Laura Ingalls Wilder Studies: The First Four Years
Online | Registration opens 1/6/2025 12:00 AM CST
Together we’ll read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The First Four Years and follow Laura’s and Almanzo’s early years of marriage in the Dakota prairies of the mid-1880s. The story captures the couple’s struggles as they build a homestead, face harsh weather, illness and financial setbacks. Taken from a found draft manuscript and published posthumously, this book has a completely different tone from the “Little House” series. Let’s see what the Laura scholars have to say.
Shanley Wells Rau
Shanley Wells-Rau spent 20 years as a writer and editor in the corporate world before starting graduate work at Oklahoma State University, where she served as an editorial assistant for Cimarron Review and taught composition. She completed her MFA in Poetry in 2018. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New Territory, Poetry Quarterly, Plants & Poetry and Bluestem Magazine, among others. She is a docent-in-training at the Nature Conservancy’s Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Osage County, Okla. She also serves as a reader for Gold Wake Press, an independent literary publisher. She teaches literature and creative writing part-time and lives on a windy hill outside Ponca City with her husband and dog.