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Previously on The Writers' Block
- Greatest Hits: Jennifer Egan
- Greatest Hits: David Sedaris
- Greatest Hits: Patti Smith
- Greatest Hits: John Waters
- Skagboys
- Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
- Best of The Writers' Block 2012
- Birds of a Lesser Paradise
- A Working Theory of Love
- The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days
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The Wilder Life
Wendy McClure reads a passage from The Wilder Life, a hilarious chronicle of her attempt to immerse herself in all things Little House on the Prairie. (Running Time: 16:22)
For anyone who has ever wanted to step into the world of a favorite book, here is a pioneer pilgrimage, a tribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a hilarious account of butter-churning obsession.
Wendy McClure is on a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder -- a fantastic realm of fiction, history, and places she's never been to, yet somehow knows by heart. She retraces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family -- looking for the Big Woods among the medium trees in Wisconsin, wading in Plum Creek, and enduring a prairie hailstorm in South Dakota. She immerses herself in all things Little House, and explores the story from fact to fiction, and from the TV shows to the annual summer pageants in Laura's hometowns. Whether she's churning butter in her apartment or sitting in a replica log cabin, McClure is always in pursuit of "the Laura experience." Along the way, she comes to understand how Wilder's life and work have shaped our ideas about girlhood and the American West.
The Wilder Life is a loving, irreverent, spirited tribute to a series of books that have inspired generations of American women. It is also an incredibly funny first-person account of obsessive reading, and a story about what happens when we reconnect with our childhood touchstones -- and find that our old love has only deepened.
About the Author:
Wendy McClure: Wendy McClure is an author, a columnist for BUST magazine, and a children's book editor. Her essays have appeared in the The New York Times Magazine, The Chicago Sun-Times, and in a number of anthologies, including Love Is A Four-Letter Word (Plume), Feed Me (Ballantine) and Sleepaway: Writings on Summer Camp (Riverhead). She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writer's Workshop.
