My dad also told us the story of the carnival that went through town in the 1930s with the exhibit of the body of John Wilkes Booth. He was skeptical that it was really the body of John Wilkes Booth, but it makes for a fascinating story, as does the story that Claudia Kennedy, the first three-star general in the history of the U.S. Army, told me. She was living on an army base, in a house in Washington, D.C., that had once been a courthouse and prison. Not just any courthouse and prison, but the one where the Lincoln conspirators were imprisoned and tried. She swears that home is haunted by the ghost of Mary Surratt. You better believe I use this story. From that courthouse, the conspirators walked out to be hanged in an area that is now a tennis court—and that I stared at in mesmerized horror.

Finally, as a native of Walnut Grove, Minnesota (the little town where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in On the Banks of Plum Creek and at the beginning of By the Shores of Silver Lake) I always tell the audience about my Wilder connection. I particularly love to booktalk Searching for Laura Ingalls: A Reader's Journey by Kathryn Lasky and Meribah Knight.