Helen Frost

The summer before I started second grade, my family moved from South Dakota to Oregon. There were nine people in our family that summer (ten when we made the return trip the following year). We packed everything we needed for the year into a big homemade trailer we called “the monster”; we hitched the monster to our station wagon, and our parents told us to pile in. We had rules to help us figure out whose turn it was to have “the big seat, window,” who would sit in the “small seat, middle,” and who would scrunch into the tiny space in the “way back”. I was considered one of the little kids, so I usually had to sit in the way back with my two younger sisters — that is, until I got carsick and then I got to move up to the most coveted place of all — front seat, window! Each evening we’d pull into a campground in the Badlands, the Black Hills, Yellowstone, or, if the day ended where there was nowhere quite so spectacular to spend the night, we’d stop at a small campground at the end of a dirt road, open up the trailer, and pull the tent over the top. We’d cook hot dogs over a campfire, and later we’d burn marshmallows, pull off the black outside crust, and almost always get the gooey inside part in someone’s hair.
Sometimes Dad told us stories as we settled down to sleep. My dreams included the grizzly bear that tried to get our picnic, my grandmother’s yellow apron, the turtle shell I had to leave behind in the old house, and my sister’s jackknife, which I wished was mine.

 

That’s how I became a writer. I didn’t know it at the time, but all those things were accumulating somewhere inside me. I kept on living. I loved to travel, think, swim, sing, learn, canoe, write, argue, sew, play Frisbee, play Clue, play the piano, play softball, play with dolls, daydream, read, go fishing, climb trees. Do you notice that playing and daydreaming were as important in my childhood as reading and writing?
Now when I sit down to write, I don’t have to make up too many details. If one of my characters has an argument with her little sister, I pretty much know how it might go. If my stories take me to the isle of Mingulay or to a small town in Alaska, a fifth grade classroom or a high school cafeteria, I know those places because I’ve been there at some time in my life. The things I don’t remember I can find out because I still love to learn. Or I can make them up, because I still love to play.

 

Helen Frost was born in 1949 in South Dakota, the fifth of ten children. Ancestors that she knows of came from Scotland, Canada, Denmark, and Norway. Helen herself has lived in South Dakota, Oregon, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, Scotland, Colorado, Alaska, California, and Indiana. She currently lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with her family.