You Cannot Read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Self-Insert Mary Sue Fanfiction as a Historical Document

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

Wilder Weather: What Laura Ingalls Wilder Teaches Us About the Weather, Climate, and Protecting What We Cherish by Barbara Boustead
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To me, the hardest concept to grasp about the Little House on the Prairie books is that they’re fiction. And to be honest, that’s because they’re not completely fiction! But also, they are! Confusingly for fiction, the main characters all have the names of the author and her real family. Confusingly for non-fiction, the characters don’t adhere to the timeframe of the author’s life. But confusingly for fiction, they operate in a similar timeframe. The stories that are told most resemble fanfiction, i.e. the retelling of a canonical story in a different way to achieve a different effect or result. And because Wilder wrote them about herself, I guess they MOST most resemble self-insert fanfiction, although even that isn’t quite right because the canonical story IS about Wilder. Does Laura sometimes come off better in the stories than she did in real life? Then maybe she wrote self-insert Mary Sue fanfic. Or should we just ignore the self-insert part? Then maybe she wrote AU fanfic.

Or we could just admit that Wilder invented, and is nearly the only author within, a specific sub-genre that conflates memoir with fiction. The other authors within this genre are the ones who claimed they wrote memoirs but then got caught lying in them. It’s interesting that Wilder chose to overtly fictionalize her story rather than push her memoir forward, but of course that’s the fault of those who wouldn’t publish Pioneer Girl as-is. BUT it worked out for the best, because her Little House books are much stronger than Pioneer Girl. And so back we go to the scenario in which Wilder invents a new sub-genre of literature!

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

All this to say that I did find it problematic that Wilder Weather sometimes seems to conflate fact with fiction, or rather, doesn’t always overtly distinguish between the two when discussing the Little House books and/or Wilder’s actual life. There were absolutely some acknowledgments, but the awareness didn’t feel explicit on a case-by-case basis. An example that stuck out to me was the discussion of the scene in These Happy Golden Years in which Laura and Almanzo see a tornado. Boustead writes, “In These Happy Golden Years, Laura immediately notices the heat and humidity on Thursday, 28 August 1884 (not a Sunday as her book narrative would indicate).” That reads as a clear acknowledgment that the Little House books and Wilder’s life are not the same, but it doesn’t feel like an acknowledgment that Wilder did this on purpose, or that perhaps she simply made no effort to verify a specific date because it didn’t matter in her work of fiction--it just as easily reads as if Wilder made a mistake with her dates.

The day is important because this is the day of the tornado. In These Happy Golden Years, Almanzo and Laura are out riding in Manly’s buggy, when a storm begins to form in the distance:

“Almost overhead now, the tumbling, swirling clouds changed from black to a terrifying greenish-purple. They seemed to draw themselves together, then a groping finger slowly came out of them and stretched down, trying to reach the earth. It reached, and pulled itself up,and reached again.
“How far away is that?” Laura asked.
“Ten miles, I’d say,” Almanzo replied.
It was coming toward them, from the northwest, as they sped toward the northeast. No horses, fast as they ran, could outrun the speed of those clouds. Green-purple, they rolled in the sky above the helpless prairie, and reached toward it playfully as a cat’s paw torments a mouse.
A second point came groping down, behind the first. Then another. All three reached and withdrew and reached again, down from the writhing clouds.”

Boustead notes about Almanzo’s estimate of the distance to the tornado that “[h]is memory was probably quite accurate; though Wilder tended to exaggerate distances in her books, Almanzo had a clearer sense of distance.”

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

Here’s the thing, though: that version of the tornado anecdote is from the fiction book. The Almanzo who estimated the distance is a work of fiction, his placement in a buggy with Laura as they witness the tornado ten miles away is also a work of fiction. There’s no indication that the real Almanzo’s memory was consulted for this fictionalized anecdote, nor that the real Wilder’s authorial estimates of distance were “exaggerations” and not purposeful components of her descriptions of her fictional world.

