I grew up in the late 1940s and early 1950s in a small Midwestern town, Rice Lake, Wisconsin. My dad was a lawyer, my mother a former high school English teacher, both of them community leaders very interested in politics.
We lived on the edge of town, next to farmers’ fields, where cows and horses were pastured. In our own yard were lots of wild of rabbits. When I was a toddler, I ran after them with a salt shaker in hand, hoping to pour salt on their tails. This, I was told, would tame them. But I was never fast enough to catch them.
My big sister, Jennifer, was six years older than me. As a three and four-year old, I broke Jennifer’s toys trying to figure out how they worked. We had no near neighbors, only horses and cows. I had no playmates but Jennifer, who never wanted to play with me. One time when she wouldn’t, I hit her over the head with the baseball bat our grandpa had made us. I was only four. Afterward, I hid in the fields for quite a while for fear of getting punished, planning to never go home again.
My parents punished Jennifer and me both. It was good for me our grandfather lived with us, taught me many things, and never punished me.
In the 1880s, when he was 15, my grandfather, Oscar Lofgren, immigrated from Sweden to the United States. When I was a child, he was in his seventies. He raised a big vegetable garden in our back yard. In those days, before people had home freezers and grocery stores sold frozen food, my mother spent her summers hot and steamy in our kitchen, canning-- sterilizing huge batches of vegetables in big pots on the stove and packing them in shining glass jars so we’d have healthy home-grown food to eat in the winter.
Before I ever started school, my grandfather taught me Swedish and told me many stories about Sweden, not all true—for instance, he claimed that in Sweden children all ate standing up, so for awhile I ate standing up too. He also told me that gremlins lived in our house—I wasn’t sure if the gremlins were Swedish or not, but I knew that they stayed out of sight , and made off into the furnace heating ducts in the floors with any things we lost track of. To this day, when I’m in my seventies myself, I still find it hard to look for anything I’ve misplaced. I’m pretty sure it’s gone forever. Gremlins have taken it.
My grandpa had a workshop on our land. Before I ever went to school, I spent many hours there with him. My parents called his workshop the "Monkey House," I kept expecting to see monkeys there, but was always disappointed. There weren’t any.
The Monkey House was my grandpa’s place for "monkeying around." I watched him working there, doing carpentry and, most interesting, working on his forge, where over a coal fire he heated iron until it was red hot, then with a huge heavy hammer, beat it over and over again on an anvil until it took the shape he wanted. He hammered out many and beautiful and useful things for us. Before he retired to live with us, he’d made his living by blacksmithing, and shoeing horses.
Until the 1920s, the US had only very few cars. Horses carried everything and because the roads were hard on their feet, they needed to have metal shoes nailed onto their hooves. That was one of my grandpa's jobs.
By the time I was born, my family had a car--actually two of them. And we had radios, two of them also, that we listened to through a lot of crackly noise called "static." Television had been invented, but we didn't have a TV until I got to be nine.
I was very excited when our first TV was delivered to the house. I thought it was going to be wonderful to see Superman fly for the first time. But after I saw him on TV, I found that in fact actually he was much exciting on the radio. On the radio he was the Superman I created, flying in my own imagined skies.
Computers hadn't been invented when I was young. I saw my first one in 1962—one that occupied a good-sized room at Harvard University in Massachuetts, where I went to college.
In high school my world had already gotten big in many ways.
My parents campaigned for John Kennedy for president in 1960. I was part of the Democratic greeting party in Rice Lake for him and his wife, Jackie, when he was campaigning. My job at 15 was to pin a corsage on Jackie. I had no idea what to do when she refused to take it.
Where was I supposed to put the rejected item I was carrying around? I wanted to drop it somewhere, but where?
Jack and Jackie were traveling by small plane from one Wisconsin town to the next. I suppose Jackie was offered a corsage in each little town, and if she’d accepted her fine New York or Boston clothes would have wound up mostly holes.
At ten, I first became very involved in politics, when my parents shared their passion aned commitment to it when they opposed our infamous Wisconsin Senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, who claimed that many Hollywood writers and stars, many US diplomats, and many officers in the U.S. Army were Communists. According to McCarthy, the people he accused out to destroy our country.
Because of McCarthy, in the early 1950s thousands of Americans McCarthy falsely accused of being traitors to the U.S. lost their jobs. My mother signed a protest letter denouncing McCarthy for the liar he was. Her brother, my uncle Glen, an engineer, got scared when she told him.
“You denounced McCarthy!” he told her,not at all pleased. "I haven’t told you because I’m not allowed to tell. But I have a big government job right now, building pumps on a nuclear submarine. I have a top security clearance. If McCarthy finds out my sister demounced him, he’ll get me fired!”
