For over a decade, while I was developing my writing skills, I had the great good fortune to work at a large outdoor ethnic museum near Milwaukee called Old World Wisconsin. This historic site includes a crossroads village and ten working farmsteads, with restoration dates ranging from 1845 through 1915. Old World Wisconsin is a place where Interpreters get their hands dirty, so my knowledge of historical domestic and agricultural processes grew exponentially. I learned how to warp a loom, how to milk cows, how to make rennet and lye soap. I prepared wine, sauerbraten, hops yeast, and Finnish egg coffee. And Ive passed many of these skills, of course, on to my characters.
But hands-on experience brings much more to a writers toolbox than technical understanding. Living history sites and events can provide the specific sensory details that bring a scene to life. I know what hog intestines smell like when theyre being prepared for sausage casing, how flax fibers feel between my fingers as they twine into linen thread, what threshing machines sound like when they rattle to life in the middle of a newly-shorn wheat field. And because I have a novelists vivid...
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