Gathering from the Grassland: A Plains Journal by Linda M. Hasselstrom (review)

Written in the form of a diary, with an entry for every day in the year 2016 (the year is unidentified in the text, but the book includes an entry for the 29th of February, a leap year), Linda M. Hasselstrom's Gathering from the Grassland: A Plains Journal is a retrospective and assessment of the writer's life as a daughter, a writer, and a rancher in South Dakota. To try to understand the course of her life, along with family mysteries, Hasselstrom compares her recent entries with entries in earlier books she has written in diary form, Windbreak (1987) and Going Over East (1987), with actual diaries she kept from childhood, with the journals kept by her mother, Mildred, and by her adoptive father, John Hasselstrom, and with letters written by her maternal grandmother.

Because Gathering is in part a retrospective, it is useful to consider the overall arc of Hasselstrom's creative nonfiction since Windbreak and Going Over East, which detailed traditional ranching culture in Hasselstrom's unique voice, with her characteristic sharp and accurate detail, not only of ranchers and the nature of ranch work but also on the geography of the Great Plains, its wildlife and plant life, and the ways traditional ranchers respect and help sustain their environment. However, after her second husband's untimely death and her father's dementia drove Hasselstrom into a seventeen-year exile from the South Dakota ranch, her writing took on a darker tone. Anger at her father for making her choose between her writing and her life on the ranch, anger at losing her husband, and anger at the way agribusiness and suburban sprawl have been crowding out traditional family-owned-and-operated ranches characterize Hasselstrom's work during those years, along with an intensified fascination with gun culture.

In Gathering Hasselstrom has achieved some peace with herself and a balance in her life between ranch work and running her writers' retreat—Windbreak House—her gardening, her relationship with her life partner, Jerry Ellerman, and her writing. Her entries document each day's work, which she meditates upon, the weather, and the passing wildlife. Her language is as exact and evocative as one would expect from the poet Hasselstrom, and her detailed observations of the ordinary becoming extraordinary that characterized her early writing are as sharp as ever. This close attention to the landscape Hasselstrom loves and to the living beings, wild and domestic, that she shares it with is the "deep map writing from the Plains" (xiii) that Susan Naramore Maher defines and John T. Price cites in his foreword to Gathering.

Of equal concern, however, in Gathering, which Price only touches on, are Hasselstrom's attempts to understand herself and her parents by mulling over their journals and letters and studying family snapshots. Clearly her relationships with her abusive mother and the adoptive father she adored are still painful for her. Why did her mother try to shape the young Linda into a caricature of femininity? Why did her father describe her writing as "junk" and disinherit her?

Answers to these questions are difficult; perhaps, Hasselstrom suggests, the search for answers is enough. "No wonder she was angry," she writes of her mother. "Instead of forgiving her, as I smugly expected to do, I am beginning to understand why she behaved as she did" (142). As for her father, she now recognizes his undiagnosed strokes as the source of his hostility toward her and her writing.

Finally, with no children of her own, what will the aging Hasselstrom pass on, and to whom? She ponders the future of the ranch itself and begins a gradual process of divestiture. "Last night I gave all three of my saddles—my father's, mine, and George's—to a family in the neighborhood, relatives of Jerry's. . . . When the older boy saw my father's old-fashioned Duhamel saddle, his face lit...