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So Laurie Lawlor is on the road. She
was in North Dakota for the first time earlier this year (1992),
speaking to 70 reading and math teachers. She has been a guest author
in the little towns connected with Addie Mills, the pioneer girl who
moved from Iowa to South Dakota in Addie Across the Prairie.
Next week, she will be speaking to school groups in communities around
North Dakota -- Minto, Gafton, Thompson, and Mayville/Portland. The
Children's Roundtable of the North Dakota Libraries Association,
received a grant from the North Dakota Humanities Council to sponsor
her trip to this area. .
On Monday, she will do a book signing at the Grand Forks Public Library, starting at 7 p.m. .
Though she has a list of school
appearances several pages long, her favorites are schools like the ones
she will visit here in North Dakota -- places where children rarely
have a chance to meet an author. .
They're so impressed, she says they
sometimes ask her "silly, strange, bizarre things." Such as, "Did you
come here in a limousine?" She laughs, "The fact that you're a human
being surprises them." .
Once past the preliminaries, students
are fascinated with the process of making a story. Often, she says,
they want to know where she gets her ideas. .
And where does she? Her own children
(now in fifth and eighth grade) have supplied many. In return she
sometimes takes them on her trips -- including this one. "Rural schools
are very different from my children's suburban Chicago schools." She
says, "I hope the interviews will give them a different perspective. .
She also gets her ideas from "being around schools." The inspiration for Second Grade Dog
came from Lawlor's 83-pound black Labrador retriever, who "loves kids."
As he walked with her to school and she read the sign, "ABSOLUTELY NO
DOGS ALLOWED," she imagined his disappointment. .
How to Survive Third Grade
was also sparked by contemporary school situations. The book seems so
real that "a number of children have thought it was non-fiction,"
Lawlor says. .
Family Folklore.
The Addie series came out of Lawlor's
family folklore. Her great grandparents started out in Iowa, bought
land in South Dakota, and traveled with five children, in covered
wagons to Dakota Territory. Lawlor who enjoys research so much that she
tends to "over-do it," poked around in family materials and in an oral
history collection in Vermillion, SD. A letter from a great-aunt ended
up giving the book focus -- her memories of the trip over the prairie,
"how lonely and cold it felt," the chokecherries and wildflowers. The
climax in Addie Across the Prairie came from one of the oral histories.
"The woman was all alone when a
prairie fire came," Lawlor says. "When her husband rushed home all that
was left of their things was charred black pieces. Suddenly out of the
well, his wife and baby emerged." She pauses. "The image of a person
coming out of the charred black stayed with me."
This image, and others are the kinds
of things Lawlor shares with the students she meets on her trips. Then
she turns around and peeks into their lives. While she is speaking, her
own two children will be taping interviews with students who are
especially interested in writing. After she gets back home plans to
write a long letter answering each budding author's questions. Who
knows what they might be inspired to try? "It's always good to
stretch," she says.
She began her own process of
stretching soon after finishing a degree in journalism at Northwestern
University in Evanston, Illinois. For 11 years she worked as a
free-lance writer, mostly publishing magazine and newspaper articles.
During that time, she also tried unsuccessfully -- to sell a children's
book. Her determination paid off in 1984 when she sold Addie Across the Prairie, now in its seventh printing.
The sale of her first book left her
"in a rosy haze." But, she says, "the hard work comes when you try to
start up again." Starting up again and again, Lawlor has now sold 10
books.
Interesting as being a children's
author has been though, Lawlor has continued to look a new
possibilities for her life. Her newest stretch has been going back to
school herself, to work on a master's of arts in teaching. Convinced by
school visits that she enjoyed working with children, she was
frustrated about "going into a school and then leaving again."
Now she dreams of being able to set
up writing programs and "help teachers figure out better ways to get
students excited about writing." The academic work has been interesting
but also time consuming. "Want to know how many days and hours I have
left?" she asks laughing.
In some ways, Lawlor's career to date
has turned out to be "surprisingly hard." But the rewards come, too,
sometimes unexpectedly -- like when North Dakota librarians nominated Addie's Dakota Winter
for a Flickertail Award. Or when a girl from London, England wrote to
say she could imagine Addie's prairie even though she had never seen
one.
Unlike her stage struck siblings,
Lawlor never wanted to be famous when she was a child. She didn't even
want to perform "unless I had a bag over my head." But as she has left
the bag behind, she hasn't felt alone. In fact, when she read the oral
histories of people in their 80s and 90s -- people who were children
when Dakota was still a territory -- "I was amazed," she says, "by how
many wonderful stories there are all over the place. Heroic stories,
Ordinary people are famous in their own way." .
Kurtz is a Grand Forks freelance writer and the author of I'm Calling Molly and Ethiopia: Roof of Africa..
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