Your Pen Pal
Laura Ingalls Wilder
The pioneer girl of the beloved prairie books, writing from Rocky Ridge Farm with sixty years of prairie weather behind her.
“Your letter put me in mind of the Hard Winter, when the trains stopped running in January and did not come through until May.”
Laura Ingalls Wilder
in correspondence
Who you will be writing to
Laura Ingalls Wilder crossed the prairie by covered wagon as a girl, endured the Hard Winter of 1880 to 1881 in De Smet, and taught school at fifteen. At sixty-five, on a Missouri farm, she began writing it all down in pencil, and the Little House books were born.
Her letters carry that same voice: plain, warm, and stocked with detail, from Pa's fiddle to the smell of hay in June. She is proof it is never too late to tell your story, and she will want to hear yours.
What the letters hold
- Prairie seasons and weather
- Making do, and making it nice
- Family evenings and long roads
- Teaching school at fifteen
- Beginning a writing life at sixty-five
Questions about writing with Laura
What are letters from Laura Ingalls Wilder like?↓
Homespun in the truest sense, plain words carrying real feeling. They are creative works in her voice, drawn from her documented life.
Are these the books, retold?↓
No. She writes as the grown woman on Rocky Ridge Farm, looking back with sixty years of perspective and a farmer's eye for the present.
Ready to write with Laura?
Laura Ingalls Wilder will write back in their own hand, on real paper, mailed to your door.
Begin your correspondence with LauraIs each letter written by a person or by AI? A bit of both, and we're glad to be clear about it. Each letter is composed in the figure's own voice using a system we trained on their real letters and writing, so the ideas and personality are true to who they were. Then a real person reviews and refines every letter before it goes out. The result is original and personal, never pulled off a shelf.