Here’s the anecdote from Pioneer Girl, Wilder’s memoir:

“One afternoon we saw a bad storm rising in the northwest. It came up for awhile, then turned and swung around passing to the west of us going south. The large bank of clouds was first black, then turned a queer greenish, purple color and from it a funnel shaped cloud dropped down until its point touched the ground. With its point on the ground and the large end of the funnel in the cloud above it began whirling and traveled southward with the purple green cloud above it.
Then a second funnel point dropped, touched the ground and followed the first, then another and there were three under the cloud and traveling swiftly with it.
The wind was almost still where we were and we stood in the dooryard and watched the cloud and its funnels pass on the west of us.”

The memoir narrative is clearly describing the same tornado (there’s even a photo of what most academics assume to be the tornado being described--it was a famous tornado!), but in this narrative, which is intended to be factual, the “we” is likely referring to the Ingalls family, and they are at home, since they stood “in the dooryard” and watched the tornado pass to their west. Unless there is some kind of correspondence or interview notes that also support the factuality of the These Happy Golden Years anecdote, it feels like an odd choice to discuss the factual accuracy of minor details in the fictional account when there’s a fact-based account that could be discussed. It would have been super interesting to theorize whether or not that famous tornado’s path could have been seen from the doorway of the Ingalls’ homestead!

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

Boustead also mentions the floating door that merits a story of its own in These Happy Golden Years, noting that it “stretches credulity.” The door story is told a little more sedately in Pioneer Girl, but as hear-say, not witnessed by Pa and Almanzo as is told in the fiction book. Whenever there’s an exciting incident in the Little House books that doesn’t happen to Laura, I always wonder if that was a part that Rose Wilder Lane authored, since she was the sensationalist.

Also, the Pioneer Girl anecdote would have better supported Boustead’s claim that the tornado they saw was THE famous tornado, since it’s much more likely that the family would have been in their dooryard on a Thursday than that Laura and Almanzo would have been buggying about the plains on a Thursday. Laura and Almanzo courted on SUNDAYS!

Tangent, but when I went to look up the tornado anecdote in These Happy Golden Years, I saw that it was very near the end of the book, so I obviously sat down to keep reading, and omg the scenes in which Laura is preparing to leave her home and family to move in with Almanzo, feeling sad and nostalgic and homesick even though she hasn’t left yet, excited about what’s to come while mourning everything she’s leaving behind--well, I don’t know if you need to be putting those words in front of perimenopausal empty nesters, because I cried so many cries for a Tuesday afternoon! It was beautiful in a way that I absolutely did not appreciate until this read-through.

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

All that being said, I was VERY interested in reading about all the historic weather events and patterns that occurred during Wilder’s life and that informed her books. It’s obvious from page one of Little House in the Big Woods that Wilder has a mind for detail and a knack for description, and it was fascinating to see how many famous weather events can be matched to their fiction counterparts just by description alone. It was also interesting to see points where the factual accounts didn’t match the fictional counterparts, and it made me wonder what other authorial purpose they were then serving, what Wilder might have wanted to convey differently. Why, for instance, would she have Laura and Almanzo witness that tornado from Almanzo’s buggy? Perhaps because, unlike in the previous books in which Laura is a child and her family comprise her other main characters, in this book she saw Almanzo as the other main character, so the most exciting events should happen in his company? Or perhaps because those Sunday buggy rides actually read as pretty boring, and this was a more exciting way to convey that the courtship is still happening?

I also thought that the discussion of the climate during Wilder’s time, both in itself and vs. our time, was incredibly interesting, and I wouldn’t have skipped reading this book for the world just for that info. It was heartbreaking to learn that those Dakota tree claims that gave the Wilder family such agony during their four-year homestead duration would never have worked… although Pa’s cottonwoods at his own homestead did survive. I’ve seen them!

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I Read The Lost Tomb Because I Am ALWAYS Down To Gossip About Clovis Point Conmen and Gripe About NAGPRA

I went to Hell Creek and did NOT make the most important scientific breakthrough of my time. Humph!

The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder by Douglas Preston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The pull of this book for me was, of course, the ancient Native American and Ancient Egypt content, but I actually found myself invested in all the mysteries.

