Lifescapes

Winter Working Vacation

I'm treating myself to a month of silence and solitude at our place in the New Mexico mountains. I'm leaving tomorrow--at least, that's the plan. I intended to leave last Friday, but that winter storm (now moving east) looked fierce, so I postponed. There's a stretch of Rt 84 that I have to drive in the dark. Daughter Robin drove it yesterday on her way from Santa Rosa (she was scuba diving at Blue Hole--would you believe?) to Colorado Springs, and told me that it hadn't been plowed yet. Also: that stretch has no cell phone coverage, so if I had trouble, it might be a long wait for help. Our neighbor says we got a foot of snow there last night, so the driveway has to be plowed.

I'll be working on two projects: Bittersweet, the 2015 China Bayles mystery; and a memoir that my brother John Webber and I are working on together, a collaborative memoir about our growing-up time in Danville IL in the 1950s. (I'm still researching my "stealth project" but won't be doing any writing on that for quite a while.) The work with John is somewhat astonishing: shared memories are prompting not just a deluge but entire tsunamis of memories.

And it's enormously interesting to get a glimpse into John's creative imagination: yesterday, he came up with an idea for a cover that is so good it's almost spooky. For a sample of his writing, check out this short piece he wrote about our great-grandfather. Among other things, we're interested in why/how both of us as adults came to make writing our livelihood--our early educations certainly didn't point us in that direction. This will likely be an author-published book, in late 2014 or early 2015. 

Linda Hasselstrom, SCN's keynote speaker for our 2014 women's memoir conference has just written a fascinating review of A Wilder Rose. I very much like the distinction she points out between Laura as a "casual" writer and Rose as a committed professional. That is at the heart of the Rose/Laura collaboration, it seems to me, and I'm so glad that Linda (herself a committed professional writer and teacher) has pointed it out. I hope you'll read her review, both for what she says about the book and for the insight she gives us into her own work as a reader and writer. I'm so glad she'll be our conference keynoter!

One happy note for me: the number of libraries in the World Catalog system that have acquired Rose has now reached 150. Pretty darn good for an author-published book!

Reading note: A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.--Richard Bach

A Wilder Rose Goodreads Q&A

 I'm over at Goodreads this week, answering readers' questions about A Wilder Rose. Drop in if you have a few moments. Some really interesting questions!

If you're curious about Rose's bookplate (left), here's the story. It was created for her in 1917 by Berta Hoerner, with whom she shared a studio on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, at 1413 Montgomery Street. Berta met Laura there when she visited SF in 1915. Rose and Berta also shared a coldwater walkup in Greenwich Village (circa 1918-1919).

Berta married Elmer Hader and the couple went on to become a well-known children's author-illustrator team. It was Berta who introduced Rose to Marion Fiery, who very much liked Rose's rewrite of part of Laura's "Pioneer Girl" manuscript. Marion acquired the project for Knopf. Expanded, it eventually went to Harper and was published as Little House in the Big Woods. You can read the full story in A Wilder Rose.

Reading note: She thought to herself, "This is now." She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.--Little House in the Big Woods