Nancy McCabe directs the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford and teaches in the low residency MFA program at the Spalding University School of Creative and Professional Writing. She is the author of four memoirs about a range of topics: adoption and heritage; violence against women, memory, and creativity; travel, childhood, reading, and children’s literature. Nancy’s essays have won a Pushcart prize and made the Best American Essays Notable List five times. Her work has also made the Notable List for Best American Nonrequired Reading.
Nancy’s hybrid book From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood (Missouri 2014) brings together travel writing, memoir, and literary criticism. It is the pick for this month’s PA Wilds Book Club, meeting Sunday, March 19 at 2pm at Watershed Books.
“A typical travel book takes readers along on a trip with the author, but a great travel book does much more than that, inviting readers along on a mental and spiritual journey as well. This distinction is what separates Nancy McCabe’s From Little Houses to Little Women from the typical and allows it to take its place not only as a great travel book but also as a memoir about the children’s books that have shaped all of our imaginations.
“McCabe, who grew up in Kansas just a few hours from the Ingalls family’s home in Little House on the Prairie, always felt a deep connection with Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series. McCabe read Little House on the Prairie during her childhood and visited Wilder sites around the Midwest with her aunt when she was thirteen. But then she didn’t read the series again until she decided to revisit in adulthood the books that had so influenced her childhood. It was this decision that ultimately sparked her desire to visit the places that inspired many of her childhood favorites, taking her on a journey that included stops in the Missouri of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Minnesota of Maud Hart Lovelace, the Massachusetts of Louisa May Alcott, and even the Canada of Lucy Maud Montgomery.” (from the description)