In this episode of Watching America, Dr. Alan Campbell talks with Michael Patrick Smith, a musician, playwright, and author of The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown. Kirkus reviews calls Smith’s debut “a white-hot, fiercely argued case for working rural people in the face of their economically brutal lives.”

After working countless “in-between” jobs as a stage actor, bartender, junk-hauler, waiter, security guard, legal assistant, and more, Michael Patrick Smith chose to pick up the role of an oil-field hand in Williamston, North Dakota. He had one main goal – to get his share of the oil boom’s money. He recorded his trip in a notebook, lived and worked side-by-side with an array of hard-working individuals from all corners of life, and came back with new-found reverence and insight of what it meant to be a “good hand.”

Hear Smith recount what drove him out to the oil fields of North Dakota, who he met, what he learned, and what he carries with him today.