Wendy McClure reads from her book, The Wilder Life.

Where do you write, Wendy?In my office at home, though sometimes I like to take my laptop out to my back porch. I have also written in hotel rooms and I plan on spending a few hours in Sioux Falls working on a fiction project! (Wendy was recently at the South Dakota Festival of Books in Sioux Falls, S.D.) For my book, I definitely needed time to process the experience… at least a few weeks. But I took a great many photos and sometimes made audio notes with a digital recorder, especially when I was traveling alone and couldn’t rely on someone else to jog my memory. Terror inspires me to write! Writing is scary but every day I write I defeat that fear.

Wendy McClure is a children’s book editor who lives in Chicago with her husband, Chris. Her most recent book is The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie. She has been contributed to Writers Block Party on NPR station WBEZ in Chicago and has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.