“The Clovis Point Con” chapter is on a topic that I haven’t really read about before, ie. Clovis points, but now I’m fascinated, especially because the chapter is about Clovis points, and also about a con man, and ALSO about an eccentric rich guy who made a hidden treasure clue hunt. As with some of his other articles, Preston comes to this subject because he was apparently good buddies with the eccentric rich guy in question, Forrest Fenn, and so was able to have boots on the ground as soon as Fenn started to have suspicions about the magically perfect Clovis points he was being sold. Interestingly to me, a lot of Fenn’s own collections have uncertain, sometimes downright suspicious provenance, but he sailed through a genuine FBI investigation scott-free, so who am I to judge?

I like that Preston spills a lot of interesting tea, but none of it is salacious. Here’s a nice bit from “The Clovis Point Con,” when he’s tracing the chain of provenance of the faked Clovis points from their maker, Woody Blackwell, to Fenn through an elderly antiques dealer who was friends with Blackwell: “Everyone agrees that the antique dealer was duped by Blackwell; the man has a severe heart condition, and I was asked not to mention his name in the article for fear of giving him a heart attack.”

Like, I’m even madder at Blackwell now. Dude got a guy with a HEART CONDITION wrapped up in his criminal caper!

“The Mystery of Hell Creek” is my favorite chapter, because once upon a time, I got to do my own paleontological excavation in Hell Creek. Although if I’d found something important in my own dig, I’d have immediately been booted off of it, lol!

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Since these articles are several years (and sometimes several decades!) old and not re-edited to reflect the current time, you get a snapshot of what it looks like to have a mystery in progress, which I think is especially interesting after it’s been solved. The Tanis fossil site written about in “The Mystery of Hell Creek,” for instance, is now generally accepted to be what DePalma originally theorized that it was, a snapshot of the hours after the asteroid that would kill the dinosaurs hit our planet, but Preston’s article about it was written in 2019, the same year that the original 2019 paper describing the discovery was published. You should read that article, by the way, because it has pictures of the site! So the article describes not just DePalma’s discovery and what he says about it, but also the controversy surrounding it at the time and the skepticism of many in the paleontology community. Academics seriously can be the worst for political machinations and power brokering and defending their own personal intellectual fiefdoms, ugh.

Preston digs into even more political machinations in his couple of articles that have to do with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. I have complicated feelings about that act, mostly for selfish reasons because I want to see more of the artifacts from Spiro Mound, but most are not on display because of various connotations of that act. In thinking about that and other artifacts found at ancient Native American sites, my reasoning has always been that since we don’t know what peoples their descendants are, we should be able to study them, because Knowledge. Preston, though, in “Skeletons in the Closet,” an article actually written before that act was passed, makes a point that I have to respect: “The real issue, it seems to me, is that most Native Americans feel deeply about reburial, for whatever reason. It is not for us to judge the legitimacy of this feeling.”

FINE! I will respect the feelings of most Native Americans and continue to express my irritation only silently inside my head!

Tangent: if I ever get the chance to have any superpower I want, I will choose the superpower of knowing anything that I want to know. Like, I ask a specific question, and the answer will simply come to me. I’ll have a lot of missing person cases to get through first, but as soon as those are solved I’ll get right to the mystery of Spiro Mound.

The chapter “The Skeleton in the Riverbank” carries the point of NAGPRA further, in that Kennewick Man, a skeleton of huge archaeological importance, caused a huge custody battle that contrasted its worth to science with the desire of the native peoples of the area to rebury it. At first, it was ruled that Kennewick Man wasn’t related to any of the local native peoples so it was okay to study it, but then further study proved that it WAS related to them, so it was eventually relinquished and reburied.

Which means that it’s no longer available for further study, but I’m officially not griping about that anymore.

Another ethically complicated and very interesting issue that Preston explores includes the whole can of worms that evidence of cannibalism by historical Native Americans in the American Southwest opened up among the academic and native communities. People have a lot of feelings when you accuse their ancestors of eating each other! Even more so when you provide archaeological evidence that said ancestors smashed open the skulls of women and children, cut off their heads, roasted those heads on a fire, and then ate their roasted brains out of their skulls. To be fair to the horrified descendents, that feels kind of extreme even for cannibals…

You know I love myself some Ancient Egyptian tomb mysteries, so the titular chapter, “The Lost Tomb,” is my second favorite. It’s so bonkers to me that Egyptian tombs are still being rediscovered, and that they’re then not excavated and explored IMMEDIATELY! As I’ve previously mentioned, I want to know All The Things. This chapter introduced me to the Theban Mapping Project, which somehow in all my reading about Ancient Egypt I’ve never previously learned about. Now when I read about burials and tombs, I can finally visualize where they are! There’s another first-person connection in this chapter, as Preston actually goes to visit KV5 during its excavation season, and, charmingly, wheedles the workers a couple of different times into boosting him into newly opened chambers so he can be the first to have a look since they were buried.

