The Great Falls Public Library warmly welcomes Missoula author Donna Erickson for an author talk/reading on Tuesday, May 6 from 6 to 7 pm in the Cordingley Room. She will read excerpts from her book Rooted at the Edge, published by University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books.
Donna was raised riding horses, putting up hay, and herding cattle at Skyline Ranch. Her family’s nearly 1000-acre ranch lies in the North Hills at the edge of Missoula. As a young adult, she ranched there and on other leased ranches in western Montana. Many decades later, her life as both a rancher and landscape planner give Donna a unique perspective on ranching at the edge of a growing western town. She wrote this book, “…to share stories about a century of change in this iconic landscape and the threats it faces going forward.”
Rooted at the Edge paints a portrait of a ranching community in a threatened landscape steeped in history, conflict, and beauty. In this narrative nonfiction work, Donna L. Erickson explores the hilly skirt of ground at the northern boundary of Missoula, separating the town from the wilderness beyond. The North Hills region represents the critical—and often highly personal—issues at play at the edge of many western towns.
The urban-rural fringe is both valuable and vulnerable. Across the West rural lifestyles are increasingly compromised by suburbanization, economic hardship, and family dynamics; a way of life and a way of work are vanishing. Ranchland may be simultaneously cherished by a family for the life its members have made there and coveted by urban neighbors for open space.
Community residents may love a place for its scenery and wildlife habitat while others wish it converted to a commercial parking lot. Complex ecological relationships can be bulldozed in a single afternoon. And the threats of climate change and shifting populations compromise the edge even more.
In the tension between love and loss, Erickson wrote this story of a landscape’s soft contours, piney ridges, shady draws, and grassy slopes, and its potential disappearance under an expanding city. Erickson writes that, “Rooted at the Edge conveys, in a way that statistics cannot, what’s at stake when ranches at the urban fringe are threatened.”
Erickson will have copies of her title available for sale after the reading, as well!
For more information, contact Jake Sorich at jsorich@greatfallslibrary.org or 406-453-0349 ex. 220.
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