Category — The Wilder Life

Two things I need for you to do:

1.) If you dug The Wilder Life and are on Goodreads (or would like to be on Goodreads), you have until Sunday the 20th to vote for it in the first rounds of the Goodreads Choice Awards, where it is a nominee in the Memoir/Autobiography category. I don’t think I actually win anything and I know having to choose between me and Nikki Sixx puts you in a tough spot, but I hope you’ll vote this week.

2.) My last book-related event of 2011 (out of nearly twenty!) will be a benefit for Literacy Works Chicago on Monday, December 5th, at the Hopleaf. We’re going for a Little House Christmas (for grown-ups) theme, and it’ll be much more festive than a book-signing. If you’re in Chicago, this is a great opportunity to hang out in that upstairs room at the Hopleaf for a good cause. So, come if you can! (Downloadable PDF with all the info here.)

Five things I’ve been doing since my last blog entry:

1.) Reading your young adult novel manuscript: Well, maybe not YOUR young adult novel manuscript, but there are a lot of people out there whose agents have sent me YA manuscripts, and I’m reading the hell out of them. (The rest of you ought to be working on YAnovel manuscripts this month, right?)

2.) Getting hitched. See below:

Yeah, that was fun. The September weather was perfect, and my brooch bouquet did not fall apart, though it weighed a ton (and no, I did not toss it). Every day, for nearly two months now, I consider two incontrovertible facts: First, that the wedding was wonderful and it went far beyond our expectations and second, we do not have to plan it anymore. Chris and I are SO FREAKING GLAD.

3.) Traveling for the next three weekends after the wedding and subsequently recovering from all the travel. What were we thinking? Although one of the weekends was a stay at a Lake Geneva resort, where about sixteen other weddings were taking place on the grounds around us and it happily reminded us that WE WERE DONE WITH OUR WEDDING and could sit around in comfy clothes reading novels (published ones, not manuscripts).

4.) Writing an adventure story for This American Life. Hot zig! I have always wanted to be a contributor and I got the chance to do it last month. The episode is here, and my piece is in Act Two. (My piece was inspired by children’s time-travel stories, like this insane serial in a 1960s Boys’ Life magazine.)

5.) Preparing for winter: I keep hearing that the coming season is going to be a massive snowmageddon winterpocalypse of coldastrophic proportions. There aren’t any muskrat houses in my neighborhood that I can check, but I suspect that the regular, non-musk rats around here are scurrying more and building bigger garbage nests in anticipation. At any rate, I’m getting kind of excited/paranoid and wanting to TAKE ACTION about this. I’ve replaced the tires and battery on the car (okay, which I needed to do anyway, but I feel better and even a little righteous about spending the money, knowing that the car will be in much better shape to face the coming of the SnowAntiChrist), bought a new parka, and am looking for new snow boots (recommendations, please!), and racking my brain for more things Chris and I can do or buy to give us the smug satisfaction of being ready when the time comes and the Evil Snow Empire descends. Shouldn’t we get batteries? Candles? DVDs of stylish 50s melodramas? Yes, yes, and yes.

1968: According to the caption in our family photo album, this is OUR HOMESTEAD. Not long after they got married (and before I was born), my parents bought a parcel of land near Belen, New Mexico (south of  Albuquerque, where they met). They bought it at as an investment, with maybe the vague idea that they’d build on it some day if it was worth something.

(Note that the mountain is not included.)

Of course, when I was a kid in Chicago I always imagined that we’d wind up here and build a shanty or something. My parents did end up moving back to New Mexico in 2006, but they bought a place with running water and electricity and a hot tub in the backyard, because they’re no fun at all.

Apparently my dad still owns the land, and it still looks exactly like this.

1979: Our very own Long Winter in Oak Park, Illinois. I’m pretty sure the Blizzard of ’79 coincided with my Little House reading years. The snow in Chicago was so heavy that garage roofs began to collapse around the city.  One night my dad had to go out on the roof of the front porch and shovel off those snowdrifts—a feat that seemed at least as thrillingly treacherous as Cap and Almanzo’s seed wheat rescue.

I remember being disappointed that I couldn’t look out my bedroom window and see the snow at eye level the way Laura could.

1980 (?): You may have already read about how I was in a community theater production of A Christmas Carol and got to wear a bonnet. And a long dress. And a crocheted shawl.

This was pretty much the high point of my life, I think.

