Wendy McClure

“It's the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it's all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress--it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass!”

“It didn't feel like the last night of anything anymore, just that the world went on and would follow us home”

“I do realize how this all sounds. I realize that in this account of my journey to the Little House on the Prairie, a journey that in Pa’s time would have taken at least ten days, my litany of misfortunes contains words like power windows and Wi-Fi. I realize, yes, that one of the greatest hardships I had to contend with involved a car that starts with the push of a button.”

“The little room was full of ordinary things that had already become precious, that I couldn't help but want to have again, to feel like whoever it was I used to be, whether it was my past or someone else's.”

“I found the world of the Little House books to be so much less confusing, not just because it was "simpler," as plenty of people love to insist, but because it reconciled all the little contradictions of my modern girlhood. On the Banks of Plum Creek clicked with me especially, with its perfect combination of pinafores and recklessness. (I will direct your attention to the illustration on page 31 of my Plum Creek paperback, where you will note how fabulous Laura looks as she pokes the badger with a stick; her style is casual yet feminine, perfect for precarious nature adventures!) At an age when I found myself wanting both a Webelos uniform and a head of beautiful Superstar Barbie hair, On the Banks of Plum Creek was a reassuring book. Being a girl sometimes made more sense in Laura World than it did in real life.”

“...but Lake Pepin might be best known to most of the world as the place where, more than a hundred and thirty years ago, a little kid picked up too many pebbles.”

“From everything that I'd read, End Timers were waiting for the collapse of civilization the way fans of the Twilight series awaited the trailer for Breaking Dawn.”

“...subtitled it 'Everything you Always Wanted to Know About Driving Out to Remote Locations in the Upper Midwest to Find your Childhood Imaginary Friend but Were Afraid to Ask.”

“I hate the thought that I'm just some kind of Russian nesting doll with the big outside and inevitably, rattling around under all the layers, a crude little peg with a face is the truth of me.”

“Sometimes, Laura World wasn't a realm of log cabins or prairies, it was a way of being. Really, a way of being happy. I wasn't into the flowery sayings, but I was nonetheless in love with the idea of serene rooms full of endless quiet and time, of sky in the windows, of a life comfortably cluttered and yet in some kind of perfect feng shui equilibrium, where all the days were capacious enough to bake bread and write novels and perambulate the wooded hills deep in thought (though truthfully, I'd allow for the occasional Rose-style cocktail party as well).”