Claim OwnershipLand of Laura: the Podcast
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Land of Laura is the irreverent yet scholarly podcast about all things Laura Ingalls Wilder. Each episode offers insight from authors, historians, researchers, museum professionals — anyone who has something to contribute to the Laura Ingalls Wilder world. It's a podcast for people who love the Little House books — or are even just interested in them. Every episode brings a new take on something in the Little House world.
21 Episodes
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Who's planning a trip to Pepin? One of the many homesites Laura Ingalls Wilder fans can visit is Laura's birthplace of Pepin, Wisconsin, a charming artistic town on the Great River Road on the Minnesota border. Kitty Latané is a longtime Pepin resident who has been deeply involved with the village of Pepin and Laura Ingalls Wilder's connection there for decades. She even wrote the foreword for the Land of Laura travel guide to Pepin. We're thrilled to have Kitty as this week's podcast guest to talk about her hometown, her role in Pepin's annual Laura Ingalls Wilder Days, and the newest event in Pepin, Home at Laura's Place. ========Pepin, Wisconsin: lauraingallspepin.comLaura Ingalls Wilder Days: lauradays.orgInstagram for T&C Latané: tandclataneLand of Laura Pepin Travel Guide on Amazon
Dr. Beth Tarini was a medical school student when talk turned to scarlet fever. Scarlet fever — that's what made Mary Ingalls go blind, she thought. But her medical training had already taught her that wasn't possible. She started to wonder — what did cause Mary's blindness? As she became a doctor, the question stayed in her mind.It would take another decade, but in 2012, working with research assistant Sarah Allexan — today a physician — they came up with an answer to that question that was so plausible, they co-wrote an article about it that was published in the medical journal Pediatrics in 2013. Episode 20 of Land of Laura welcomes guests Dr. Beth Tarini and Dr. Sarah Allexan to look back on that article, their collaboration on it, and the historical and medical research that led to their conclusion on what exactly may have caused Mary Ingalls to go blind.Pediatrics: Blindness in Walnut Grove: How Did Mary Ingalls Lose Her Sight?https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/131/3/404/31000/Blindness-in-Walnut-Grove-How-Did-Mary-Ingalls?redirectedFrom=fulltext=================Little House seriesLittle House on the PrairieLaura Ingalls WilderRose Wilder Lanescarlet feverMary Ingalls blind
Some of us are scholars, some of us are creative, and some of us are both. Julia Park Tracey, Writer incorporated her Laura Ingalls Wilder scholarship into her latest book, the adult novel WHOA, NELLY: A LOVE STORY WITH FOOTNOTES. What happens when an introverted librarian boards a train in California to meet up with like-minded fans in De Smet, South Dakota? On episode 19 author, journalist, and poet Julia Park Tracey tells us what we can expect.Whoa, Nelly! A Love Story with FootnotesFind Julia on social media:Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/juliaparktraceywriterInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/juliaparktracey/Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@juliaparktraceyThreads: https://www.threads.com/@juliaparktraceyBlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/juliaparktracey.bsky.social
When author Sarah Miller heard the Little House audiobooks as an adult, she began to see Caroline Ingalls in a different way. In 2018 she published CAROLINE, a look at Laura Ingalls Wilder's book LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE from the perspective of the woman who held it all together: her mother, Caroline Ingalls.http://www.sarahmillerbooks.com/
Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie (Episode 6), brings her 30 years of experience in children's publishing to another visit to the Land of Laura studio. In an overview over two episodes, she'll orient us to the state of quality children's literature when Laura Ingalls Wilder (and Rose Wilder Lane) came on the scene. (Hint: it didn't exactly exist.) She'll also introduce us to all four of Laura's editors, including badass Ursula Nordstrom. She'll tell us about the ongoing branding and expansion of the Little House series that started in the 1990s and share her opinion on which Little House book is most likely to show up as a horror movie.
Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie (Episode 6), brings her 30 years of experience in children's publishing to another visit to the Land of Laura studio. In an overview over two thirty-minute episodes, she'll orient us to the state of quality children's literature when Laura Ingalls Wilder (and Rose Wilder Lane) came on the scene. (Hint: it didn't exactly exist.) She'll also introduce us to all four of Laura's editors, including badass Ursula Nordstrom. She'll tell us about the ongoing branding and expansion of the Little House series that started in the 1990s and share her opinion on which Little House book is most likely to show up as a horror movie.
For over fifty years, readers of Laura Ingalls Wilder's The First Four Years have found the book ... confusing. Why doesn't it sound like the other Little House books? Does it belong with the rest of the series? Why wasn't it published in Wilder's lifetime? Welcome to part 2 of our interview with Pamela Smith Hill about her book Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books. This episode is all about when, and why, The First Four Years might have been written.
