Pamela Smith Hill – Author – Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life

Review Excerpts

Review Excerpts
“… a work which we believe adds substantial measure to the critical literature involving Wilder and [her daughter Rose Wilder] Lane.” — Noel Silverman, The Little House Trust

“…an insightful visit with the woman who first captured what it meant to be an early young American,” ” The Christian Science Monitor

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author’s notes

authors note

y big, brown Rainbow Book of Bible Stories from childhood included an unforgettable picture of Moses on Mount Sinai. Boiling up around the summit of the mountain were blue-black-green clouds, as turbulent as an Ozark tornado sky. But above that was a radiant circle of orange and yellow light, white hot at its center. Moses clutched the stone tablets in his hand and raised them toward that throbbing circle of light. Surely that was the Voice of God, telling Moses exactly what to chisel into the stone.

On May 29, 1965, I had a similar feeling, standing in front of a pair of old fashioned glass display cases in a tiny, cramped Ozark farm kitchen. In my imagination, another divine circle of white-hot light was beaming down from the heavens that day, piercing those cases and illuminating yet another set of divine tablets— not of stone, but of paper. Just like the ones I used at school. But written in pencil across those tablets were the very words that went on to become book after book after book from the only Real Writer who’d come from my corner of the world: Laura Ingalls Wilder. Surely she’d heard the Voice of God just as clearly as Moses had on Mt. Sinai when she’d put pencil to paper. Writing as divine dictation— or so I assumed then.

I was eleven years old, and my family’s trip to Rocky Ridge Farm on that Saturday afternoon in 1965, merited a line in my new Five-Year Diary: “Went to Wilder home,” I wrote. I kept the entry short because I had only four lines to describe the entire day, and although I already aspired to be a writer, I hadn’t yet learned an essential writing principle: “show don’t tell.” But my memory recorded the awe I felt that day as my blue ballpoint pen did not.

My Missouri Childhood
I grew up about forty miles west of Rocky Ridge Farm, on a small acreage east of Springfield, Missouri. I was born in the very St. John’s Hospital Wilder sometimes mentions in letters to her daughter Rose: “Dr. Fuson is in St John’s Hospital in Springfield very low with pneumonia.” Although I lived just minutes away from Rocky Ridge, I came to Wilder later than most of her young readers. I must have been ten years old when our neighbor Opal Scott recommended Wilder’s books. “Pam’s such a bookworm,” she probably said to my mother, “that she’d like those books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. She’s a Missouri writer, you know.” So Mother dutifully wrote down Wilder’s name and we looked for her books the next time we went to the bookmobile, which parked on the outskirts of town. The only Wilder book on the juvenile shelves at the back of the bookmobile that day was Little Town On The Prairie. I dutifully checked it out and started my journey through the “Little House” books almost at the end of the series. But that didn’t matter. Opal Scott was right. I liked the book, and read all the rest— as soon as they appeared on the bookmobile shelves. 1

That’s not to say that I took the books at face value, especially when I came to The Long Winter. How could a snowstorm be so fierce that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face? A “blank whiteness?” I just didn’t believe it—any more than I believed everything in the stories I heard late on summer nights when my dad’s family gathered at my grandparents’ house. A family favorite— about a deadly white tornado that dropped out of a cloudless sky— sounded a lot like Mrs. Wilder’s “dizzy whirling” blizzards. I believed in the literal truth of neither account, though this didn’t diminish my appreciation for them. I’d come to expect exaggeration and hyperbole (though I didn’t know the word then) from a good storyteller. 2

Life in South Dakota
Then in my twenties, I moved to South Dakota and experienced my first blizzard. It swept down out of the northwest, just like the ones in The Long Winter, and came on so fast that it stranded motorists on the Interstate. Somewhere between Sioux City, Iowa, and Vermillion, South Dakota (where I was living then), a couple panicked and got out of their car. Their bodies were found frozen, just a few feet away from the highway. Five years later, a co-worker, my infant daughter, and I were stranded on a stretch of isolated road between the Crow Creek Indian Reservation and Pierre, South Dakota, during a surprise Halloween blizzard. My companion wanted to leave the car and look for help, but by then, I’d learned the underlying truth in The Long Winter. We stayed put, and after several of the longest hours of my life, the state highway patrol broke through the “blank whiteness,” and took us to an RV— where there was shelter, warmth, and food— half a mile up the road. Wilder hadn’t exaggerated Dakota blizzards after all.

Living in South Dakota deepened my appreciation for Wilder’s work. I was a travel writer for the state tourism agency, and my assignments often focused on the prairie, its wide expanse of sky, the seemingly endless horizon. But I didn’t embrace the prairie as readily as Wilder had. Coming straight from the Missouri Ozarks to eastern South Dakota, I felt small, vulnerable, and exposed by the land, stretching flat and almost treeless in every direction. I longed for rocky hills; low, hazy skies; and the lush blue-green of the Ozarks. On my first day in South Dakota, I sat out on the curb in front of a dilapidated apartment building, once a grand and imposing Victorian, and wept. What had I done? Whatever had possessed me to move west? Over the next few months, I reread Wilder, and as I lingered in South Dakota, her books— and the prairie— worked their magic. I began to understand the subtle beauty of the plains and learned to read the sky to see what each day would bring.

Wilder With A Capital W
More importantly, Wilder taught me that the real power and beauty of language reveal themselves through simplicity. What could be more perfect than this?

