She never really left South Dakota, but after 16 years of living "away" in Wyoming, Linda Hasselstrom is coming home to her Hermosa ranch.

Hasselstrom — one of our state's favorite prose writers and poets — told an audience Tuesday night at Mount Marty College in Yankton that she's excited about her homecoming. Interestingly, her next book will be titled No Place Like Home.

She says one of the things she discovered in Wyoming is that people who live to the west of South Dakota don't consider this state to be western. I suppose that's the way it is across America; Ohioans think they are Midwestern, for example.

"We have distance, we have cattle, we have ranches, we have cowboys with big hats — and sometimes the cowboys with big hats even own cattle," she quipped. She thinks South Dakotans share traits of toughness and hard work. "We are well known for working hard even when we don't have to," she said.

She lamented that both rural Wyoming and rural South Dakota also suffer from too much violence. "We find a lot of bones in Wyoming, and we find a few bones in South Dakota," she said. "Somebody disappears and nobody knows where they went. We find some bones and nobody knows who they are."

She read poems about buying bulls, gardening, bad marriages and mulching — and sometimes she combined several of those. Her long poem "Bittercreek Junction" is about a rural woman running out of options, "in a place where there are not many options."

We always considered her a South Dakotan, but it's a plus that one of our best and most thought-provoking writers will again be a full-time member of the South Dakota community.