Newbery-award winning author Patricia MacLachlan has often included older protagnoists in her books, but in the last year all four of her new books are strongly effected by the presence of older characters . "I've always had very strong older people in my life," says MacLachlan, "And of course I'm getting older now and I write from a knowledge that old and young are a lot alike."

This year older characters figure strongly in four books she's published, each one disctintly different and each memorable. The aunts, many times referred to in Newbery-award winning Sarah Plain and Tall (HarperCollins, $11.00; $3.95 ages 7 and up $3.95), are actual characters in the sequel, Skylark (HarperCollins, $12.00; ages 7 and up). When Sarah, Anna and Caleb leave the prarie to escape the sorrows of drought, they are in need of much nurturance. To be sure, the three aunts they stay with are a source of nurture and security, but they are first individuals. Lou wears hip boots and skinny dips, , and even Mattie who dresses in silk always has bare feet. These are an older generation that escapes stereotyping. "A lot of times in books," MacLachlan says, " I have seen older people portrayed as fools, or foolish people. I think that's a little cliched and I knew I wanted to do something different. I'm not quite sure where the aunts came from, but I like them. If you go up into New England, or down South or out on the prarie, you're going to find people like them.. honest, indvidual and eccentric people."

MacLachlan has told that there are a lot of eccentric people in her books, but she sees them as "indivdualistic. It's all we have in the end. This is a soceity which has tried to make everybody alike and this is what childhood is about, trying to figure out who you are and discover it's okay to be different." Without even knowing she has done so, MacLachlan offers the young older heroines who model a sureness and belief in their individuality. The children in Skylark, Caleb and Anna find strength and support in this very quality.

"There are a lot of people out there that are fascinating and the most fascinating stories come from ordinary, everyday kinds of people. I don't think our heros are necessarily national heros, but the people who exist everyday and tell stories to their grandchildren and live the kinds of lives that are interesting."

In Baby (Delacorte, $13.95; ages 10 and up), a family living in pain because of the death of an infant, has a baby left on their doorstep for a year. Baby has an important hinge, Grandma Byrd, whose wisdom acts as a change agent for healing. "I know a lot of people like Byrd," says MacLachlan, "who are in a sense are hyperpolizing the grounding of a family and who in essence really do speak the truth and see and know what's going on. They may not be able to do anything about it, but they can see it and help children figure it out."

Byrd seems never to have lost her childhood sense of play. She wears sparkly stockings and wonders if Baby Sophie isn't "a crown princess dropped from a balloon." MacLachlan sees that "if we're fortunate we have the adult and the child in us as a combination. I know I do, it may be why I write for children. My oldest son, John, with whom I'm writing books with now, once said to me as I looked in the mirror, 'Who do you see there now, the fifty year old woman or the eleven year old child inside?' He knows just that's what I'm about."

MacLachlan writes out of very personal connections, "not that I'm reporting my life, but I start from stuff that bothers me or worries me. I wrote Baby when I realized that I wouldn't have any more babies and my children were not yet having grandchildren. So that book is kind of the wish fulfillment for me for having a baby left on my door step. Writers kind of do that."

A third book, Journey (Delacorte, $13.50; ages 10 and up; 0-385-30427-7) is about an eleven year old boy who's living with his grandparents and his sister Cat, trying to resolve his mother's leaving. MacLachlan who's just finished writing a screenplay of the book for a Hallmark movie added a lot to the mother and defends her against people who think she's a villanMacLachlan says, " this is a limited woman who, Sophie's mother in Baby, knows that she can leave these children with these parents and they'll be all right."

Again, MacLachlan draws on her personal experience this time recounting times spent with foster children and remembering her own losses. "It seemed to me it's important to let children know that there's someone there to care for you."

She extends this same kind of thought by focusing on a different facet in her newest picture book, All the Places to Love (HarperCollins, $15.00; ages 4-8; 0-06-021098-2) a reasurring poetic vision of the idyllic rural places that are important to a small boy because of how they have touched his life and comforted him.

One of the most powerful scenes is the grandfather carving the names of newly born in the barn rafters. Naming is a theme that reaccurs in MacLachlan's work. "Names ground you and maybe that's why children often have family names to create a continumum, lines that reverberate from the past, and remind you of those who have come before".

She's recently finished a picture book to be illustrated by Barry Moser which is almost a companion, titled, What You Know First. "It's about losing a farm and how important it is to remember what you know. When I talk to children I show them my prarie dirt that I carry with me because that's where I was born." She was surprised at how former foster children "clutched that idea because they were children who could never go back to where they once were. I had always thought they were'nt old enough to know the importance of that. There is a sense in my work that stresses the importance of where we came from and where we're going, a reverence for place."People can fill in and care for you as you gather new friends and people in a new landscape."

MacLachlan's present landscape is happily filled with writing screen plays, working sometimes with Glenn Close (Good news: both agree that Sarah Plain and Tall will be a trilogy!). She's at a between place, looking forward to grandmothering and yet, as she admires her father as a a grandfather. He's a very active 92 year old who maintains close relationship with his grandchildren. Last year he took them when he delivered a lecture at Trinity College in Dublin. "It's nice for them to see this as an example of what it's like to be old- you don't have to kind of give up. he was a teacher, he taught in a one room school in N. Dakota when he was 19. 3 names is his landscape. He has a great memory for facts and so on. He has a great exhuberance for life, and for my children, he thinks they're wonderful even when they're bad."

MacLachlan, never one to sit passively and wait for her grandmothering time to roll around, is actively involved with her children. She and her son John, a photographer, are working together on a non-fiction book, Five Writers, Their Life, Literature and Landscape (delacorte. A book that will describe how five strikingly different authors, including Robert Cormier, Cynthia Rylant, Byrd Baylor, Jean George and Ashley Bryan write out of their landscape. They're also working on a zany new picture book about a man who falls in love with a fish.

©Susie Wilde 1998