This is an IHeart podcast.

This is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. And today we have a story

from Leslie Layland Fields. She's an author, a speaker, and a teacher, and she lives in

Kodiak, Alaska. This is the story of how she came to write her first memoir, something she thought

she'd never do. Here's Leslie.

This is the story of a book. Really, it's the story of writing a book I never wanted to write.

It's the story of surviving the writing of a book I never wanted to write. But it changed my life in every way. Let me back up.

I've always believed in the power of story. I was a voracious reader from a young age, and as soon as I

could write, I began creating poems and stories. I grew up in a time in culture when quiet children

were the best children, and thinking you were special in any way was the pinnacle of pride,

and pride was the worst sin of them all. So when I grew up and became a writer, my main interest was

other people's stories. Who would care about me or my life? Yes, my life was not a typical American life.

I lived in Alaska mostly. In the summers, I commercial fished with my new husband

and his family on a tiny island in the wilderness with no roads or cars. It was an island with eight

people on it, just us. We lived through days and nights of such drama and stories. But even then, other people's stories

were much better than mine. So I wrote about other people. By age 40, I had published two collections

of stories about fishermen and women. And then I began a third book. This one was different.

It was about my own experiences living in the wilderness with my husband, digging a well by hand,

hauling water and buckets, building our own house with very few tools, doing the laundry

outside in the winter in an old ringer washing machine,

prying frozen laundry off the line, and stacking the towels stiff in my arms into the house

like a stack of wood. Stories like that. I sent it to my agent. Yes, I had an agent. Somehow, earlier that year, I had landed a hot

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