The farther they went into the west, the smaller they seemed, and the less they seemed to be going anywhere. The wind blew the grass always with the same endless rippling, the horses’ feet and the wheels going over the grass made always the same sound. The jiggling of the board seat was always the same jiggling. Laura thought they might go on forever, yet always be in the same changeless place, that would not even know they were there.

For me, Wilder became more than a revered children’s book writer, she became a Writer— with a capital W — and I began to realize that writing for children demanded as much artistry, perhaps even more, than writing for adults. 3

From 1978 until 1981, I wrote about Wilder often for South Dakota tourism. She was one of several writers I profiled in a press release about South Dakota novelists and poets. The “Little Town on the Prairie” pageant in DeSmet merited an annual press release, and when the town celebrated its Centennial in 1980, I wrote a feature on Wilder and her little town on the prairie. There I interviewed her old family friend Aubrey Sherwood and Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society veteran Vivian Glover. When I left South Dakota in 1982, I packed up a big box of Wilder interview notes and research materials. In the years that followed, that box on Wilder moved with me from Kansas to Colorado and on to Oregon. I reread her books often, and with more frequency after my first novel for young readers was published in 1996. When I began teaching creative writing classes at Washington State University in Vancouver, I quoted from Wilder’s work often, sometimes to the surprise of my students, who expected more esoteric (and adult) examples of great literary fiction. But as author Madeleine L’Engle writes, “The techniques of fiction are the techniques of fiction. They hold as true for Beatrix Potter as they do for Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Characterization, style, theme, are as important in a children’s book as in a novel for grownups.... But if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.” Alas, I explained to my students, not all bestselling adult books are good enough for children. Adult fiction doesn’t always exhibit mature, thoughtful, or inspired writing. 4

Parallel Paths
In 2001, I again reread all of Wilder’s work closely, as part of a Web history project for the South Dakota Department of Education and Cultural Affairs. And I came to think that geographically, at least, I’ve lived Wilder’s life in reverse— starting in Missouri, then moving on to South Dakota, and finally ending up where Pa always wanted to be— in Oregon. I can’t move farther west.

But there are other parallels. Like Wilder, I met my husband in South Dakota, and like Almanzo was to Wilder, my husband was ten years older than me. Just a few days separated our birthdays, so we celebrated them together, as Wilder and Almanzo did. Our only daughter was born in South Dakota. I started my career as a journalist— like Wilder, for a Missouri newspaper— and published my first novel relatively late— at forty-two. The book was set in South Dakota.

My research for Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life led me to another interesting detail. In On The Way Home, Wilder reports that Almanzo (she called him Manly) and Mr. Cooley explored a cave at Jones Spring, just five miles east of Springfield, on August 28, 1894. My parents’ home is six miles east of Springfield, and though I’d heard of Jones Spring, I couldn’t place it. But my dad knew exactly where it was— about a quarter of mile from the spot where my great-grandfather ran a general store from 1907 until 1965. The Wilders had probably crossed Pearson Creek (“Pierson’s Creek” in On The Way Home) about a mile south of there; as a kid, I’d crossed at that same spot countless times— on the school bus and on frequent visits to my great-grandfather’s store, something I wish that I’d known back in 1965, when these lines from These Happy Golden Years sent shivers up and down my spine:

“‘Gather ye roses while ye may,’” Mary began, and she quoted the poem for Laura. Then as they walked on together in the rose-scented warm wind, she talked of her studies in literature. “I am planning to write a book some day,” she confided. Then she laughed. “But I planned to teach school, and you are doing that for me, so maybe you will write the book.” “I, write a book?” Laura hooted. She said blithely, “I’m going to be an old maid schoolteacher, like Miss Wilder. Write your own book!”

As an eleven-year-old, I didn’t question the reality of this scene, as I’d questioned so much of The Long Winter. It rang absolutely true to me. Clearly, Mrs. Wilder had been fated to write a book. Lots of books. Did a similar fate await me? Would a white-hot circle of light— like the one in my Bible story book, like the one I’d envisioned in Mrs. Wilder’s kitchen— surround me? Would a divine voice dictate my book to me word for word? How and when would I know? Not soon enough.... 5

Of course, I long ago abandoned the idea of Divine Dictation. “Leaving the hard work up to Inspiration,” children’s book writer Eloise Jarvis McGraw once said, “is the way to go unpublished.” Writers with a Capital W don’t write graceful, effortless prose without a great deal of effort. Nor do most writers work in isolation. Usually they collaborate with editors who help them find the heart and voice and soul of their books. That’s how I’ve worked on my novels; it’s how most of the writers I know work on theirs. When I was asked to write Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life, I feared that I’d have nothing new to say. Then I read the correspondence between Wilder and Rose. It revealed the normal give and take (which is sometimes painful) between a writer and her editor. Here was an example of the juicy but everyday communication that continues to define the editorial process of publishing children’s books. So I had a story to tell, after all. 6

A story that began for me on May 29, 1965.

notes

1. Laura Ingalls Wilder, April 10, 1939, Box 13, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.

2. Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Hard Winter (New York: Harper Trophy, 1971), p. 123.

3. Laura Ingalls Wilder, By The Shores of Silver Lake (New York: Harper Trophy, 1971), p. 59.

4. Madeleine L’Engle, “The Techniques of Fiction,” Herself (New York: Shaw Books, 2001), p. 176.

5. Laura Ingalls Wilder, On The Way Home (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 67-68; Laura Ingalls Wilder, These Happy Golden Years (New York: Harper Trophy, 1971), p. 135-136.

6. Eloise Jarvis McGraw, “Welcome to the Club,” in unpublished manuscript (author’s copy), p. 8.