Fans of the “Little House on the Prairie” books may be surprised to learn there’s an Iowa tie. The author lived in the northeast Iowa town of Burr Oak when she was a girl and the town’s remembering her this weekend.

Merlene Brown is director of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary. As part of Laura Ingalls Wilder Days, there will be pioneer games, pioneer cooking demonstrations, quilting demos and a local actors group is holding a cemetery walk. There’s a parade through Burr Oak at noon and other events like a home-baked pie auction.

Brown explains the link between her Winneshiek County town and the famed writer. “Laura and her family lived in Burr Oak when she was nine and ten years old and our museum is the childhood home and it also served as the hotel for the Burr Oak area,” she says. “We have the original building and the original site of one of Laura’s childhood homes.” For more information about the museum or the festival, surf to “www.lauraingallswilder.us” or call (563) 753-5916.

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Laura Ingalls Wilder museum

A University of Iowa journalism graduate who went on to become a best-selling spy novelist says aspiring authors who want to follow in her tracks need to apply themselves.

Gayle Lynds, a Council Bluffs native whose new novel “The Last Spymaster” hit book store shelves this week, says wanna-be writers need to do just that — write. “If this is really what you want, you must treat it with the seriousness that you would a regular job — or a love affair,” she says. “Writing is not a hobby.”

Lynds’ books have sold more than six million copies. She’s considered the first contemporary woman to successfully write international spy thrillers and co-created the best-selling “Covert One” series with Robert Ludlum. “If you want to publish, it takes a commitment and a passion,” she says. “If you don’t have those things, it’s much better to look at other things in life, but at the same time, gosh, the years are going to pass. It’s so important to do something that really means a great deal to you, that’s deep within your soul, and the people who have that kind of passion, that kind of commitment generally tend to succeed because they become very, very good at writing.”

Lynds’ husband, renowned detective novelist Dennis Lynds (pen name Michael Collins), died in August of 2005. Lynds says her writing was part of what helped her endure the hardship of that loss. “About a month after his death, I did sit down and I just really focused on it and it was therapy. I’m grateful for my work. I miss him a lot of course, because we not only lived together and loved one another deeply, but he was another writer and so we had that — we shared that,” Lynds says. “But I’m going on and I’ve started my next book.”

Lynds counts former U-of-I lit teacher Kurt Vonnegut as one of her early inspirations to become a writer.

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Author Gayle Linds