North Dakotans have always had a bit of an inferiority complex when it comes to our writers. Yes, natives are proud of our ability to withstand the howling winds, swirling snow and 40 below zero temperatures that might send people from other states into a warm corner to whimper and curl up into a fetal position. We laugh at Southerners who call off school at the first sight of a few snowflakes or who careen into a ditch when ice coats the roadway because they do not know how to drive on ice.

But too many of us are under the impression that a truly great writer must come from out of state. Rick Watson, a lecturer at Minot State University and a popular local author himself, calls that a mistake. “Could you guys ever accept the fact that something homegrown in North Dakota can be as good as something from (outside the state)?” Watson has asked some of the people he knows. “If you write about (North Dakota) as an exotic place from the outside, you get a totally different picture of it than someone who grew up here.”

Some of our greatest writers are the artists who describe the joys and sorrows of everyday life in a state that is changing more rapidly than ever. Some authors write about the past of the state; others about the future. Every lover of books will enjoy reading at least one of these authors and exploring a side of life in the state or of the life of a North Dakotan that they might not have been familiar with.

What follows is a list of some of the best North Dakota authors:

“Love Medicine”

by Louise Erdrich

Award-winning author Erdrich, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is among the most significant American writers living today and is probably the first person most North Dakotans think of when they are asked to name a North Dakota author.

Erdrich is a prolific author of novels, poetry and children’s fiction featuring Native American characters, but the favorite novel of many is “Love Medicine,” published in 1984. The novel starts with a woman dying while she tries to walk home from Williston to the reservation in a snowstorm. The novel explores other universal themes of love and loss through the experiences of other narrators who are affected by the death of the woman in the snowstorm.

“Her style is a little bit like (William) Faulkner,” said Mike Porter, an assistant professor of English at Dakota College at Bottineau. He said another of Erdrich’s books, “The Master Butcher’s Singing Club” will be featured in the college’s Community Read program next spring. Porter describes himself as a huge fan of Erdrich.

Val Stadick, owner of Main Street Books, said National Book Award winner Erdrich is probably the most respected North Dakota author.

Erdrich has also presented at numerous writers conferences and writing workshops in the state and owns Birchbark Books in Minneapolis.

“The Story of Hazel Miner” by Chuck Suchy

Songwriters are modern day poets, some of whom are among the best North Dakota writers. Chuck Suchy’s “Dakota Breezes” includes his popular “The Story of Hazel Miner,” another tale about someone who died while traveling home in a blizzard.

“Wings on the snow, a fate not chose, ” wrote Suchy about the 15-year-old girl who died to save her little brother and sister in March 1920. “Morning finds a dove so froze, who too soon thought spring arrived. In warmth below her love survived.”

The story, and Suchy’s ballad, began on March 15, 1920, when classes at a one room rural Center school house were let out early because of blizzard conditions. The Miner children’s father rode to the school on horseback to guide his children safely home. William Miner hitched the horse to their sleigh and told Hazel and her siblings to wait while he got his own horse. Instead, the horse guiding the children’s sleigh took off on its own before Mr. Miner came back and Hazel was not strong enough to hold the horse back. The sleigh hurtled into the blizzard, in conditions so blustery that the children could not see which way they were headed. When the sleigh hit a coulee and overturned, Hazel, up to her waist in the slushy snow, tried and failed to set it right. Hazel and her siblings, 10-year-old Emmet and 8-year-old Myrdith, turned the sleigh into a makeshift shelter while they waited for help to arrive. Hazel kept the younger children moving and talking. As the temperatures grew colder, she spread blankets over her siblings and finally unbuttoned her overcoat and spread it over the youngsters. She laid over the children to keep them warm and refused to get under the blanket with them. Eventually she stopped moving. When a search party found the three children the next afternoon, 25 hours had passed since they set out from the schoolhouse. Rescuers tried to revive Hazel but failed; both her siblings survived.

There have been many tributes paid to the heroic teenager, one of 34 people who perished during the blizzard, but Suchy’s is the most lyrical.