With the massive project of editing and annotating the unpublished memoir Pioneer Girl behind her, Pamela Smith Hill thought she was done writing about Laura Ingalls Wilder. Alas, she was not. Last year she released Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books. The title came directly from the speech Wilder herself gave at the Detroit book Fair in 1937, which we told you all about back in Episode 10. In today’s episode, Pamela talks to Land of Laura about what prompted her to write the book, racism on the prairie, and the enduring legacy of the Little House books as classic American literature.
What exactly is girls’ literature? What do we learn about Laura Ingalls Wilder when we study her work critically? What problems are inherent in being protective of "my" Laura?And what if there's more than one Laura? Today's guest, Dawn Sardella-Ayres, Ph.D, is a scholar in girls' literature who has written extensively about Louisa May Alcott, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. She was a contributor to the 2019 essay collection Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond. For the past few years she’s been teaching virtual girls' literature classes through the Newberry Library in Chicago. Her next class on Laura Ingalls Wilder starts in March 2026. Girls Lit Reading Group (https://hollinsgirlslit.wordpress.com/)
Dr. Kelly Ferguson has been entertaining Laura fans since 2011 with her hilarious book MY LIFE AS LAURA: HOW I SEARCHED FOR LAURA INGALLS WILDER AND FOUND MYSELF. But writing about Laura had a way of breaking her heart, and fifteen years later, she's embraced a new affinity for Rose Wilder Lane. Kelly's substack, Albaniac, details her own travels to Rose's onetime home and shares interviews with the top minds in Rose Wilder Lane scholarship. Today, Land of Laura talks to Kelly about the book, her heartbreak with Laura, and finding her way to Albania.
At its core, the Land of Laura podcast is about celebrating the people in world of Laura Ingalls Wilder: the researchers, the museum professionals, the historians, the academics, the fans ... all of us. But what exactly is it about Laura Ingalls Wilder that brings us all together when we're all so different? New York City–based filmmaker Amy Elliott asked herself that questions, and decided she wanted to answer it in film. She's just finishing up filming for Girls Gone Wilder, a documentary that explores the culture of Laura Ingalls Wilder fandom. We're so excited to have her as this week's guest in the Land of Laura studio.
In 1937, when she was 70 years old, Laura Ingalls Wilder traveled to Detroit to deliver a speech that would forever after be known as her "Detroit Book Fair Speech." What was the Detroit Book Fair? What was in her speech? Why is this speech considered so integral to her career? Eddie Higgins returns to the podcast with answers to all of this and more. Then, eavesdrop on our field trip to the Detroit Public Library, home of one of the most robust collections of Laura Ingalls Wilder artifacts.
Chris Czajka's day job is with WNET in New York City, and in 2020 he developed and produced Laura Ingalls Wilder: Prairie to Page as part of PBS's American Masters series. But that's only a smidge of his Little House involvement. Tune in to find out all of the ways Little House — both the book series and the TV show — has found its way into his life.
It's a special Thanksgiving episode with the origin story of Pamela Smith Hill, a longtime literary fixture in the world of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Hill's biography Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life was published in 2007 by the South Dakota Historical Society Press. She went on to act as editor and annotator of Pioneer Girl, Wilder's previously unpublished memoir that became an unexpected national bestseller in 2014, also with SDHS Press. Her latest book is Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books, published in July 2025 by University of Nebraska Press.
Cindy Wilson couldn’t get the question out of her head: Was the Long Winter really as bad as Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote in her book? Answering that question—from trains to food to fuel—resulted in a book, The Beautiful Snow. Cindy visits the podcast to tell us all about it.
Our conversation with author and children's book editor Wendy McClure includes her book The Wilder Life, the hilarity of 1970s Weight Watchers recipes, and encounters with Melissa Gilbert.
Historic interpreter Laura Keyes joins the podcast to talk about Little House fashion — dresses in particular — with a special emphasis on those in Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years. Laura Keyes won the Mary Todd Lincoln Oratory Award at Kentucky's Lincoln Days in 2025.
Though they both live in the United States now, Brits Katy Bowman and Eddie Higgins grew up reading the Little House books in England, where the meaning of Laura Ingalls Wilder's words wasn't always straightforward. Join us as the two Brits trade stories about what might have gotten lost in translation. Voracious, indeed!
Blizzards and tornadoes and grasshopper weather ... the Little House® books are full of weather events. They're also based on real life, so did this weather really happen? Meteorologist and climatologist Barb Boustead talks about her just-published book, Wilder Weather, which connects the weather mentioned in the Little House® series with actual, historical weather events.
Anyone who's done any research beyond simply reading the Little House books knows the name William Anderson. But how did the preeminent biographer of Laura Ingalls Wilder get his start? Here it is, William Anderson's Little House origin story, in his own words.
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Great podcast! I so look forward to new episodes every week.
I loved this so much! Looking forward to more episodes with William Anderson.