Contributors

Rebecca Brammer

Rebecca Brammer inherited her love of “Little House” from her mother at an early age. Years of study and multiple visits to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s homesites cemented her lifelong devotion. Since 1996 – the pioneer days of the internet – Rebecca’s website Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frontier Girl has been a mainstay of the online Laura Ingalls Wilder world. “My hope is that Frontier Girl will continue to turn casual Little House readers into devoted fans who will visit and support the homesites, ensuring Laura’s legacy is preserved for future generations,” she says. Apart from her Wilder interest, Rebecca is a speech-language pathologist in West Virginia, and is currently writing a series of children’s books set in the era of the Great Depression. The Year of Plenty and The Year of Sacrifice are currently available for purchase. Click here to read Rebecca’s posts.

Jonni Craven

Jonni Craven’s devotion to Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder, which began in elementary school, has led to three other passions in life – music, reading and traveling. When not visiting Little House sites around the country, she runs the Laura Ingalls Wilder Literary Society, an online discussion group. She’s currently working on a presentation to introduce children to the music in the Little House books. In her spare time, Jonni works as the Executive Director of the Carmel Heritage Society, helping to preserve the history of this small coastal village in California. Click here to read Jonni’s posts.
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Sandra Hume, writer and editor

Sandra Hume came to her love of the Little House series through the TV screen. “As a kid, my Monday ‘Little House’ nights were sacred,” she says. Something about those braids, that lopsided house, that school bell … Walnut Grove seemed like a pretty neat place to live. (The year her parents signed her up for art lessons that ended at 8:30 on Mondays—third grade, as she recalls—was a particularly trying time in her young life.)

Only through a chance sighting of the phrase “BASED ON THE LITTLE HOUSE SERIES OF BOOKS BY LAURA INGALLS WILDER” during the closing credits did Sandra discover the book series. Once she found them, she read them all. And reread them. And reread them again. Her upbringing in suburban Boston didn’t exactly square with the windswept prairies and daily farm work of Laura’s life. For years settling into Wisconsin or Plum Creek or De Smet was always her ideal escape from suburbia and 1980s adolescence. Then, just before she turned 30, things started to make a little more sense. She found herself relocated to Kansas, married to a farmer, identifying with Laura’s story in a much more visceral way.

Now, too, geography was on her side. From her new Midwestern base Sandra was finally able to realize her dream of visiting Laura’s homesites and museums. Each successive trip fueled her passion for these living testaments to Laura’s life. Back in Massachusetts she’d been a professional journalist writing for outlets like Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, and various web sites, so in 2002 she put that experience to use and launched the Homesteader, a newsletter about Laura Ingalls Wilder, her homesites, and everything a contemporary Little House fan would like to know. Twice each year the full-color, professionally written publication, bound charmingly with jute, is mailed to paying subscribers all over the world.

Today Sandra, now a mom of two, continues to blend her love or all things Laura with her career as a freelance writer, and is currently working on a memoir about her experiences as a city girl turned farmer’s wife. Click here to read Sandra’s posts.

Amy Mattson Lauters, Ph.D., is author of The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, a compendium of Rose’s magazine articles from 1917 through 1968. Her interest in Laura sprouted in childhood, when she learned her grandmother was friends with Laura’s cousin Ruby Martin. “As a child I had a hard time figuring out why a little girl like Laura had such an ‘old’ cousin,” she says now. But that marked a revelation for young Amy: Laura Ingalls was real. A professor of journalismat the Minnesota State University at Mankato, Dr. Lauters released More Than a Farmer’s Wife: American Farm Women’s Voices, 1910-1960 in June 2009; her next project is a biography of Rose Wilder Lane. Click here to read Amy’s posts.

Sarah S. Uthoff

Iowa-based Sarah S. Uthoff is a widely respected authority on Laura Ingalls Wilder. She has been visiting Laura’s homesites in the Midwest on a regular basis since 1983. Much in demand as a speaker on Laura and other topics, Uthoff has presented at several of the homesites and is on the Humanities Iowa Speakers Bureau. She’s been involved in several historical preservation endeavors, most recently running a national campaign to identify letters penned by Laura. A reference librarian at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Uthoff is an editor of and frequent contributor to the Homesteader. She maintains her own web site at Trundle Bed Tales. Click here to read Sarah’s posts.

Guest Contributors

Wendy McClure first revisited her old Little House obsession when her boyfriend brought home a boxed set of the paperbacks. Now she’s working on a book about her experiences returning to what she calls “Laura World.”  The book, tentatively called THE WILDER LIFE, will be published by Riverhead Books in late 2010 or thereabouts. In her tamer life she’s a writer and a children’s book editor; her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Chicago Sun-Times, and several anthologies. She lives in Chicago.  Visit her website to find out more about her books and other writing.

Laura Welser fell in love with the Little House books after her sixth grade teacher read them to her class, and throughout her life has read all she could about Laura, always wanting to know more. Since her kids are grown, she now devotes her spare time to learning more about Laura and has also begun expanding her “Laura collection”, which seems to have taken over her living room. In the past two years, she experienced her lifelong dream and visited four of Laura’s homesites. Laura and her husband run a water well drilling business in Michigan. Click here to read Laura’s posts.

Historian and author Trini Wenninger‘s love of history developed in the Southwest when she started doing living history programs in 1996. Since many children and adults are familiar with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, she often incorporated Laura’s life into her programs. Laura’s life has lured her all over the country with visits to all of the official homesites and several unofficial sites. Trini lives in Ohio where she is on the board of the local historical society and participates in history programs. She also offers several different presentations that are described on her website at PrairieMania.com. Click here to read Trini’s posts.

Cheryl Whitlock discovered the “Little House” books in school and loved them instantly, but her true Laura obsession began about twelve years ago. Cheryl’s passion is collecting things that were used by the Ingalls and Wilder families, including dinnerware, books, and household items. Her favorite piece is a three-gallon butter churn like Laura owned. Cheryl also loves visiting and photographing the Little House homesites, and she currently has a photography project underway. She maintains the Dakotagirl website, which is undergoing a complete revamping. Click here to read Cheryl’s posts.