1981 (?): Here I am at my own version of Plum Creek, at a campground west of Chicago that we’d visit two or three times a year, mostly on holiday weekends. I fished (badly), waded, caught crayfish (or at least watched people catch them), and tragically lost swim toys to the current. If I could have done all of it while wearing a calico dress, I would have.

I also tried my damnedest to grow my hair long enough to braid.  You might have been able to wrench a couple of pathetic pigtails out of that mess, but just barely. That’s the longest I’ve ever been able to grow it.

2009: But who needs good hair when you have a BONNET? I bought at this one the Little House on the Prairie Museum in Kansas and preened in the mirror of my motel room in Springfield, Missouri. The first of many bonnets I would buy, and many, many more dorky photos.

Speaking of pictures, I’m in the process of putting up more photos of my Little House trips and shenanigans on The Wilder Life’s Flickr page as well as the Facebook page, so stay tuned.

Also! Book review blogger extraordinaire The Girl from the Ghetto has posted a truly EPIC review and giveaway of The Wilder Life today, so if you want another chance to win a copy of the book before it officially launches a week from Thursday, GO ENTER.

With the book release coming up, it seemed like a good time to have a site makeover, so welcome to WendyMcClure.net, Pretty Prairie Edition! If you’re reading this through a feed reader you’ll have to click over to the site to see, and if you’re already here, made yourself at home.

The site’s new finery is the handiwork of Jennette, who has been promoting her own new book Chocolate & Vicodin this winter (PLEASE view the exceedingly-cute-despite-the-depressing-subject book trailer on that page, by the way), and who knows how jittery the book pre-launch experience can be. I’m not twitching that much right now, but of course there’s 18 more days left to freak out.

A few of you have asked if it makes a difference where or how you buy the book. I’ll just say that any new purchase or pre-order of the hardcover or ebook will directly support The Wilder Life, and whether you choose an indie bookseller, a chain store, or an online merchant is up to you. As long as you don’t buy an advanced reader copy on eBay (which is sort of illegal) or shoplift (definitely illegal), you will be doing fine by me (and avoiding jail & stuff).  That said, I have heard that early sales and pre-orders are important, so if you can buy early and buy often (Sorry, I know, I’m from Chicago), it will definitely help.

Other things you can do to support The Wilder Life right now… [Read more →]

A much more detailed event page is forthcoming on this site, but for now, here’s a quick list of all the confirmed The Wilder Life events for this spring:

April 14: CHICAGO: Barnes & Noble (Webster Place), 7:00 PM

April 16: KANSAS CITY: Johnson County Central Resource Library in Overland Park (with Rainy Day Books), 2:00 PM

April 18: ST. LOUIS: City Library, Schlafly Branch (with Pudd’nhead Books), 7:00 PM

April 19: IOWA CITY: Prairie Lights, 7:00 PM

April 20: MINNEAPOLIS: Magers & Quinn, 7:30 PM

April 21: CHICAGO: Book Cellar, 7:00 PM

April 29: CHICAGO/WINNETKA: The Bookstall, 6:30 PM

May 3: CHICAGO/NAPERVILLE: Anderson’s Bookshop, 7:00 PM

May 10: MADISON: Barnes & Noble (West Towne), 7:00 PM

May 17: BROOKLYN: Word, 7:30 PM

May 18: DURHAM: The Regulator Bookshop, 7:00 PM

June 11: ALBUQUERQUE: Bookworks, 3:00 PM

In addition to the event page on this site I’ll also have all these events posted on The Wilder Life’s Facebook page, where you can spread the word or RSVP for reminders.

There’s one part that’s really hard about announcing book event stuff, which is that for every place I’m headed, there are dozens of others that I can’t visit. I’m lucky that Riverhead could give me a few days of semi-glamorous Midwestern jet-setting in addition to the couple of trips that I’m making on my own dime, but it’s still just eight cities I’m visiting, which makes it awfully statistically likely that I’ll miss yours.

So when you say, “Come to Otisburg!” or “Can you please stop in Chocolate City?” my heart wrenches like a twisted towel, because of all the above events have been in the works for months and it’s usually not possible to spontaneously add Otisburg or Chocolate City or Bedford Falls or even Port Charles to the list, though I will definitely keep them in mind for next year when the paperback comes out. It is a sad fact that I am not a one-woman jam band and cannot tour the country for months and months, improvising long, noodling solos every night on my butter churn guitar.  That said, I hope that those of you who are in these cities will come out for a lovely night (or afternoon) of reading, book discussion, trivia (maybe!) and other Little House shenanigans yet to be determined.

(Photo courtesy of Travelpod.com)

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.

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.

*    *    *

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)