The song was recorded on Suchy’s “Much to Share” album in 1986 and again on his “Dancing Dakota” album in 1989. Today it can be found on his “Dakota Breezes” album. In 2008, Suchy told The Minot Daily News that he was inspired to write the song after his daughter showed him a newspaper article in the 1980s. Further inspiration came one day when he was working on his ranch and spotted a dead dove lying in the snow. The song about Hazel, a “frozen dove,” became one of his most popular songs with audiences of all ages.

In 2008, Suchy said he still thinks about Hazel all the time, especially when he’s hit a bump in his own life and thinks “”What do I do?” He said he remembers that Hazel did the best she could do and good came from her efforts, even though she lost her own life in the process. That is all any of us can do, he said. He thinks Hazel’s story serves as a real inspiration to ordinary people who are called upon to do courageous things. Both Hazel’s story and Suchy’s song are also recounted over and over again because all too many North Dakotans can imagine themselves meeting a similar fate if we are not careful and well prepared when the next blizzard hits.

“Beyond the Bedroom Wall” and “The Invention of Lefse” by Larry Woiwode

Woiwode, North Dakota’s poet laureate since 1995, has been noted as a particularly astute observer of life in a state.

“(Read him) if you want to read a book that is really thoughtful about what it’s like to be alive in North Dakota right now,” said Watson.

Woiwode was born in 1941 and lives in Carrington. His works comprise essays, novels, and short stories.

His “Beyond the Bedroom Wall,” the favorite of many, was published in 1975 and, based on a synopsis is the story of three generations of a German-American family, the Neumillers. The story opens with the funeral of Otto Neumiller, the patriarch, and follows the younger generation as they deal with the death of a beloved wife and mother. “His opening chapter is as great as anything I’ve ever read,” said Minot State University English professor Robert Kibler.

Woiwode is also a versatile author who has written books for both children and for adults. His “The Invention of Lefse” is a “wonderful little children’s book about lefse and lutefisk and Christmas,” said Watson. National reviewers also praise the 2011 book. The Washington Post Book World called Woiwode “a writer of truly American grain, a writer whose prose throbs with affection for and understanding of the land and its people.”

In the story, young Mette and her Norwegian-American family are experiencing hard times during a Christmas in the first part of the 20th century. They worry that there will be no feast for the table that Christmas after her father fails to shoot a deer. But family resourcefulness and love combine to make a very special meal of the traditional Norwegian Christmas foods that many Minot residents have enjoyed at the Norsk Hostfest every fall, regardless of whether they are of Scandinavian heritage.

“The Tiger Lily Years”

by Erling Rolfsrud

North Dakota-born teacher and author Erling Rolfsrud (1912-1994) was a prolific and popular regional author, but it was his “Tiger-Lily Years” that my mother describes as the most successful Christmas present she gave to my grandparents.

“They read passages of it aloud to each other and laughed and cried,” said my mom, Peggy Johnson. “The Tiger-Lily Years” is Rolfsrud’s memoir of growing up in the Norwegian-American community near Keene during the 1920s. Undoubtedly my grandparents, who were of the same generation and were both teachers like Rolfsrud, could easily relate to some of the experiences he shared. Rolfsrud wrote the book in 1975 for his own grandchildren so they would know what life was like before fast food stores and shopping malls. Today’s North Dakota children, accustomed to smart phones and iPads, can likely barely imagine what it might be like to pick tiger lilies for a father’s funeral or to collect cow chips to give one’s mother for her birthday, as Rolfsrud did, according to Arland O. Fiske in a column for The Pilot Independent in Walker, Minn.

Fiske writes that Rolfsrud recalled minute details of his childhood in his books. A mackinaw from the Sears catalogue cost $5.45 back then and he wore a brand new suit with long pants when he graduated from the eighth grade. Rolsfrud earned just $81 per month as a teacher at a one-room school in 1930. He attended what was then Minot State Teachers College and walked 14 miles to make it home on the weekends.

Rolfsrud is also the author of another funny children’s book, “Gopher Tails for Papa,” about young Sven, a Norwegian-American boy growing up in the early 20th century who started the tradition of leaving gopher tails in the church collection plate.

