An earthy smell greeted artist Bill Wolfe early in the restoration of a 73-year-old mural by Terre Haute legend Gilbert Wilson. It was a smell Wolfe recognized, but it seemed out of place. He couldn’t figure out why he could smell the Wabash River as he cleaned the dark brown swirls in part of Wilson’s 1936 mural in the former Laboratory School, now University Hall, on the campus of Indiana State University. “I realized it was the river. He had used clay from the river to make some of the …

This is a story about children.
Erin Pringle was little more than a child when we first met, during a summer fiction writing workshop at ISU in 1999. She was 17 at the time, still attending high school in Casey, Ill., and had decided to take a college-level fiction workshop, with her mother’s blessing.
Back then, Pringle approached the writing process with the wonder and intensity of a determined youngster. She attacked the page the way so many children face down an obstacle or a challenge — she steeled her jaw, fixed …