I was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and lived my first almost-seven years in a little yellow house on a dead-end dirt road seven miles north of town. We didn’t have a TV. My mom, who has her master’s in English, tended a massive garden and put up nearly 80 quarts of pickles every year, until I started kindergarten and she went back to teaching. My dad worked at the community college, teaching and directing plays. I learned to cross-country ski on a pair of six-inch wide red plastic skis, to ice skate, to weed a garden, to identify wildflowers, to carry and stack wood for the stove that kept our house heated. Mostly, though, I spent my time with my older brother, inventing worlds and stories. Inspired by our visits to my dad’s theater, we staged plays, charging my parents each a dime to attend performances.

Love of books was passed on through the generations as surely as nearsightedness and curly hair. Trips to the library were weekly occurrences. I remember the children’s section at the Grand Rapids Public Library at that time, a deliciously private room in the basement (kids only!) with a big red carpeted “stage” that filled the center of it, to climb on and sit and page through books.

Through family moves to Rhinelander, Wisconsin, when I was in first grade, and then to a small farm town in northern Illinois, when I was in fourth, libraries and books were a constant, plus, I’d also started to write – a little something every day, short stories, journals, poems and plays. Then, on my first day of high school, my mom’s sister was walking down a street in Chicago when a man knocked her to the ground for the four dollars in her purse. The back of her head struck the pavement. She never regained consciousness; two days later, she was dead. From then on, every day was lived in delicate denial of my extended family’s collective grief, and in careful avoidance of my mom’s intense mourning.

I soon began what seemed to me a very natural form of escape: writing my first historical novel, a romantic tale of a young girl in Chicago who elopes to Wisconsin with a handsome older man.

I wrote 48 chapters in spiral notebooks my freshman year. By my sophomore year, I had a boyfriend and had decided to put away childish things (like writing novels in notebooks).

But, when I was fifteen, we moved again, this time to Brookings, South Dakota, and, in the fall of my senior year, my dad, who worked for the South Dakota Humanities Council, took me to meet the writer Frederick Manfred at Fred’s home, called Roundwind, on the prairie near Luverne, Minnesota. I got to see the tower in which Fred did his writing, the rows of books lining the shelves throughout his home and office, and even one of his typed manuscripts, with penciled corrections, boxed up and ready to send off to his editor. He told me that, if I sent him some of my writing, he would read it. Back home, I typed up some pages from my old novel. A week later, the phone rang early on a Saturday morning, and it was Fred Manfred, calling to say that he had read my work. He said I was a good writer, and that, if I kept at it, I would be published by the time I was thirty.

Thirty? I thought. I’m going to live to be thirty?

But the experience was inspiring. A few months later, I started writing another novel. By the summer after my junior year of college at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, I had a finished book, a long tale of life in a small Minnesota town in 1905. I was a psychology major, and had planned to pursue a career as a therapist, but, by the time I finished my novel, I was more involved in studying American history and literature, and I knew that I really wanted to be a writer – of historical fiction.