“The Bones of Plenty” and “Reapers of the Dust: A Prairie Chronicle” by Lois Philips Hudson

The Depression devastated the entire country but took its toll on many of the ancestors of today’s North Dakotans as well. Hudson’s work, like Rolfrud’s, is largely autobiographical but touches on serious themes. According to biographical information at Wikipedia, Hudson grew up near Jamestown and her work depicts what it was like for her parents, who were North Dakota farmers battling dust and financial disaster during the Great Depression in the 1930s. After they were ruined, the family worked as migrant farmers in different communities on their way to Washington state in the 1930s and Hudson often felt like an outsider. She eventually became a college professor and taught for a time at North Dakota State University in Fargo.

Watson compared her work with John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” a more widely known tale of Depression era America.

“If you read them back-to-back, you’ll just be going, “Wow, she’s as great as Steinbeck,” said Watson.

Porter said “The Bones of Plenty” was a featured book in the college’s Community Read series a few years back.

Porter said it was a good book, if a “long read,” and appealed to him personally because of its 1930s theme. “My father talked a great deal about the 1930s,” said Porter. “It fit with the sort of thing he talked about.”

Prairie Peddlers: The

Syrian-Lebanese in North Dakota by William C.

Sherman, Paul Whitney and John Guerrero

Early North Dakota was not inhabited only by Native Americans, Norwegians and Germans from Russia. “Prairie Peddlers,” which the authors spent over a decade researching and writing, tells the story of people of an Arabic background who settled in the Great Plains. The book focuses between the families that settled in different parts of the state. Some families, like the Hagger, Allick and Farris families who settled in Turtle Mountains, which is the area where I grew up, came from parts of Lebanon and Syria.

According to the authors, the Turtle Mountains were unusual because many Syrians continued to come to the area through World War II and established small businesses in the area. Some Syrian immigrants were Christians, while others were Muslim. Some immigrants of Arab descent, like other immigrants to the state, ended up marrying into Native American families in the Turtle Mountains.

Sherman, Whitney and Guerrero have published a valuable history of a little known chapter of North Dakota’s early history which continues to influence its future. The book is also of interest in the present day, when the Middle East and discussion of whether North Dakota and other states should welcome Syrian refugees, has been so much in the news. Any Syrians who come to North Dakota will find that their predecessors helped build the state long before they arrived.

Rachel Calof’s Story

(Jewish Homesteaders

on the Northern Plains)

by Rachel Calof

Jewish homesteaders were a rarity on the Northern Plains. Calof, a Russian Jew, came to North Dakota to marry a man she had never met. Her memoir is wry and funny and may well destroy any romantic view that the reader had of pioneers. Calof and her new family shared their home with the livestock (the pigs were under the bed) and she shared a family bed with a brother-in-law who wet the bed. Calof lived on a farm north of Devils Lake for 33 years. The book describes her experiences between 1894 and 1904 and is worth reading for a new perspective on the pioneer experience.

“The Edge of Nowhere”

by Lucy Johnston Sypher

Sypher wrote “The Edge of Nowhere” and other children’s books in the 1970s about her experiences growing up during World War I in Wales, a small North Dakota town on the northern border.

Like Rolfsrud, Sypher’s book is filled with details of everyday life in North Dakota that today’s children will find surprising. Lucy and her brother are left snowbound home alone during one of North Dakota’s blizzards. The children must carry up coal from the cellar and keep two coal-burning stoves going all night. Keeping both stoves running requires someone to get up to stoke the fire every three to four hours. Big brother Amory teases Lucy and enjoys snowball fights, games of baseball and going gopher trapping with her friends. Larger events threaten the town, like a fire that burned down half of the buildings on the town’s Main Street. Her fictionalized account describes a fire that burned down half the stores on the town’s Main Street and one of North Dakota ubiquitous snowstorms that left her snowbound for days.

Sypher graduated from Langdon High School and eventually became a college professor at Lasell Junior College in Auburndale, Mass.

“Five Days in November” by Clint Hill with Lisa

McCubbin

Some North Dakotans might not realize realize that a native North Dakotan was one of the Secret Service agents protecting first lady Jacqueline Kennedy on the day her husband was assassinated.

