Wordslinging in Deadwood

Sep 29, 2015

The little city of Deadwood, where just more than 1,000 people live on steep mountain streets and visitors come to test their luck in glitzy casinos, is winning a reputation as the biennial home to the South Dakota Festival of Books. Photos by Bernie Hunhoff.

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The 2015 book festival was held there the last weekend in September. Events took place all over town, but the Deadwood Mountain Grand was the center point.
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“I want to write things worth cutting down trees for,” said Elizabeth Cook-Lynn at an early-morning session about fiction writing. She read from her new novella about a young Indian woman dealing with loneliness in a small South Dakota town.
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Custer photographer Paul Horsted gave an intriguing look at civilization's effect on the Black Hills by showing historic pictures from the early years of settlement and his own photos. His book The Black Hills: Yesterday and Today has become one of the state’s most beautiful reference materials.
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Now in its 13th year, the book festival has grown to become one of the country’s leading gatherings of readers and writers. Large crowds attended most of the sessions in Deadwood.
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Pamela Smith Hill, editor of the popular book Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, filled the event center’s theater on Saturday morning with her presentation about the book on Laura Ingalls Wilder.
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Hallway conversations are sometimes as interesting as the readings and presentations. Poets Patrick Hicks of Sioux Falls (left) and Jim Reese of Yankton (right) visited with Gary and Vivian Westgard of Watertown. Gary is a Lutheran pastor who began to write poetry when he retired.
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Writers enjoyed meeting readers face-to-face at several book signings, and when there were no books to sign they hammed for our photographer. Pictured (from left) are sculptor John Lopez, Kristin Donnan (who wrote a book that illustrates Lopez’s art), and Hill City paleontologist Peter Larson.
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Vermont illustrator Ashley Wolff charmed an audience with slides and stories of how she finds ideas.
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Debra Marquart was a singer and songwriter before her career as a poet, author and writing professor at Iowa State University. Her book, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, draws on her years as a road musician. She brought her guitar to Deadwood and obligingly posed for a picture on the historic Main Street.
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Nathan Sanderson of Pierre told stories about Ed Lemmon, South Dakota’s most famous cowboy. He described Lemmon as “controlled recklessness,” pointing out that he took chances but was also a shrewd businessman. Sanderson recently finished a book on Lemmon’s life.
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Most of our South Dakota Magazine staff attended the book festival, including (from left) Heidi Marsh, Laura Andrews and Mary Wickler Peterson.