ILCW member Linda M. Hasselstrom (USA) Founding Fellow, will host several creative writing faculty members and about 15 MFA students from the Creative Writing and the Environment program at Iowa State University (Ames) at her Windbreak House retreats (windbreakhouse) on the edge of the Black Hills of southwestern South Dakota, USA. This will be the fourth year students from the writing program visit Linda's ranch.
 
During the three-day September event, Hasselstrom will lead walks through the Great Plains grassland of her cattle ranch, observing and discussing wildlife, climate, grazing, terrain and human occupation. She will provide handouts on various topics, talk about native grass in relation to agricultural cultivation, and provide a cow skeleton diagram so students can put together their own souvenir cow at the cattle graveyard. And she will provide students with a literal "taste of the ranch," so they can sample the flavor of foods grown in arid grasslands soil, so different from that of Iowa's rich loam.
 

 


Linda and the group of students head back to the ranch headquarters after a grasslands hike. (Sept. 2010)
 




Students explore Battle Creek. In 2004, Linda worked with the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory (www.rmbo.org) to enhance the bird and wildlife habitat along the creek, fencing the riparian area to separate it from surrounding cattle pasture. (Photo taken Sept. 2010)