I go to visit my mother in San Francisco every couple of years. In anticipation of one of my visits, she had cleaned out her closet and sorted all the things she had kept from the growing-up years of her four children. My pile of memorabilia was a treasure trove to me: all the letters I had ever written to my mother, photographs, a music box, a necklace that I had made in second grade for her, and two very special books.

The first book was one my mother must have read to me a thousand times when I was little: a pop-up edition published by E.P.Dutton & Co. (no date) of Winnie-the-Pooh and Eeyore’s Tail by A.A.Milne. It has a spiral binding and cardboard covers and boasts that it is a “new full color [sic] edition with four pop-ups”. It begins: “The old grey donkey, Eeyore, stood by himself in a thistly corner of the forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “In as much as which?” – and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about.” I love that beginning. It makes me wonder how much that book has to do with how I write now.

I suspect the second book my mother saved for me has even more to do with how I write now. It is the first real book ever given to me to read to myself. It was Christmas 1953 and I had only just turned eight. I remember distinctly that I was not overly pleased to get a book for Christmas, a book 238 pages long with hardly any pictures, certainly nothing in colour. I was not a precocious child. I could read perfectly well, but I avoided it as soon a something better came along. Even though I knew that the author of this book was my grandmother’s friend, whom I had met several times, I couldn’t give two hoots about it or her. Finally, my parents made me sit and read non-stop for at least a half-an-hour every day until I finished the book. after the first few forced sessions, I was sucked in and didn’t need to be reminded to read. The book was Little House in the Big Woods, originally published in 1932. It was the first of the Little House series that made my grandmother’s friend, Laura Ingalls Wilder, famous. But, the only thing I remember about the author was that she was very, very old. In fact, Wikepedia says she was almost 90 in 1953.

For a person who remembers being ambivalent about this book, I was amazed to find, when I re-read it last week for the first time since 1953, that I remembered almost every word of it.  And I was amazed to see how important the detailed stories about a small family surviving pioneer life in Wisconsin were to me. One reason may be that we had a pioneer log cabin just like the little house in the book in our back yard. It had a heritage trust covenant on it and we were not allowed to touch it, except to protect it. I longed to play in it, but I was really only allowed to look. Ms Wilder’s book allowed me to put people into our little house and to imagine the life there. It allowed me to imagine bears and wolves and deer and even Indians, who I already knew about since another of our friends had an Illiniwek burial mound in their back yard. The stories in the book were so vivid because they were real. In fact, they were exact descriptions of how to do things like make a hat out of straw, or stick a pig, or smoke venison, or churn butter, or make soap, or, best of all, tap a tree for maple sugar. It does not matter than none of the trees in our yard were maple trees, they all got tapped by an eight-year-old to see if sugar would come out.  This book taught me to imagine the lives of others, and it made me infinitely curious about the way people lived and the way they did things.

Other authors, who came much later into my consciousness, and whom I have always assumed were of great importance to and influenced me more than any other authors were Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner. The things I like most about all those writers are the details with which they describe the lives of their characters, the way they revealed the characters by showing what they can do, how Nick, for instance, could spin a fly in “Big, Two Hearted River”, how Ma made the stew in an unemployed workers camp in Grapes of Wrath, how Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy went after Tommy’s Turl in “Was”. These authors show. They don’t tell. And, whole worlds are revealed.

When I work with people, I get them talking by asking them to tell me how they do something. With Daryl Tonkin, who wasn’t sure he was so good at telling stories, I put him at his ease and at the same time learned how he organised a story and what words he used, by asking him to explain the skills and tools needed to be a tree faller. With Bette, who did not see the reason for telling much about her mother since her mother had no real interest in politics, I asked her to tell me what her mother cooked her large family for dinner during the depression, where the food came from and how she got it when there was no money coming into the household. Bette gave me enough information for three chapters without realising it. It is the detail of people’s lives that make the stories of these two characters so readable and full of meaning.

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder was the beginning of this great curiosity for me. Once I read her book, I became an enthusiastic reader and read every pioneer and Indian book I could get my hands on as a kid. And there were plenty. Two years later I read Gone with the Wind, which I thought was the fattest book ever written, and after that I felt I could read anything put in front of me. Which I did.

But, when I began writing my own books, I went back to the lessons I learned about writing in that very first book my parents gave me in 1953. Isn’t it a wonder that my first real book set me on a path from which I never wavered? I would not have discovered this if my mother hadn’t saved Little House in the Big Woods for me and if I hadn’t picked that old book off my shelf to read when the State Library’s Summer Read program encouraged me to think about my first book.