Last weekend I paid a genius to redirect Poundy.com to WendyMcClure.net and merge the RSS feeds, and it appears to have worked beautifully. However, if you read the site through something like Google Reader, you may have noticed a few older entries showing up as new posts. Just in case you were wondering how on earth I could be going to LauraPalooza AGAIN.
More soon.
I am back from my grand tour of midwestern hotels: one night in St. Paul for a bookseller trade show (MBA!), two nights in Grand Forks for a children’s book conference, then the following weekend a night in Dearborn for another bookseller trade show (GLIBA!). It is a very small-time kind of jet-setting: short little flights where the flight attendant puts a beverage in your hand and then two seconds later takes it away because the plane’s landing. I both love and hate that.
All for books—for these two jobs in my life that involve bookselling. Because even if your job is to write books, or edit books, or buy other people’s books to edit (I do that, too), at some point or another you have to Sell Books by talking about them to complete strangers and somehow you have to do it without coming off like some kind of feverish Mary Kay lady with a big pink case full of crazy. Though when it comes to this new book I already sound insane just from talking about my butter churns,* which lets me off the sanity hook and thus gives me sort of an advantage.
(*Yes, churns with an s, as in PLURAL churns, because I recently bought another one with the vague idea that when the book comes out next spring I would have a little mini travel churn and put on some kind of jolly one-woman pioneer dairy show. Except I misjudged the size of the new one from the auction listing, and it turns out it’s pretty huge. I mean, not massive, but too big to hide and too ugly to pass as shabby chic. Crap! I need to stay the hell off eBay if I don’t want the apartment to turn into Cracker Barrel.)
Anyway, the trips were good, and I’m told I didn’t sound too kooky, and other authors talked about their books, and they sounded perfectly normal, which gives me hope that even with my churn-hoard I might come off okay. I met the guy with the amazing-sounding inter-generational fire memoir and the girl with the werewolf YA novel that’s getting a lot of buzz (or growls?) and the Not That Kind of Girl girl (whose book I am DYING to read) and also this woman who I realized I’ve been following on Twitter for months, and you’re clicking on all these links, right?
Now it’s good to be home. And finally the weather is Octoberlike and not that creepy slow-bake psuedo-summer business. It took only a few short weeks from the end of reasonable sandal weather (early September) for my pedicure to completely devolve and my feet to shift to winter mode and become sad gnarled Shetland-pony-hoof appendages, so when the weather makes everyone break out the flip-flops again this late in the season, I highly resent it. Now everything is cool and crisp and soon I will be swaddled in a safe cocoon of knits from which I’ll occasionally stick out a bare hand just to grab a mug of hot cider, and all will be well.
You know, as long as I am talking about seasons: now that the book is finished, I have some time to blog again (and eventually the poundy.com blog and feed will be redirected to wendymcclure.net, so I’ll be blogging in one place). But The Wilder Life doesn’t come out for another five months. While it’s a big part of my life, I’ll have plenty of opportunity to talk about it in the new year, so until then, this blog doesn’t have to be—and perhaps shouldn’t be—All Little House Shenanigans, All The Time. (Though before the fall is over I really ought to post about the green pumpkin pie I baked a few weeks ago, just like Ma in The Long Winter). But in the meantime, I’m curious to know what you’d like to read about on this site. Should I write about the writing life, exploring my weird little interests, the sadness of hotel rooms, what?
But I should add that I haven’t really been compelled to write about fat and body image these days. Maybe it’s just the years passing, but the things that used to get me worked up just don’t anymore, and I’m afraid that with work and writing I haven’t been keeping up with the new stuff, which means I don’t know that TV one show with the fat people, or that other show with the other fat people, or that thing that Beth Ditto did that was cool. This is not to say that I’m “done” with the subject, but if there are peaks and valleys, I’m definitely in a valley. It’s like with Chris and metal. He doesn’t feel the need to keep up with the latest Iron Maiden or Electric Wizard or Bone Awl like he used to, though he’ll still promise to check out a new album if someone else tells him it totally rules hell.
Look, I even a made a tacky web poll where you can vote! I’m just curious.
Finally, a reminder: next Friday night—Jen Lancaster! Claire Zulkey! Stacey Ballis! Me! At the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square, being Witty Women Writers wittingly weading our work! Come say hello.
The wind blows like crazy against my office window whenever the seasons are in transition or the temperature changes quickly. Wind Of Change, why must you be so literal as you rattle the stupid windows?