Luckily in 1954 there were hearings broadcast on national TV—McCarthy versus the U.S. Army--that showed the U.S. and the world that McCarthy was a fraud. My uncle didn’t lose his job.
Suddenly nobody cared any more what McCarthy said. With no attention from the US Sentaor, only condemnation, he turned to drinking so much alcohol that he destroyed not others, but his own liver, He soon died, gone from being a big, powerful and very dangerous Somebody to a Nobody in a few short years.
Soon, McCarthy was forgotten and then everybody in the country was watching TV news, following the Civil Rights movement as African-Americans demanded full rights of voting, education, and citizenship. I was in awe at the strength of African-Americans who refused to turn to violence when they were violently and brutally attacked by white mobs across the South.
A very few years later, I was a student at Harvard University, where I heard Martin Luther King speak. He was a very sensible man, I thought. Because of him, I became a "freedom rider" trying to do my small part to bring the cruel and brutal world of segregation to an end. Then and later, when I demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and counter-protesters threw raw eggs at me that broke and dripped down my best dress, I began to understand how powerfully hatred, as well as heroism, shape the world.
In my Wisconsin childhood, I’d loved as much as woods and lakes and animals, the Rice Lake Public Library, with its thousands of books, many of them re-covered with leather bindings, and smelling of aged paper, so that I breathed history as I read.
Because of reading and loving books, I started to write stories. I admired writers tremendously. They understood so much. They were almost like God! Unlike most other adults, who probably understood the world but never explained it to me—writers of books made the world both exciting and clear. By the age of nine, I had decided to be a writer one day. If only I was good enough. I worried about that a lot. Would I ever be good enough?
After university, I worked in New York City for Harcourt Brace, a distinguished publishing house, and then studied and got an advanced degree at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. .After living in Iowa City, I moved to Berkeley, California, then returned for five more years to New York City, where I work for literary agents and a book club, writing about other people’s new best sellers. Some of their books were very good—but writing about them left me very little time to write my own.
In 1983 I moved to a Central American mountain village, Panajachel, Guatemala where I hoped could make a living from my own books, not from reading other people’s.
Panajachel, a Mayan town of 6,000 in 1983, now is home to 18,000 people. It’s on the shore of a lake that’s been called the most beautiful in the world --Atitlán, sometimes wild and dangerous, sometimes still and shining, forming an perfect mirror for three huge volcanos which watch over it from its south shore.
In between stays in New York, Virginia and Oregon, I’ve lived mostly in Panajachel for many years.
When I first arrived in Guatemala in 1983, the country was in the middle of a brutal civil war. In it, thousands of innocent people mostly in rural areas, died. Thousands of guerrilla fighters risked their lives hoping to create a new honest government. Many other people didn’t want to be part of the war on either side. One Mayan man from a country town told me his view: “The guerrillas are the poor who rip off the poor.”
Desperate and hungry fighters hoping to topple the corrupt goverment for a new government hid in the mountains. They came down to remote Mayan farming villages demanding to be fed, threatening to kill the villagers if they didn’t provide food. After the guerrillas got food, they forced villagers to listen to anti-government speeches against the government before fleeing to their mountain hideouts.
A day or two later, the government soldiers would arrive at the village the guerrillas had visited, often killing everyone in it in down to the smallest children for “supporting the enemy.” When the war finally ended, the guerrilla fighters, the revolutionaries, were defeated, with some disgraceful help from the U.S. The only good result was that the killing stopped.
At the end of the war, I’d been living more in the United States than in Guatemala. I gave a lot of talks to children at US schools about my fist books. I married my husband, Bill Cherry, who I met when he was working in Washington, D.C. as a staff director for an agriculture subcommittee in the U.S. Congress. We fell in love. Bill retired and moved to Panajachel with me.
With the encouragement of an honest new mayor, we worked to help Panajachel by creating a modern library for the town. At the beginning of our effort, the existing library, which had been for ten years during the Civil War, had only about 15 useful books amid old government propaganda pamphlets and mountains of dust.
Thanks to our work, and donations from Europe and from all over the United States (especially from schools), the new library of Panajachel now immaculaely clean, has 15,000 books in Spanish for readers from toddlers to university students and adults. In growing the library collection, we made sure to include in it the many books that Guatemalans have written about its terrible Civil War.
Because of all that that good libraries have meant to me, I wanted to help the children of Panajachel have the same chance to learn from books that I’d had. Books open the world to us. Libraries and education change lives for the better. War almost never does.
Like most writers, I’ve learned even more from experience than from books. That’s meant learning from pain as well as pleasure, from failure and mistakes, as much as success. Learning about and feeling many people’s struggles for justice in small and big ways, is what moves me most as a writer.
