Patricia MacLachlan

ELYSIA CONNER

For the Star-Tribune

Patricia MacLachlan was about 5 years old when she gathered dirt from the prairie into a small plastic bag before her family moved from Cheyenne. The Wyoming native and author of many award-winning books keeps that bag of dirt on her desk where she writes.

“Wherever I go, I’ll have this,” she remembers thinking.

Her family loved to drive through the prairie, and she’d asked her father to stop so she could pick up some dirt.

“Somehow I knew then that it was important in some way,” she said.

Wyoming has inspired many of her numerous books loved by generations of children, including the Newbery Medal-winning “Sarah, Plain and Tall.” “Prairie Days,” set for release in May, is all about memories of her first home in Wyoming.

Wyoming has remained a major part of her life and work.

“Well, I think it’s because it was my first home,” MacLachlan said. “But it’s totally beautiful in a dramatic and yet barren kind of way. And I love the stretches of the land, and in a sense, they give me comfort when I go back there and see those stretches of land, and I think it kind of symbolizes the prairie.”

Wyoming inspiration

Kids from all over write to MacLachlan, and many ask her where she was born and what it means to her, she said.

“Sarah, Plain and Tall” is based on her great-great-grandfather and stepgreat-grandmother, who joined his family on the prairie.

“So most of my writing is quite personal,” she said.

In her 1998 book, “What You Know First,” a young girl leaving the prairie takes some dirt like MacLachlan did when her family moved to Minnesota.

“I think you always remember what you know first,” she said.

MacLachlan sometimes shows her bag of dirt from the prairie to students she speaks to.

“Kids are really interested about where you’re born and how you feel about leaving and how you go back in other ways, like writing about it. They really understand that.”

A Wyoming group of children she visited mailed her a bag of dirt, a gift she treasures, she said. She’s kept other

Author remains INSPIRED by native Wyoming

Patricia MacLachlan continues to write stories for children

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO BY JOHN MACLACHLAN Cheyenne native Patricia MacLachlan is known for award-winning children’s books, including “Sarah, Plain and Tall.” The Newbery Medal-winning book is among many of her books inspired by Wyoming.

bags that children have sent over the years as well.

Her upcoming “Prairie Days” describes her memories like horses, prairie animals, drives in her family’s old gray car and towns with names those in Wyoming know, like Spotted Horse and Sunrise. She misses Wyoming every day, but she lives near the ocean, which o ers a view that almost looks like the prairie.

“It stretches out,” she said.

Wyoming even comes into how MacLachlan writes.

“I think my writing is pretty bareboned when I write about the prairie. It’s my tribute to the prairie, because it’s a bare-boned place.”

She was a teacher before she began in her thirties to write books on a typewriter.

“And now it’s like a piece of my past coming back, that’s kind of interesting,” she said.

She thinks she learned to write first about the Western landscape settings and kept her spare way of writing.

“I think it is style, because I have a bit of a simple way of writing,” she said. “I think, as I look at other writers, mine is kind of simple and almost young — younger than I am. Or maybe it’s my age, and I just am looking back. I’ve never figured that out. But I think it does a ect my writing. And when I write about the prairie, it’s certainly the prairie, because I know it.”

Constant ideas

MacLachlan hasn’t let becoming legally blind stop her from writing. In fact, she thinks she’s even writing more now.

“So I kind of bring the world in, since I can’t get out and drive.”

The 81-year-old never runs out of ideas for books, and retirement is nowhere in her plans.

“I have eight books coming out in the next couple of years. What do you think about that for an old blind woman?”

At her mountain home in Massachusetts, she still chases bears from the bird feeder.

“I’m very brave,” she laughed. “It’s probably because I’m blind.”

MacLachlan’s 2017 picture book “Someone Like Me” tells about the way she was as a child and experiences that later helped her become a writer. She’d sit under the table during dinners and listen to the grownups’ secret conversations, for instance.

“And children like that, because they see themselves there somewhere, you know, they know secrets.”

The book shares MacLachlan’s lifelong love for reading. Her mother would walk her home from the library with a hand on her shoulder to safely cross streets as she read the books, she recalled.

“And so my parents had a lot to do with me actually being able to read everything I wanted to. And nothing was something I couldn’t read. I could read anything; but we could talk about it, if it was a di cult subject. Oh my God, those are funny times, too.”

MacLachlan finds endless inspiration for her novels and picture books for