Clint Hill, who grew up in Washburn, was on the first lady’s Secret Service detail for three years between 1960 and 1963. His book, “Five Days in November” recounts his experiences in the Secret Service and the assassination of the president.

When Hill spoke in Minot last year, he said he hadn’t particularly wanted to protect Jackie Kennedy at first. He had been protecting President Dwight D. Eisenhower and thought the assignment to Mrs. Kennedy was a demotion. He was also bored by the tea parties and ballet recitals Mrs. Kennedy liked. For her part, Mrs. Kennedy didn’t want to be constantly surrounded by the Secret Service.

Over the next years, Hill developed a close and trusting relationship with Mrs. Kennedy and grew particularly fond of her young son John. He saw that the president and Mrs. Kennedy grew closer to one another after the death of their baby son Patrick.

Readers will be fascinated by Hill’s account and by some of the little-known details about the practicalities and challenges of protecting the president and first lady. In the early 1960s it was common for the president to ride in an open car in parades and too easy for people to come within an arm’s length of him. Footage from the time shows people leaning out of open windows lining a parade route in cities all over the U.S. and the world and cheering crowds lining the streets. At any given time, Hill said, there were only five Secret Service agents guarding the president and two assigned to the first lady. The Secret Service relied a great deal upon local law enforcement for security.

Hill was riding with the motorcade on the fateful day in Dallas, Texas, when Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed President John F. Kennedy and wounded Texas Governor John Connally, who were riding in an open car along with Jackie Kennedy and Connally’s wife, Nellie. After the initial shots were fired, Hill threw himself over Mrs. Kennedy and the president as the car sped toward a nearby hospital.

Tragically, it was too late to save the president. Hill, who had seen the bullet wound to the president’s head, thought JFK was probably dead. But he recalls not wanting to tell the attorney general, John F. Kennedy’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy over the phone that his brother was dead. Hill told Bobby Kennedy, “It’s as bad as it can get.” That was how Robert F. Kennedy learned the terrible news.

It was also left to Hill to arrange for a casket to be brought to the hospital. Through the next days, Hill continued to guard Mrs. Kennedy as Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn into the presidency, as arrangements were made for the slain president to lie in state at the Rotunda and during the funeral that followed.

One of the most poignant moments in those days was the moment young John F. Kennedy Jr. saluted his father’s coffin.

Hill said Secret Service agents had been trying to teach little John-John how to properly salute for a month. Originally, he was supposed to accompany JFK to a Veterans Day ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He saluted properly at Arlington but afterwards returned to saluting with his left hand instead of his right. On the day of the funeral, Secret Service agents tried to keep him occupied by having him practice his salute. A Marine colonel in full dress uniform walked by and had the 3-year-old boy’s full attention. “John,” he said. “No, son, you’ve got it all wrong. That is not how you salute.” The colonel demonstrated a salute and the little boy imitated him perfectly. Later, at the correct moment, Mrs. Kennedy whispered something to John and he gave a perfect salute to his father.

Hill continued to protect Mrs. Kennedy for a year after the assassination and then later returned to the White House to protect President Johnson. He served five presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, President Kennedy, Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He retired in 1975 as assistant director of the U.S. Secret Service.

Ghosts of North

Dakota series

This book series, which features photos of abandoned buildings, railroad tracks and bridges and other locales in North Dakota, are among the most popular local books at Stadick’s Main Street Books.

People like my father can spend hours looking at old photos that remind them of the vanished life of rural North Dakota. The history of these old places will fascinate readers.

In some people, the images inspire nostalgia; in others melancholy, but all must admit that those long ago days will never come around again.

“Roughnecks”

by James J. Patterson

and Quinn O’Connell Jr.

Patterson’s “Roughnecks” is a story about present-day North Dakota at the time of the oil boom. Many people will recognize themselves in the character of the young roughneck who heads to the Bakken in hope of finding a job in the oil field and in the struggles he experiences along the way. O’Connell, a lawyer, actually worked on the oil rigs in North Dakota and some of the book is based on his experiences, according to his biography at Amazon.com