’m excited to share the journey with SDPB listeners and readers and writers across the state.
I’ve been attending the Festival of Books nearly every year since its inception and reporting from event venues since before I worked in radio. I’m grateful to have interviewed authors such as Ted Kooser, Harry Bliss, Chris Browne, and Marilynne Robinson for newspaper stories. I’m honored to have shared the stage for interviews with authors such as Alice Sebold, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Heid Erdrich, and Nick Estes. Once SDPB’s Paul Ebsen and I set up in a green room and recorded back-to-back interviews with a dazzling array of Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, including the luminously funny book critic Michael Dirda.
It is equally joyful to spend time with our state’s literary legends — to travel to Windbreak House and sit with Linda Hasselstrom, to pause an interview because of the antics of Dan O’Brien’s cat, and to get to know the everyday memoirists, novelists, and poets who are scribbling away in notebooks and tapping away at keyboards. They write on their lunch breaks, in coffee shops, in minivans, before morning chores. They tell stories that are passed down from one generation to the next. They write letters and emails to loved ones and messages in bottles to recipients unknown.
Not everyone has a book, but everyone has a story.
One more aspect of our September book coverage is deeply personal to me. I am thrilled to announce we are chartering a custom-built Little Free Library for placement outside our studios in downtown Sioux Falls. Each week, as steward of the library, I will add books and inspiration. I’ll leave interview notes and book reviews — maybe even Polaroids of the author who left the book to be passed along. We hope you will stop by the studio and visit the library, taking something to help build your own South Dakota bookshelf.
The Little Free Library project is dedicated to the memory of my brother Wesley Byers, who died in 2020 after a four-year battle with cancer. Wes was the one who taught me to read. He spent his career as a bookseller and a bookstore manager. He spent a lifetime patiently, relentlessly, and lovingly placing books into the hands of people he adored and people he didn’t know. I am humbled to carry on his work in the world.
We invite you to journey with us for this SDPB Spotlight and literary road trip. What books do you think define and redefine our region? Who do you consider our very best authors? What books should people outside the state read to understand more of who we are? You can send me a note via email, social media, or postal service. I love to hear from listeners and readers. There’s a pretty good chance I’ll write you back.
Reach Lori Walsh via email at lori.walsh@sdpb.org, via postal service at 601 N. Phillips Ave. Suite #100, Sioux Falls, SD 57104. You can connect with her via social media on Twitter @MomentSDPB and on Instagram @inthemoment. Find all our Spotlight coverage online at sdpb.org/spotlight.
SDPB AT THE 2021 SD FESTIVAL OF BOOKS, DEADWOOD MOUNTAIN GRAND
Friday, Oct. 1, Noon/11am MT - In the Moment with Lori Walsh broadcasts live from Bill’s Backstage Bar at the Deadwood Mountain Grand, including an interview with Lisa Napoli, author of Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of The Founding Mothers of NPR. A captivating account of four remarkable NPR journalists, their deep and enduring friendships, and their journeys to becoming icons, each with a different story.
Saturday, Oct. 2, 11am - “Media, Democracy & Citizenship,” a panel discussion with Lisa Napoli; Nomadland author and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism professor Jessica Bruder; Stanford University historian Allyson Hobbs, and Marc Johnson, author of Tuesday Night Massacre. Lori Walsh moderates.
Saturday, Oct. 2, 1pm - “Getting to Know Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie,” a conversation with Lisa Napoli and Lori Walsh.
Saturday, Oct. 2 - 3pm – American Experience American Oz Screening, with discussion featuring author Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve and Nancy Tystad Koupal, founding director of South Dakota Historical Society Press. Katy Beem moderates.