But I guess there is a corresponding truth, because stuff is starting to happen, especially with the book. For the past twenty months The Wilder Life’s life has progressed at the glacial pace of my writing, so it’s a little stunning to have things going so quickly now over the past few weeks: copyedits, design, page proofs, the metadata going out into the universe and getting sucked up into the pneumatic tubes of all the retail websites. And even though I spend every day at work bringing books into existence, this whole process still feels mystifying from the other end. Like I’ve found myself looking at the line on the Amazon page that says “Shipping Weight: 1 pounds” and wonder how anyone could know that at this point. Even when I know perfectly well how it’s possible, because I know there are production managers and purchase orders and specs and templates and cartons and I have to sit in meetings about this stuff every day, but never mind, it’s still sort of magic when it’s your book.
So now there it is—the book writing part was so huge and lonely, it’s hard to get used to the way things are now, with the book stuff just bubbling along on its own in one corner of my life. Between now and the pub date in April things will be intermittently frenzied: for two weekends in October I’ll be flying out to bookseller trade shows where I’ll meet a whole lot of indie bookstore folks at these speed-date-type dinner events. I still can’t believe that I get to think about other things.
Such as: remember how Chris and I decided that in exchange for his accompanying me to LauraPalooza I would go with him to see all the movies in the Cremaster Cycle? I mean I knew I would do it, but I guess I was counting on being able to make a funny-cute joke about the whole thing for a while before the films showed up at an art house somewhere. But ha, only six weeks after our return from Mankato, there they were at the Music Box! It turns out it’s really hard to casually describe the Cremaster films to people. You tell them that it’s an eight-hour conceptual epic made by Björk’s husband, and it’s about Masons and Mormons and Houdini and the Chrysler Building and bees, and that it has Norman Mailer and opera and the drummer from Slayer and a lot of things made from Vaseline in it, but when you get started trying to explain nobody really wants to meet you halfway. But for three nights straight we went to the theater, and it was fun (in its way). It was also by far the least Laura-Ingalls-Wilder thing I’ve ever done.
But you probably want to see another picture of me with a Little House on the Prairie TV show cast member, don’t you? Well, here you go:
That is none other than Alison Arngrim, aka NELLIE OLESON!!!, who did her one-woman show, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, at Davenport’s last weekend. And if it wasn’t obvious from this review I wrote, I thought her book was great even by non-celebrity-memoir standards. Her show was full of anecdotes about playing Nellie but also about growing up in Hollywood in the 60s and 70s. The audience was invited to write questions on index cards for her to answer at the end, and SOMEONE, I’m not saying who, asked her if the guy who played Doc Baker was as sexy in real life as he was on the small screen. (Answer: yes, but apparently a lot more people are still hot for Albert after all these years.) Anyway, If she comes to LauraPalooza 2012 they’ll really need to leave room in the schedule for her to discuss things like Dance Fever and Eartha Kitt. Also, she was very cool in person, and I hope that after all those camera flashes she didn’t wind up like Mary Ingalls.
While I do not have awesome stories about Deney Terrio, I will nonetheless be reading funny stuff here in Chicago next week, at Funny Ha-Ha at the Hideout on the 28th, and next month, at Witty Women Writers at the Book Cellar on October 29th. I’ll probably be trying out some stuff from the book, but hey, if you have any requests, let me know. (As long as you come to the show, too.)
Happy first day of fall! When will it be corduroy weather? Come on!
(cross-posted at wendymcclure.net, just to be redundant.)
We went to LauraPalooza last week. Yes, it was really called “LauraPalooza”: the first-ever combined academic conference/fan fair/geekcon devoted to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and YES, it was all that and a bag of cracklings.
Last Wednesday Chris and I drove up to Minnesota State University in Mankato, MN, a town that has no real historical significance to the Little House books, though I understand that on the TV Little House on the Prairie, Mankato was where various characters went whenever they had a tragic illness. But what was our sickness? LOVING LAURA INGALLS WILDER. And we were not there to be cured, nor were the other 150+ folks who showed up for this thing.
The night before the official conference kick-off we attended an ice-cream social, where we met a great many of the Laurarati (I like that term better than “bonnetheads”), including a few folks in costume. I had a great time talking to Melanie (above), and somewhere on Facebook there’s a photo of her downing a beer on Friday night in her poke bonnet, and I am very very sad not to have seen that in person.
My friend Shae, who I’d met about fifty-seven internet years ago at something called “JournalCon” in 2001 (and hadn’t seen since) had decided to attend, and she in turn had just met Eleanor, and from that first night on it was clear that they were going to be our conference buddies.
