Lifescapes

In Bloom This Week: CrossVine

The crossvine (it looks like trumpet because they're cousins) is blooming against the house on this beautiful spring day, and the trees and grasses are celebrating the half-inch of rain we got last night, accompanied by a great deal of lightning and thunder. The volume on our weather radio has gone bonkers and we can't turn the darn thing down, so last night's frequent warnings definitely woke us up. I ordered a new radio this morning.

Lots of garden news. Our TX temps are breaking records again this year (listen up, you climate-change deniers). We've already hit 90, twice, while it was still "winter."The peas are up, the potatoes are flourishing, the tomatoes are in--oh, dear, the tomatoes. I transplanted 24 them on Sunday but forgot to water them on Monday, so I lost two. Lost two more to cutworms last night, which leaves 20. I installed cardboard collars are the tomatoes this afternoon, to foil any other cutworms--and caught and squashed the two murderers. Yuck. We've been eating spinach, chard, kale, and onions from the garden.

And eggs from the girls. Five of our six hens are laying regularly, so we're enjoying fresh eggs, with enough to give to friends. While my son Bob was here, he repaired and dog-proofed the chicken coop, so the girls are living in luxury--and security. I've been letting them out in the evening for an hour, keeping an eye out for marauding dogs.

From the writing desk. Ah yes, the writing. Lots of it. Yesterday, I finished Death Come Quickly, China #22 (the 2014 book) and sent it off to New York. Every time I do this, I remember the old days, printing 300+ pages of a book x 2, packaging it up, shipping via Fed Ex (expensive even then!). I'm more than happy to hit "send" and zip the book into my editor's computer. How's that for magic? You don't catch me being nostalgic about the "good old days."

The other project--A Wilder Rose and the Reader's Companion that goes with it--is almost finished. The book itself is being copyedited, and several beta readers are working on it, as well (many thanks to Nancy, Laura, and Susan!). The Companion turned into a bigger job than I imagined and isn't quite done yet. This is a self-published project, so there's a lot of extra learning and work that's going into it, from the publishing end of things. I've been meaning to write a post about that. Now that China's done, I'll have a little more time. For a few days, anyway. I'm expecting the copyedited manuscript of the next Dahlias mystery, The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star, sometime in the next ten days.

So life at Meadow Knoll is busy, and good, with spring in full bloom. Hope spring is coming to your neighborhood very soon!

Reading note. “Whatever you may have heard, self-publishing is not a short cut to anything. Except maybe insanity. Self-publishing, like every other kind of publishing, is hard work. You don’t wake up one morning good at it. You have to work for that.”--Zoe Winters

 

Researching A Wilder Rose

I've often thought that writers and readers of historical novels have the best of both worlds. Historical fiction, when it's done well, gives us a deep view of historical events and people--not a deep, dry view, as in a history book, but a lively dramatic view that draws us in, makes us want to explore further.

I've been writing historical novels for twenty years, beginning with the Robin Paige mysteries that Bill and I wrote from 1993-2005, then my Beatrix Potter Cottage Tales series (2003-2011), and more recently, the Darling Dahlias. Several of the China Bayles mysteries have historical backstories, as well: Bloodroot, Wormwood, and Widow's Tears, for example. If you're guessing that I love to dig around in the past, you've guessed right.

It might be that my love of historical fiction began with the Little House series, which I read to tatters when I was a child. And then, in the 1980s, as an adult, I bumped into The First Four Years, a short novel set after These Happy Golden Years. I was surprised and dismayed: the book was not the same as the eight books in the series.The story was clumsy, the writing was clunky. What had happened to my favorite author to make her write as if she'd never written a book before?

I began searching for a possible explanation. I discovered that Laura's daughter was a well-known bestselling author in the 1920s and 30s: Rose Wilder Lane, named for the wild roses on the Dakota prairies. Suspicions aroused (did Rose give her mother a hand with those first eight books, but not with the ninth?), I began to dig. My explorations took me to Rocky Ridge Farm, then to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, where I found Rose's diaries, journals, and letters--and Laura's letters to her, as well.

I also began to read the work of scholars who were writing about the Little House books, particularly Rosa Ann Moore and William Anderson. About that time (1993) William Holtz published The Ghost in the Little House, and I could see the writing of the Little House books in the Depression-era context of Rose's and Laura's lives. I went back to the Hoover Library for more of Rose's unpublished work, and began a concentrated search through the primary materials Holtz had used for his biography.

But in those years, I was just getting started with the China Bayles series, and then Bill suggested that we write the Robin Paige mysteries, which led to the Beatrix Potter series, and . . . well, you get the picture. It wasn't until I had finished with the eight Cottage Tales that I had the time to go back to my boxes and stacks and shelves of Rose Wilder Lane (RWL) materials, and especially to her diaries and journals--and start thinking about the kind of book I might like to write. A scholarly, academic book? A narrative nonfiction for a general audience? After trying out several approaches, I finally decided to write a novel. I have, after all, been writing novels for nearly three decades now. An easy decision, right?

