Shop online and local: get your friends a book from Frederick, South Dakota, for Christmas!
Frederick entrepreneur Heidi Marttila-Losure edited Dakotafire magazine for five years, promoting discussions of rural community and revitalization. She collects 45 of her editorials, columns, and blog posts from Dakotafire and 50-some photos, most from around her family farm in northern Brown County, in her self-published book Sky Theater.
One theme running through the anthology is mingled opportunity and challenge of distance in rural life:
The space available in rural places is one of the greatest advantages of rural living—and its biggest disadvantage…. Great things are possible in rural places—sometimes more so than in cities, because out here there is room to make your own opportunity, doing the things that matter to you…. But the distances between people also mean that it is more difficult to bring people together to get things done or to make the human connections that we are so hungry for today. That’s one reason the theme of purposeful community building comes through so strongly in the essays in Sky Theater. Those of us “living rural” have to go out of our way to build those connections—both within the small towns we typically call our communities, but also beyond them [Heidi Marttila-Losure, press release, 2017.11.15].
Sky Theater is available in black and white or in color. You can order copies via Dakotafire or Amazon.com. Hard copies will also be on the shelves at the Frederick Community Store come December.