Sonya Pearce was born in Redding, California, on 11 February 1959. As the tenth of eleven children, she grew up in a household that wasn’t wealthy--rather poor, in fact. Her father, Ivan Pearce, was a rancher, and the cattle market wasn’t doing well at the time; in short, times were tough. Her family moved every two years or so, as her dad sold and bought ranch after ranch. The first place she was old enough to remember was Paul, Idaho, but they soon moved to Nampa, Idaho; Middleton, Idaho; Huntington, Oregon; Orevada, Nevada; Payette, Idaho; and Gilbert, Arizona.
She has a very early memory from when she was about four years old, in Paul, Idaho: her dad sitting in a red rocking chair, reading his scriptures by the evening fire. Though this scene paints him as a saint, he was sometimes a hard father, disciplining his eleven children and teaching them both the gospel and hard work.
Her mom, on the other hand, was a creative woman. She watched her mom carefully make posters for church meetings, or write quotes to put on the walls of their home (the lettering for which she had learned in a required class in high school). Her mom knew how to type too, and she owned a typewriter. Sonya always watched carefully when her mom would make carbon copies, layering the sheets, and typing onto two at once. Later (when Sonya was in fifth or sixth grade), her mom got a mimeograph machine which she used to copy information for her political meetings (she was, after all, the founder of the local chapter of the John Birch Society). But she also made copies of fliers for the young women’s association.
Her mom was a big advocate of reading. She taught her kids, “If you can read, you can learn anything you want to learn.”
When Sonya turned six, her brother Monty got her a book of her own, Little Black Sambo, and, that same day, her older sister Dixie gave her The Tall Book of Fairy Tales. She treasured those books and asked her mom to read them to her nearly every night. (Brian, though, her younger brother, asked for The Night Before Christmas every night.)
When they lived in Nevada, they were always ecstatic to see the dusty trail following a large blue school bus headed for their house. It was called the Book-mobile, and it had been gutted of his seats, filled with books, and painted in bright blue--a library on wheels. After mom returned the old books and checked out new ones, the Book-mobile would drive back down the bumpy dirt road, past Cleo Ben Goah’s (a damn Bask, as Sonya’s dad would jokingly say), and past the Woodwards’, until it reached the pavement 27 miles away. From there the Book-mobile had another 45 minutes to go before it made it back to Winnemucca. And the Pearces would keep their books for several weeks until it returned.
Sonya’s first-grade teacher organized her class into three groups of varying reading levels (Sonya was always in the highest). They sat on the floor in a circle and read Dick and Jane and home-made books the teacher had made for them by folding papers into fourths and stitching the pages together. As they’d read, they were awarded with little star stickers, which, if you earned enough of, could be traded for a big, gold-star sticker.
In fourth grade, her mom asked her to write letters to her older brother, Parley, who was on a mission. And her mom continued to encourage her to read--by reading out loud to them books like Brighty of the Grand Canyon. Her older sisters, especially Bunny, read to them too. Every evening after dinner, usually after the sun had gone down, little Sonya, Brian, Melodee, and Shannon would lay on their older sisters’ big bed and listen to books like Huckleberry Finn, The Secret Garden, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Where the Red Fern Grows, and The Witch of Blackbird Pond. Bunny would impersonate the characters’ voices, even mimicking British accents. She must have loved doing it; the children certainly enjoyed listening. Bunny’s stories were the best entertainment around. Sadly, now days that sort of thing is often replaced with TV and video games--which lacks the personal interaction and human connection that storytelling has. Her dad did watch the news on TV occasionally, though, after which he’d express his disgust about the Vietnam war.
In sixth grade, their school bought a projector that would shine sentences onto the wall. As the teacher turned the knob, the time would speed up, making you read more words in fewer seconds. Sonya got up to 450 words per minute. Although they were tested on comprehension and she always did well, she had a nagging feeling that it was teaching her to chomp through reading without really savoring it. (When she later took a speed reading class in college, the professor wanted them to get to 700 words per minute, but she just couldn’t or wouldn’t do it.)
That same year her sister Dixie gave her a diary that came with a lock and key. She treasured them and wrote in it often--not a story, per se, but simply about the day-to-day things of a young girl raised on a ranch. When it ran out, she started another diary on an old tablet.
Her mom died when she was twelve.