I also got to see my friend Sandra again (who runs The Homesteader and Beyond Little House) and FINALLY meet Erin Blakemore, whose book, The Heroine’s Bookshelf, is coming out in October. The three of us were doing a panel on Saturday called “Loving Laura in a Lindsay Lohan World,” and I’m proud to say we thought that up months before the whole Lindsay prison thing.
As early as the very first night, people were willing to give Chris the Boyfriend of the Year Award just for attending LauraPalooza with me, but he shrugged it off, because that’s just the kind of guy he is. (Although it’s true that in exchange, I’ve agreed to watch The Cremaster Cycle in its entirety with him.)
That night we ALSO got to see Dean Butler, who played ALMANZO on the TV show, and who is now making documentaries about the real-life Wilders, and he was at LauraPalooza to show his new Laura video, and… and okay, let me just get this photo out of the way, because OMG ALMANZO:
(Did you know that he was also the guy in the movie adapation of Judy Blume’s Forever? I just found this out from Sandra! If it turns out he also had a part in a movie based on a VC Andrews novel my head will explode.)
On Thursday morning the conference began in earnest, with presentations ranging from academic papers to creative writing (Kelly Kathleen Ferguson’s amazing book chapter!) to a lecture by a high school physics teacher about how he figured out that Almanzo and Cap Garland could only have traveled about eight miles during the seed wheat trip in The Long Winter, based on calculations of average sled speed and load weight and snow friction and angle of drag, and how he used this data to find the homestead of the guy who sold them the wheat. NO, REALLY. Jim Hicks, who gave that talk, needs to have his own Discovery Channel show about solving literary and historical mysteries with science.
But the more scholarly stuff was great, too. I was really impressed with Jenna Hunnef’s paper on homestead claims and Michelle McClellan’s talk on the meaning of place in the Little House homesites. I also met Pamela Smith Hill and John Miller, two of my favorite Laura biographers, and loved the talks that they gave. I learned about the political strategies behind the Homestead Act, the weather anomalies of the Hard Winter of 1880-81, and the theory that Almanzo Wilder may have had polio instead of diphtheria! There was so much information that by the end of the first day we were exhausted.
On the second day, LauraPalooza attendees had the option of visiting the Betsy-Tacy houses in Mankato and seeing where the Betsy-Tacy books took place. (Note: Betsy-Tacy fans are HARDCORE. There are tons of casual Little House fans in the world, but the moment you pick up a Betsy-Tacy book for the first time, a secret alert goes out to Betsy-Tacy fans everywhere and they send a representative to fly out to your house on a pink feather to recruit you. I’ve only read three books so far but they are great.) When we got to the houses there was a Maud Hart Lovelace impersonator ready to show us around.
She had the best handbag ever.
It was actually a little surreal walking around with her as she showed us Tib’s house and the bench on the hill and all the other spots from the books, because she wasn’t projecting her voice the way a tour guide would, but instead spoke softly and gently as she recounted the storylines of various Betsy-Tacy books as if they were her own Maud Hart Lovelace memories. The thing about the younger Betsy-Tacy books, though (and this is why I love them so far), is that the plots sound really bizarre when you try to describe them, and after awhile I found myself thinking that maybe we weren’t on the tour at all but were just coincidentally following a woman who truly believed she was Maud Hart Lovelace and was deep in the throes of a lovely delusion. Anyway, we enjoyed that.
Back at the conference, there was more awesomeness, including Kay Weisman’s presentation on the artwork in Little House in the Big Woods and a great feminist paper by Emily Woster about Little House on the Prairie. We also saw a video interview with an Osage man who posits that the Osage in LHOP wore fresh skunk pelts as a joke on the white settlers, sort of like a 19th-century Punk’d stunt. Gives you something to think about!
On Friday night, Dean Butler screened Little House on the Prairie: The Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which I will tell you all to buy as soon as he gets a distributor. Until then, you will just have to be jealous of me for getting to see Little House on the Prairie: The Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which stars a real sixteen-year-old as Laura and was filmed in part in De Smet, SD.
My panel was the last one of the conference, and I’m glad, because while Sandra and Erin and I talked about our own experiences as fans of the Little House books, we wanted people to share their stories, too, and people started to stand up and talk about how they came to love the books. One woman had had to leave for a few minutes to compose herself when we’d started talking about our families, then she came back in and stood up and spoke so movingly about how the Ingalls family helped her survive her own childhood that I looked for her afterwards but couldn’t find her (and if she’s reading, I hope she writes me).