Maybe. But it would have to be a fact-based novel--tightly fact-based. All of us who grew up loving the Little Houses deserve to know the real story behind the books. And I do mean real: a story that details the way the books were actually written, based on the real, day-to-day record that Rose kept, as well as on the letters her mother wrote when they were working on Plum Creek and Silver Lake. I want readers to see and understand why the two women kept their collaboration a secret and how the books changed both their lives, in the short run and the long run.

The novel is nearly finished now, and will be published in October (the current plan). To satisfy those readers (like myself) who always want to know more, there will also be a Companion, which documents the fiction and connects it with the research: the facts, references, and sources (published and unpublished) from which I've created the story. I hope that both the novel and the Companion will help readers see through the long-standing myth that Laura wrote the books by herself, with just a little editorial touch-up and some promotional boosts from her daughter Rose. That literary legend does a disservice to Rose, who deserves credit for her real contributions to the Little House books. It also does a disservice to Laura, who deserves to be known and respected for the brave, resourceful woman she was, not the literary miracle we imagine her to be. And I believe it does a disservice to us as readers, for we deserve to know the real, collaborative story behind the books we love: how they were written, and why, and by whom.

Reading Note. It rains. Slowly and moistly and indefatigibly. Little crystal drops are strung all along the wet-dark branches of the walnut and the elm outside these windows . . . The trees remain obstinately bare and uncolored all up the flint-gray slope of the hill, but the old oak on the edge of the gorge is creamy with blossoms. Yesterday afternoon Troub [Helen Boylston] and I walked to the top of the hill, and saw on the southern slope the blue of violets, like a reflection of the sky in water. We gathered two handkerchiefs full, and they are now a great mass in a bowl on my table. I do so wish that I could send you some, for it seems to me there are no violets like those that grow on Rocky Ridge.--RWL to Guy Moyston, April 8, 1925.

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A Wilder Rose

A Little Rose

A Little Rose

A little Rose, just past her second birthday, already a girl who knows her own mind.

We know a few facts about the early life of Rose Wilder Lane. We know that she was born on Dec. 5, 1886, in a claim shanty outside the town of De Smet, in Dakota Territory. Her parents were 19-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder and 29-year-old Almanzo Wilder. Rose would be their only child; a son born in 1889 did not survive. After family illness, crop failures, and a house fire, the bank took the claim and the Wilders moved in with Laura's parents in De Smet, then with Almanzo's parents in Spring Valley MN. In 1890, they movedto Westville FL, hoping that the warm climate would improve Almanzo's health. But they were Plains people, and the Florida heat and humidity proved uncomfortable, so in 1892 they took the train back to De Smet, where Laura worked as a dressmaker and Almanzo did odd jobs around town. By 1894, they had saved $100--enough, they hoped, to buy a farm in the "Land of the Big Red Apple," in southwestern Missouri, near Mansfield the "Gem City of the Ozarks." They moved there in 1894. Just seven years old, Rose was already a well-traveled child, and travel would be in her blood until the end of her days.

Those are facts. The rest of what we know about Rose's childhood comes from her--and since she was a consummate storyteller, the stories are embellished. But that's what makes a good story, isn't it? Take, for instance, the story she tells about the unsmiling and determined little girl in the calico dress, crocheted collar, and tatted cuffs who is pictured above. In the foreword to her mother's diary of the trip from De Smet to Mansfield (On the Way Home), she writes:

"I was 2 years 4 months when this picture was taken in April, 1889. I remember the picture-taking well, was impressed by the photographer’s stupid pretense that there was a little bird in the camera. The photographer also kept putting my right hand on top of the left, and I kept changing them back because I wanted my carnelian ring to show. And in the end I won out."

Rose had a remarkable memory, an even more remarkable gift for story, and a way of enlarging personal experience that made it memorable and special. You can read more about her early childhood in On the Way Home and in several pieces collected in The Little House Sampler: "Rose Wilder Lane, by Herself"; "Memories of Grandma's House"; and "Innocence," a darkly compelling short story based on the Wilders' time in the piney woods of the Florida Panhandle. "Innocence" won second prize in the O'Henry Awards for 1922--and it wasn't the only O'Henry Prize Rose would win in her writing career.

 

Reading note, from Rose's foreword to On The Way Home, p. 12, describing the Wilders' going-away from De Smet in 1894: "Away from Grandma's house with its rag-carpets and rocking-chair, the hymn books on the organ, my very own footstool; away from the chalky schoolroom where angelic Miss Barrows taught Kindergarten, Primer, First and Second Readers; away from the summer sidewalks where grasshoppers hopped in the dry grass and the silver-lined poplar leaves rattled overhead; away from the gaunt gray empty house, and from Mrs. Sherwood and her sister who sometimes on sweltering afternoons asked me to fech ten cents' worth of icecre am from the far-away icecream parlor, and shared it with me; away from De Smet to The Land of the Big Red Apple."

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