Her Dad had to sell the ranch to pay the enormous death taxes, and they moved to Ontario, Oregon, in the middle of her seventh-grade year to start again. Sonya went from a class of ten to a junior high of 400 where she would have to switch between four different buildings for her classes. It was a shock and an intimidating new social position. Her teacher, Mr. Sutherland, was a round man, with chubby cheeks, a mustache, and an accent--a strict man who, to her, was not approachable. “I used to sweat bullets,” she later wrote, “worrying that I would get chosen to go to the chalkboard to diagram a sentence in front of the class.” Having gotten there mid-year, she didn’t know anything about diagramming--hadn’t even heard of it. She was relieved when they moved to the next unit--as she wouldn’t have to worry about the chalk board anymore. Mr. Sutherland gave her her first real writing assignment: a research paper on France. (And she didn’t realize he’d neglected to teach her about citation styles until she arrived in college and discovered she hadn’t really gotten much of an education at all.) The research paper, at least, sparked her interest in European studies, and with a little encouragement from her older sisters she read The Three Musketeers, and other books, which was simply a gateway to more learning. She enjoyed the read, but she read it without any context of the rich history around it--a history she knew she had to learn.
A few years later when they were moving yet again, she threw away her diaries--somehow thinking she would never need those memories. But she kept a newspaper clipping that showed a picture of her mom promoting reading in schools.
Sonya continued to write letters to Dixie, who was away at college, and to her older brothers, as each of them served missions. During her senior year of high school, Sonya learned calligraphy from her sister Beau, so she could learn to write like her mother.
In her late teens she attended Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho, where she took a course on children’s literature. And this teacher brought excitement back into her education. He would leap onto the desk in the middle of a dramatic reading, completely animated, his unhandsome face and unashamed expressions adding more exuberance and liveliness to the scene. He got her revved up--enthusiastic about learning and being creative. He encouraged her to buy a dictionary, of all things (and her children later learned and benefited from the big red dictionary she bought because of him). He assigned his students to write a children’s book of their own. Hers was about a witch, and she illustrated it with full-color drawings. It made writing fun, and although most of her peers whined about and dreaded the task, it was the most enjoyable college assignment she ever had. (Nor has she done a project like it since, though she has often wanted to.) After earning her associate’s degree in general education, she attended Brigham Young University.
At BYU she met her husband, Jim Washburn, and came close to getting her bachelor’s degree (a degree she may soon finish now that her children are mostly raised). She continued to learn ways to expand her creativity, taking classes on tole painting, sewing (and not the simple kind), and even reupholstering furniture. Raising their eight children on a single income, they struggled through minor financial straits of their own. But she educated them and taught them the value of education--just as her mother had done for her. (Now, although they don’t make millions, they have plenty, and are well off.)
During her younger married life, her husband brought home a dinosaur of a computer that took floppy discs that were nearly a foot across. He suggested that she learn to use it, but it was all too frustrating and complicated--she just didn’t understand. After messing with it for a while, she got rid of it. Her sister Dixie then bugged and bugged her to get on email, but she wouldn’t hear it--it wasn’t worth the hassle. Five or six years later she and her husband bought a personal computer, and her children, then a little older, slowly taught her to use it. It wasn’t that hard to learn--nothing like the old dinosaur, but it took a little repetition and some patience from her children. Now she writes her journal in Word rather than by hand--as she can write much more and faster that way. She also runs her own puppy business with email as a primary way to communicate with clients, and she updates her business’s website with pictures of the dogs.
As a mother and full-time homemaker, she writes in her journal, and she reads both for pleasure and to continually educate her children. She recently read with her twelve-year-old son, Jackson, a book called The Great Brain, and she enjoyed it at least as much as he did (probably a little more). She also writes emails to her daughter on a mission in Guatemala (which serves as a supplement to her sometimes sporadic journal writing).
Her father, Ivan Pearce, now 96, recently had a mild stroke, and he came to live with her for several weeks. One day she sat him down at her computer desk and explained the internet to him. This was a man who had started life with a horse and buggy, who had been there at the arrival of indoor plumbing--a man who’d seen airplanes first take flight, and a rocketship carry men to the moon. She showed him how with nothing more than a few clicks, the information of the entire world could be loaded onto the screen--how you could learn about just about anything under the sun, anything you ever wanted to learn. They even typed a letter together and sent it off through cyberspace.