The weakest chapter is the last one, “In Search of the Seven Cities of Gold.” The tone is very different, and the subject is a poorly-contextualized horseback riding trip that Preston and his buddy, Walter, took through Arizona and New Mexico in an attempt to follow Coronado’s path. This is the only passage that I loved, and found hilarious, because I, too, am, in the eyes of my immediate family, infamously obsessed with Bag Balm:

“Fortunately, in our medicine chest we found a tube of a substance called Bag Balm. Billed as an “Antiseptic Emollient Treatment for Horses & Cattle, Other Livestock, Small Animals,” this marvelous embrocation was for “Hoofs, Body & Legs, Udder & Teats.” It was also ideal for sore hands and butts. During the course of our journey we went through three large tubes of the stuff, very little of which was applied to the horses.”

I don’t know about its use as an antiseptic or a liniment, but it makes an EXCELLENT lotion for my chronically dry elbows! It smells kind of nasty, but we must all decide the price we’re willing to pay to be well-moisturized.

Even though I didn’t love that chapter, reading it made me crave a re-watch of Esteban and the Mysterious Cities of Gold. I’ve ALWAYS loved a good ancient mystery!

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How to Make a Comic Book Bookmark

I originally wrote this tutorial for Crafting a Green World way back in 2017.

Don’t you dare dog-ear that book! That’s what bad people do.

To make it even easier to not deface great works of literature, you can make yourself a set of bookmarks out of my *other* favorite genre of reading, the comic book. Comic books or any other upcycled papers, are easy to turn into sturdy, fun, useful bookmarks. Here’s how:

1. Source some comic books. My local comic book shop has a back room full of comic books that are a quarter each. There are no diamonds to be found in this rough, you can be sure, but it’s pretty easy to find a bad comic book featuring your favorite characters (you can’t tell how 70s corny Tony Stark is drawn if he’s in his Iron Man suit!), or a comic book so awful that it’s awesome again (those dinosaur mercenaries *might* have seemed cool to kids, but they also dated strippers, soooo… yeah) there. 

Another great place to find comic books is any garage sale, anywhere, and that’s also where you can find other great books that would also make good bookmarks. Seriously, wouldn’t you love a bookmark made from a page from Sweet Valley High? Or that Harry Potter with its cover ripped off? It needs to be made into bookmarks!

2. Fussy cut bookmark fronts. On a piece of scratch cardboard, draw a simple rectangle that’s about 2″x6″. Cut it out, round the corners if you’d like, and use it as a template to trace and cut out bookmark fronts.

Cut outside the lines of the bookmark fronts, and you’ll be able to neatly trim them after they’re attached to the bookmark backs.

3. Adhere the bookmark fronts to cardstock backs. The quickest, easiest method is to stick the bookmark fronts to adhesive-backed cardstock, then cut inside the lines of the bookmark to cut out the complete bookmark, front and back together.

You’ll have more options for cardstock, however, if you use glue or adhesive spray. You could use the cardboard from cereal boxes or other food packaging, record album covers, file folders, or anything with cardstock consistency that will give the needed sturdiness to the paper bookmark fronts.

Once the fronts and backs of the bookmarks are attached, and you’ve given enough time, if needed, for any adhesive to dry, cut just inside the lines of the bookmark front to neatly trim both front and back together.

4. Add a tassel. Use a hole punch with a small diameter to punch a hole in the top center of the bookmark, then add a tassel. Options for the tassel include embroidery floss, yarn, twine, necklace chains, or strips cut from T-shirts or plastic grocery bags.

