On the prairie in southern Minnesota,
In a town of 10,000 people nestled around Lake Okabena –
Okabena is a Dakota word meaning “nesting place of herons.”
Every year, when the lake was free of ice
And the ground mushy with mud,
My sister and our friends would pack a lunch,
Put on our oldest shoes,
And spend one whole day walking around the lake.
We usually lost our shoes, sucked off by the mud.
We couldn’t have had more fun.

Then clomped into the warming house to thaw out and start over.
In the summer, when I wanted to be alone,
I would take my ragged worn copy of Carl Sandburg’s Honey and Salt,
filled with all the wonders of growing up,
and hide in a patch of tall grass by the lake to read the afternoon away.
This is a picture of the sky above Worthington on a perfect summer day.

gave me a book. It was a real book with a hard cover and a beautiful jacket.
I opened it up; WOW! It was blank.
She told me to fill it up, and then write another book...
and another.
She gave me a powerful start
because she saw me in a way I didn’t see myself.

long afternoons reading in a patch of sunlight,
reading curled up in bed late at night
are all memories of the worlds these books opened up to me.
So when it came to choosing a profession,
books and writing were a natural.
When I write, I think of what Richard Peck,
who writes wonderful novels for young adults, said:
"We write by the light of every book we have ever read.”
So all of my past reading goes into each book I write.
This is what my desk looks like when I am writing a book.

that writing is a lot of not writing, too.
It is a lot of staring out a window,
thinking down to the core of your story.
Writing is also telling the truth, even though you may not have written one true thing.
It’s a way to both banish, and understand, your own world.
For that reason, each book is an adventure.
Sometimes I write outside, to collect my thoughts.
Here I am starting a new book,
on a sand dune,
by the shores of Lake Michigan.

For seven days, I walked, up and down,
Through Robert Louis Stevenson's “sapphire blue hills” of Cevennes, France.
Stevenson wrote about this area after riding a donkey through the hills (it took him months!)

If you want to know more about Robert Louis Stevenson,
Look for a copy of “A Child’s Garden of Verses” in your library.

Those thoughts you don’t think to, or don’t want to, tell anyone.
Have conversations with your thoughts.
Finish conversations you never finished.
Put the ending on you would have liked.
And always keep reading.

This is what writers do when they are not thinking!
Meet some of my writer friends - Maryann Macdonald,
Louise Borden, Sally Cook, and Ted and Betsy Lewin.