All About Writing The Blue Ghost

The author, Marion Dane Bauer, answers these questions about writing The Blue Ghost and where a writer's ideas come from:

Was Gran’s cabin inspired by a cabin you’ve visited?

It was, probably more than anything, inspired by an old log cabin in the mountains of Colorado I lived in for a summer when I was twenty. It had been built by original settlers, then added onto and added onto until the original cabin was impossible to distinguish. There were even two separate upstairs that had to be reached by different stairs. You couldn’t get from one set of upstairs rooms to the other without going down and climbing the other staircase. Now that I think about it, there may be more stories residing in that old house.

Does your family tell stories about connections?

My mother used to tell stories about her family, her mother’s father, who brought a colony from England to Minnesota. (I wrote about him in my Dear America novel, Land of the Buffalo Bones.) She told of her mother’s years of teaching in a one-room school and of her homesteading grandfather, her father’s father, who moved across the country homesteading in different places until he finally reached Minnesota, where he settled and stayed. My father had almost no stories to tell about his family, so I felt closer to my mother’s people. Stories brought them alive, even the ones I never knew.