No matter the material you use, cut it to twice the length of the bookmark, thread it through the hole, then double knot it at the top of the bookmark. Pieces such as embroidery floss or yarn will also need to be knotted at the other end to keep them from unraveling.

5. Seal the front? Maybe! If you’re worried about the fact that your bookmark front is likely made from a non-archival material, you may choose to seal it. I wouldn’t worry about it too much, though.

I think it’s better to have too many bookmarks rather than too few, so make as many of these bookmarks as you’d like, and to get buy-in from the kids, be sure to make some bookmarks out of their favorite things, too–that’s how our bookmark collection now includes Harry Potter, Thor and Iron Man, Garfield, G.I. Joe, Sherlock Holmes, and Spider-man.

And I'm always on the lookout for a super beat-up copy of The Hunger Games, if you've got one!

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Want to Have Nightmares for a Week? Read This Book about the Johnstown Flood

Last December, the big kid and I fulfilled her childhood Junior Ranger dream of stopping by the Johnstown Flood National Memorial on the way to pick her little sister up from college. The sun was setting as we walked around the site of the former Lake Conemaugh, just east of the former South Fork Dam. In the distance is the former Unger homestead, with the national park site's visitor center next to it.

The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Johnstown Flood was an absolute literal living nightmare OMG. This book was so scary that I actually had to put it down for the night a couple of different times, because reading about such abject terror and such mass destruction does not make for easy slumber.

McCullough really leans into the terror, too, with lots of retellings of harrowing first-person accounts--I just wish that he’d included footnotes, because I’d be interested in sourcing and reading some of these for myself as a way to honor the victims.

The Johnstown Flood National Memorial Visitor Center contains this terrifying display of what flood survivor Victor Heiser experienced. At just sixteen, his last memory of his father was him standing in their home's second-story window, gesturing for Victor to get back in the barn. Victor obeyed, and climbed through the barn's brand-new trapdoor to the roof, an innovation that his father had recently installed for no particular reason. From his viewpoint on the barn roof, he saw his family home crushed by the flood, and then the barn came unmoored and Victor had to stay on top of it while it raged down the river. He was his family's only survivor.

I love that McCullough especially highlighted the heroes of the story--the train engineer who essentially raced the flood, blowing his whistle to give the residents the only warning most of them were to get, the people who stopped in their flight to help others, the rescue and aid workers and private citizens who helped with the cleanup and recovery. I’m still thinking about six-year-old Gertrude Quinn, and the total stranger, Maxwell McAchren, who jumped into the flood not even because he had a way to rescue her, but literally just to be with her. They floated down the raging river until they got close to a house that was still standing at the edge of the water, with other total strangers hanging out the window trying to rescue people. One of the strangers shouted at McAchren to “throw them the baby,” he somehow did so, and a guy named Henry Koch managed to catch her by lunging so far out the window that another guy, George Skinner, had to hold him by the legs. McAchren continued floating down the flooded river alone, but happily he, too, survived.

The sign in the foreground states that we're at the approximate level of Lake Conemaugh before the flood that broke the dam, and to the left is the top of the former South Fork Dam just a few feet higher than the lake level. The dam was also allowed to wear down and sag in the center to make a weak point, and a former owner had disassembled, removed, and sold off the pipes that were previously used to lower the water level. Add to that the fact that the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club blocked the spillway by installing both a bridge and fish guards to keep the fish they'd stocked in the lake from escaping, and the break seems completely inevitable.

Okay, I just discovered that Gertrude Quinn Slater wrote her own book about the Johnstown Flood! I am currently trying to get Internet Archive to generate an epub of it as I write, but I’m sorry to tell you that it’s not going well.

There were a lot fewer flood artifacts than I thought there would be, but this was one of them.

At first, shortly after finishing the book, I was irritated that McCullough didn’t write more about the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club and the consequences the members faced, etc., but I finally got it through my head that this is because… there weren’t really any? They just kind of all… got away with criminal negligence? So much for Eat the Rich, I guess!