And then it was over! Or almost: the conference ended with a lunch, a spelling bee (SPELLING BEE!) and an optional field trip to Walnut Grove (where On the Banks of Plum Creek was set). Chris and I needed to make it to Iowa City that night, and since the weather reports were warning of storms and tornado conditions in the late afternoon, we decided it was best to skip lunch and head out to to Walnut Grove early. We wound up eating hot dogs and Hmong sesame balls at the Walnut Grove family festival.
We’d been at this very same festival last year, but back then we’d had to drive out to South Dakota and missed the judging of the Laura-Nellie lookalike contest. This year, though, we managed to come back almost where we left off and catch the judging of the Nellie contest. There were only 10 Nellies to 34 Lauras, which I’ve learned is the typical ratio every year. Alas, ringlets are hard to pull off, especially in summer humidity. But you have to love these girls:
Over at the Walnut Grove museum, more LauraPalooza attendees had started to show up, and from my friend Sue I found out that Erin Blakemore had won the spelling bee, which is so befitting a heroine! We got to finally talk to Amy Lauters, the MSU professor who organized LauraPalooza in the first place and who was signing copies of her book about Rose at the museum store. She was at a table with John Miller and also William Anderson, who was the only Laura biographer that I hadn’t met yet. If the Laura Ingalls Wilder community has a rock star, it’s Anderson, who has written more than a dozen books and probably knows more about the Ingalls and the Wilders and the home sites than any other living human being. And he was very nice and funny and gracious and took one of my Wilder Life postcards.
By now the heat index was well over 100 degrees, and the air conditioning could barely keep up in the busy museum store (where Nicole from the museum was kind enough to let me leave a batch of postcards). We had only the dugout site at Plum Creek left to visit before we hit the road, and I worried that it would be as hot and crowded as everything else in town. But we went anyway, and somehow the place it was even more gorgeous than it had been the year before. It was quiet and breezy: it was the same Laura World that I remembered.
I got my feet wet once again, wandered the prairie a little, and then we got back in the car and headed back east on 14.
* Â Â * Â Â *
Thanks so much to everyone we met at LauraPalooza for being so kind and friendly (and if I didn’t get a chance to meet you, feel free to drop me a line). I have to confess that sometimes the thought of coming to this terrified me—I didn’t know what to expect, showing up with my blue postcards for this book of mine that I hope will be good enough, meeting over a hundred people who all have a stake in this world I’ve come to know and love. But it was everything I hoped it would be.
(cross-posted on wendymcclure.net)
for more about the book, which is now beginning its journey to publication in April 2011.
(I no longer need for you to email me and share your Laura memories, per the blog post below from a year ago. I mean I don’t need them to go in the book, but of course if you want to share, I will not mind one bit if you write me.)
In the meantime, I am heading out west yet again tomorrow for the first-ever LauraPalooza festival/conference/geekout. See you in a bit!
This life coach/therapist I was seeing for a while this past year insisted I stop saying that doing certain things was HARD, since it’s supposed to be actually harder when you think of stuff as hard, and easier when you think of it as easy. I have found this to be mostly true.
Yet I am feeling lately that revising this book is seriously NOT EASY, even though I know it is not as hard not-easy as completing the first draft, all three-hundred-something pages of it, which I did at the end of February one night when I stayed up really, really late. Remember that? And then I woke up Chris to tell him I was done? And then I had some wine? That was awesome. But everything up to that point was not easy.
And then after I sent it off I had other uneasy things to do, like my taxes (then again, I have an accountant to do the seriously hard stuff, and I can call that hard if I’m not even remotely qualified to do it, right? Also, I deducted a butter churn. No, really.), traveling to Italy for work (of course I will not complain about the Italy part, but the physical travel part isn’t exactly a breeze. Look at that soulless airport corridor! And on the flight I had to watch New Moon!), and doing a 5K (which, okay, transcends the hard/easy spectrum on account of being so painful yet hilarious yet pathetic yet triumphant). So I don’t know why revising the book is harder—excuse me, “harder”—than other stuff I’ve done lately. But I will try to break it down for you:
On the bright side, we have a final official title and subtitle, which is The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie. We also have a cover draft (which I can’t show you yet, but it’s very pretty) and a tentative publication date for next spring. I know that sounds like forever in human time, but in publisher marketing time it’s about half an hour, and a jam-packed half-hour at that.
I’ll try to be back here again before summer starts, but for now, I have to get back to this:
(Bonus: click on the photo to read about my helpful/dorky flag system. This is when I first started; there are fewer flags now.)
Have a good weekend!
