I still vividly remember coming home in first grade with the most recent copy of the Scholastic book magazine. I’d sit in one of the two chairs at the kitchen table and read the summary of every book. One particular magazine had the set of nine “Little House” books and as my mom looked over my shoulder, she said “I think you’d like those books.” They came in the mail a short time later, and over sixteen years later, I still have those copies, weathered, of course, with many penciled-in notes, bent corners, and ripped covers. They sit on a shelf surrounded by the dozens of other works of Wilder as well as spin off novels, a cookbook, picture books, and collections of letters and diary entries. I have read the series too many times to count and could probably quote many scenes. I have spent most of life in love with Wilder’s stories, gravitating towards similar books and styles. But I always come back to “Little House.” They’ve become a comfort to me. I’ll often pick up one of the books at random and immediately get lost in them as I did when I was six and seven years old. I love the simplicity of her writing and storylines. But I also love the underlying complexity in her imagery and characters: it’s difficult to miss the wit of Laura, the determination of Ma and Pa, and the unwavering faith of the whole Ingalls family.
The nine books follow Laura as she grows up, beginning with “Little House in the Big Woods” when she is about five years old, and ending with “The First Four Years” when she is about twenty. Even though she lived over two hundred years before me, I felt like I was growing up with her. Each book covered a certain age of growing up and even though her life was very different from mine, I could still feel a connection through even the small things in her stories. She describes in detail her family’s wandering among a half dozen midwestern states, including Wisconsin, South Dakota, and most famously, Minnesota. Even as they are traveling in a covered wagon for weeks through untouched, flat prairie lands, Wilder somehow manages to create powerful and vivid imagery with a focus on the little things. I think what initially grasped my attention was Wilder’s writing itself. I loved the way she described the people, places, and things around her. She wrote for children but that didn’t mean she wrote immaturely. On the contrary, she writes with passion and strength, ensuring that her readers could understand the words while at the same time, never minimizing her meaning. I still have vivid memories of the images she created through her words in my mind: her rag doll, tables of food at Christmas, the dugout they lived in under the ground, the colors and patterns of their dresses, and the faces of her parents and sisters. The expressive words have yet to fade from my mind, and they manage to seep into my own writing now.
A lot of the little stories I wrote in elementary and middle school followed a similar pattern of Wilder’s stories and her characters became mine in a sense. Even throughout high school, when I started exploring the form of poetry, countless titles and ideas came from the “Little House” books themselves. And even now, I know my writing style, particularly my love of writing descriptions over dialogue, comes from Laura Ingalls Wilder. She’s the reason I love to read and the reason I wanted to become a writer. Her story, both her real life and her fictional adaptation of it, continuously inspires me and impacts my life. I know that I have learned to write through her books and I still feel her presence in many of my own ideas. I’m inspired by her to write stories no matter how simple they are for they can become beautiful and impactful, even more so than an overly complex piece of writing.
In “Falling Out of Love,” Wilder might not be obviously present, but some poems, such as “Where Violets Grow,” are titles of chapters in her books. She even wrote about love in her later books, particularly in “Little Town on the Prairie” and “These Happy Golden Years” when she meets and begins dating her husband, Almanzo Wilder. This hint of romance has always captivated me, for as a little girl who loved Disney princesses and a young woman who fawns over Hallmark Channel movies, any moments of romance, no matter how faint, sticks in my mind. So in my verse novel, small hints of Laura and Almanzo show up in my descriptions.
But now, as I have recently begun a rough first draft of a fictionalized version of my grandmother’s immigration from Italy, I sense Laura even more. Laura initially wrote her first draft of the “Little House” books as simply an account of her father’s life through her own eyes. She felt that the pioneer way of life was dying out come the 1920s and 30s that she wanted to write it down so it wouldn’t be forgotten. My grandmother was born in the middle of the Great Depression, lived through World War II, and moved to the U.S. with a fifth grade education and the skills of a seamstress. She lived a childhood that no other exists and traveled as Laura’s father did: to better the lives of her children and grandchildren. So Laura inspires me to write down her story, too, so that it won’t be forgotten and we can remember where we came from.
If you personally know me, “Little House” is a piece of my personality and as a writer, Laura is a large part of my identity and the sole reason for the dreams I hold in my writing. The first "Writer Inspiration" had to go to her without question, for I know without a doubt that I wouldn’t be a writer without her.
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