Here’s the thing that I REALLY do not understand, though--why does everyone not know about this? Why didn’t we study it in school? It would have been a terrific addition to the unit on American Industrialization and the development of factories and classism in the 1800s, etc. I only knew about the flood because my older kid was flat-out obsessed with earning Junior Ranger badges when she was little, and the Johnstown Flood National Memorial was a badge she could earn by mail, so we did our own DIY unit study of it (including a trip to visit our own local dam and spillway--they look sturdy and sound, thank goodness!), and what we learned during that study was so ghastly and shocking and downright bonkers that we’ve never stopped talking about it. And I do not understand why EVERYBODY is not constantly talking about it! It was so famous at the time, and now it’s just… not? In 2137, if we’re not in our full on zombie apocalypse Mad Max era, are people no longer going to remember anything about 9/11? Crazy how the memory of human suffering can just dissipate like that.

We're looking across the former Lake Conemaugh, with the former South Fork Dam to the left. You can also see the creek that was dammed there in the middle.

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Translating the Mayan Glyphs Really Brings Out the Asshole in Some People

Went to Mexico in 2022 and somehow didn't try a single "Mayan" rum cake, dang it!

Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To me, the most interesting through-line of this book is how the actions of petty academics served to hinder, stall, and otherwise thwart the translation of the Maya glyphs for decades. I have some small experience with petty academics who care WAY more about their self-proclaimed role of thought police and their self-imposed mission to maintain the status quo of their field than they do actually progressing knowledge, and I am always on the lookout for others willing to spill the tea on that same topic. And dude, does Coe spill the tea! You need to get yourself some popcorn to munch while you read about Thompson’s career-long power play that served absolutely nothing but his own sense of self-worth. I wouldn’t have found this book nearly as interesting without that play-by-play of who tried to ruin whose career for personal reasons, who wouldn’t admit that someone else was right and kept bitching about it endlessly, who was low-key racist and who was high-key racist, etc.

Do you want to know how to call someone racist without calling them racist? Coe shows us how via his thoughts about another academic:

“Having met Gelb but once, many years ago [...], I cannot really call him a racist. His book, however, is very definitely infected with that sinister virus of our time.”

There was also a Nazi sympathizer, a German-born, Louisiana-based researcher named Hermann Beyer who had to be forbidden to wear a swastika at work, who was later sent to the Stringtown Concentration Camp in Oklahoma at the start of WWII and who subsequently died there.

Chichen Itza, 2022

Coe is also VERY (and undeservedly!) snarky about archaeologists--or, sorry, about “dirt-archaeologists,” as he puts it. I kind of got the idea that he thinks they’re stupid. What’s up with that? The digs and the exploration of the jungle and the finding bits of stela with carvings on them are the best part!

Seriously, though--Thompson was such a jerk! He was so convinced that the Maya were illiterate magical shaman ignoramuses that he wouldn’t believe that they had a proper written language, and kept making every peon under him say that the glyphs were, like, pretty pictures that spoke to your heart or something. And he did this for upwards of forty years! And when people started finally actually translating the glyphs anyway (thank goodness for Knorosov!), he did his best to ruin all their careers and talk shit about them and keep them from getting hired, etc. Imagine if you were trying to translate the glyphs and some of his peons were on your hiring committee. Or your tenure committee. Or were peer-reviewing your article. Or in the audience at the conference where you’re reading your paper. Or on your PhD committee. Or your grad school application committee…

Chichen Itza, 2022

There’s another villain in this story, though: that absolute asshole De Landa! I hate that guy. Like, yay I guess that he wrote down a sort of syllabary that researchers finally figured out they needed to use to connect the written glyphs to the spoken language, but we wouldn’t have needed that second-hand source if De Landa hadn’t, you know, BURNED 99.9% OF THE MAYAS’ BOOKS! He even wrote about it in his diary, being all, “Jeez those guys screamed and cried when I burned every book they’ve ever written. What a bunch of dumbasses.” Racism has clearly been holding back our understanding of the Maya and their language ever since we first met them.

Our cast of heroes is charmingly eclectic, including the previously-mentioned Knorosov, much of his work done while trapped in the USSR, as well as a female artist from Tennessee, and a homeschooled child. All of them, I think, illustrate the importance of different perspectives when trying to solve a tricky problem. All of them, notably as well, exhibited grace and the spirit of collaboration and absolutely zero ego.

