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Reeve Lindbergh grew up in a household where writing was a way of life. Her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was a well-known author, and her father, Charles Lindbergh, was as respected for his writing as he was as an aviator. “I can’t recall any time during my childhood when one of my parents was not engaged in writing a book,” she says. “This made us believe that the best thing you could do with an interesting idea or experience was to write it down.”
Following this example, Reeve Lindbergh drew on her childhood experience to create many of her memorable books. Inspirational words from her past infuse In Every Tiny Grain of Sand: A Child’s Book of Prayers and Praise, a collection of seventy-seven treasured poems and prayers from many cultures and faiths. “It is a joy to see familiar and beloved words from my own childhood come to life for other children in the presence of such beautiful paintings by four remarkable artists,” she says of the book’s illustrators, Christine Davenier, Bob Graham, Anita Jeram, and Elisa Kleven. About The Circle of Days, an adaptation of the “Canticle of the Sun,” she notes, “I have always loved the simple, strong voice of Saint Francis of Assisi giving thanks for life itself and celebrating everything in existence.” And On Morning Wings, luminously illustrated by Holly Meade, is a gentle adaptation of one of her father’s favorite psalms, words from which he chose to have inscribed on his gravestone.
Reeve Lindbergh’s My Little Grandmother Often Forgets, illustrated by Kathryn Brown, was inspired by her experiences as an adult, watching her mother and her son together. It is a deeply personal and lyrical tale about a grandson and a grandmother affected by memory loss. “When my mother came to live with us on our farm in Vermont, she was old and fragile, with the kind of memory loss that caused her to feel disorientated often,” the author explains. “It was really disconcerting and troubling for my son, as it was for her and for all of us, for a while. Thank goodness, as time went on everybody relaxed and gave up on all this organizing and reminding. Then it was possible to spend time with my mother, just to be with her quietly in a family, all together. I thought this story might mean something to other children and other families confronted by memory loss in an older family member, though I altered it a bit, and made it a rhyming story. I really wanted My Little Grandmother Often Forgets to be fun to read— not a lecture for children on Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, just a story, in rhyme, like all the others I write.”
Reeve Lindbergh, who also wrote Nobody Owns the Sky and My Hippie Grandmother and contributed to When I Was Your Age: Original Stories About Growing Up, an anthology of works by ten award-winning writers, now lives in the remote Northeast Kingdom area of Vermont on a farm with her husband and youngest son.
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