Chichen Itza, 2022

As far as actually translating the glyphs, I was interested to see that, from what I understand after reading another book on how Egyptian hieroglyphs were first translated, they work sort of similarly to those hieroglyphs. With 20/20 hindsight, one would think that the Maya researchers would have leaned more heavily on the example of hieroglyphs, but I guess that everyone has to hobble their own way towards truth. Except for Thompson--he’ll just try to kneecap you and then when you fall down he’ll step on your neck.

I’d been hoping for an explanation or a reasoning for why Maya glyphs are so decorative, but Coe, perhaps because he’s studied them for his entire career and thus no longer sees them as so extraordinary, didn’t ever point out their structure as notable, even though they very, very, very much ARE. They’re so beautiful and fancy, and every glyph has its own writer’s interpretation of how it’s drawn. I LOVE it.

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I did, however, learn a lot of interesting facts about how the Maya language reflects its people’s obsession with time. I was already interested in the Maya calendar and the Long Count way of dating, and now I know that precision of time is also inherent in their language. No imperfect tenses for you in the Mayan language--you have to know exactly when every action was, is, or will be completed!

I also thought that the focus on classification was interesting. Not only do you have to know what time something happened, but if there’s a group of something you want to talk about, you can’t just name it--you also have to classify it. Considering how much variety there can be in the construction of a single glyph, the language the glyphs are expressing is SO precise!

One more interesting tidbit: Coe writes about Naj Tunich, a cave containing glyphs and art that was being investigated, that “[t]he cavern walls, lit by their flashlights and photographic equipment, had many other surprises, not the least of which were realistic homoerotic encounters.”

Realistic homoerotic encounters, you say? Tell me more!

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Happily, some of what Coe writes in this third edition of his book is now out of date. Coe writes, for instance, that “Mexican law forbids the teaching in schools of the Yucatec Maya tongue.” That is no longer the case. I’d be very interested in learning Maya, as well, but I don’t know where I’d even begin--I already checked DuoLingo, sigh. I’m also very interested in the four extant Mayan codices that De Landa didn’t manage to get his hands on. Trying to see all four will let me travel the world, although it’s shameful that only one gets to still live in Mexico.

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If You Want To LARP Little House You Should Just Do It

Actively homeschooling outside Laura's house in 2014!

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I didn't love it, but it gets 5 Stars from me because it's about Laura Ingalls Wilder. You evaluate your books the way you want, and I'll evaluate my books the way I want!

There’s a weird friction right off the bat in this book in which McClure states that she wants to immerse herself in the world of the Little House books, but enacts this desire partly by visiting the historical home sites of the author Laura Ingalls Wilder, and using that as the framing device of her narrative. It’s no surprise, then, that the friction never dissolves and McClure never really achieves the kind of closure she seems to seek, because the Little House books are fiction, and cannot be transcribed onto these factual places the way McClure seemed to want. It’s true that Wilder was extremely skilled at description, and that many (most?) of her descriptions are based on what she observed in her own life, but that doesn’t make the books biographies. And McClure kept choosing the most fact-based, “intellectual” and biographical activities like site tours and pioneer skills and feeling disappointed and disenchanted that they didn’t get her back into Laura’s “world,” rarely indulging in the thematic world-building activities like cosplay and LARPing, even though I think she’d have LOVED cosplay and LARPing if she’d just let herself relax. It’s kind of like the way she wanted to be a fan of the books didn’t mesh with the way she thought she “should” be a fan?

LARPing in a prairie bonnet at the Ingalls homestead in 2014

It would have been interesting if McClure had researched more about the types of fans that the Little House books attract, although just in her travels she did manage to suss out two types I’m also very familiar with: fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers and fundamentalist Christian Doomsday preppers. Those kinds of fandom are very analytically interesting, and I would have loved to have seen an analysis of why they each chose to pin their own ideals onto Laura. Spoiler alert: it’s nothing Laura did! Like yes, for the Doomsday preppers, at least, Laura’s later Libertarian leanings would probably appeal, but the preppers are fans not because of that, but because they fetishize the Manifest Destiny type of pioneer fiction that makes homesteading look easy. But umm, guys? It looks easy because it’s written for CHILDREN. That’s why all those weekend warrior preppers that so unnerved McClure kept going on and on about “canning” butter--”canning” butter (which I keep putting in irony quotes because if you actually eat “canned” butter you will get food poisoning) is a canning-adjacent craft project the same way that Fox News is a news-adjacent propaganda channel. It’s brainless and ineffective but it’s easy and looks great, and since the fundamentalist Christian Doomsday preppers are essentially just playing pretend, that’s all they need.

Homeschool field trip to Laura's Missouri house. Everything inside was so wee!

The Little House fandom among fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers is a little harder to unpack, but ultimately it, too, requires no close reading of the literature, but instead a vibes-heavy version of it, the same way that most contemporary fiction and films set in the Medieval period reflect very little actual historical fact or detail, but a whole lot of “Medieval” vibes. Also see: “Amish” romance. The Little House books read through a fundamentalist Christian homeschool lens are all about patriarchy, heteronormative gender roles, nationalism, and the outward manifestation of virtue evident in obedience and hardship. Pioneer-era skills are seen not as the complicated, labor-intensive work that they were but instead as proof of “simplicity,” “simple living,” “simple times,” and whatever other euphemisms they can think of to dog whistle anti-intellectualism. That’s why a homeschooling parent, as evidenced in McClure’s brief interview with one, generally has trouble vocalizing their intent in studying the Little House books, the point of them in their homeschool curriculum, or even the bare bones reasoning for why they make a good immersive unit study for children--it’s rarely more complicated than that they want to role-play Little Gender Roles on the Prairie with their kids.

a genuine hay twist to see us through the Long Winter!

Tangent to the book review, but speaking as the type of homeschooler who had the kids building backyard trebuchets and not the type of homeschooler who named them after Bible characters, the Little House books DO make an excellent, immersive unit study for any age of homeschooler, and an excellent lens through which to study US history and geography. It’s still prairie bonnets and butter churns, but with context and reference books! You do tend to do a lot of activities *with* the Christian survivalists, but you are not *of* them, you know?

I’m sorry, but I’m not buying McClure’s eventual conclusion/explanation that her obsession with Little House is her way of processing the trauma of her mother’s death. Like, her mom wasn’t even that into Little House? I understand that it’s more about how little Wendy felt back then when her mom was alive, but even that wasn’t about her mom; it was about how unashamed little Wendy was in her fandom, and how unabashedly she enacted the role of fan. Like, Wendy, daydreaming self-insert Mary Sue LHOTP fanfic is a deeeeep dive, Girl! If only you’d had LiveJournal back then, you’d have been on top of the world!

McClure didn't love her faux covered wagon camping experience, but I had a ball during mine!

Rather than watching her walk awkwardly and indecisively through the world of Little House, fighting herself every step of the way, I’d rather have seen McClure spend that time trying to process the cringe nature of fandom, and pushing through the discomfort of being objectively not cool in order to enjoy something. Hey, I’ve been there! I was pretty embarrassed at my first Star Trek convention, even though I was enjoying all the activities and everyone else was happy and welcoming and unaffected. I just couldn’t get myself to turn off my own self-judgment and lean into the fun. That’s the kind of thing that I saw with McClure’s descriptions of her visits to the various tourist sites, when she was spending just as much time watching and evaluating fellow fans as she was interesting herself in the site. Girl, just be a fan and enjoy yourself! Put on the prairie bonnet and make a corncob doll! Put your hay twist out on the front room bookshelf where it belongs!

my little homeschooler making a cornhusk doll way back in 2011

Link me to your Little House Time Travel AU fanfic on A03 and I’ll leave you Kudos!

P.S. View all my reviews, particularly Prairie Fires and Caroline.

P.P.S. Want a couple of examples of properly educational ways that the Little House books can be used in homeschooling? Here's a reading comprehension activity for young kids using Little House in the Big Woods. Making taffy lets you do some Farmer Boy LARPing while building the practical life skills of cooking and following instructions. Use a map like this as inspiration to help kids draw and label their own line maps of Laura's travels. My favorite way to homeschool books, though, is to read them together and talk about them a lot and dive deeper into what the kids find interesting, building lots of historical, geographical, and literary context along the way.

P.P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!