Gary Paulsen, the author of over 100 books, died in 2021. Hatchet, his most famous book, was a middle-school staple. When I was teaching 11th grade, many of my students would reread it, along with Dogsong and Winter Room (all three were Newbery winners). I came across a memoir Paulsen wrote in one of my English anthologies and added it as an assignment. What he writes about is important, but it also shows what a hard-working author he was.
Paulsen writes, “Books saved my life. As surely as my lead dog Cookie pulled me from the bottom of a late after I fell through the ice, books are the reason I survived my miserable childhood.”
Paulsen credits one of his teachers for helping him overcome his shyness by reading him a book as he hid in the cloakroom. When he was 13, he wandered the streets of Minnesota to get away from his unhappy home. He went into the library to get warm, and the librarian noticed him and asked him if he wanted a library card. She also handed him a book she recommended.
He writes, “Later that night back at home, or what passed for home–a crummy apartment in the bad part of own–I took the book, a box of crackers, and a jar of grape jelly down to the basement, to a hideaway I’d created behind the furnace where someone had abandoned a creaky old armchair under a bare light bulb.”
“I consider every good thing that has happened to me since then a result of that woman handing me that book…But she wasn’t just giving me books, she was giving me…everything. She gave me the first hint I’d ever had in my entire life that there was something other than my drunken parents screaming at each other in the kitchen. She handed me a world where I wasn’t going to get beaten up by the school bullies. She showed me a place where it didn’t hurt all the time.”
Years later, he married, joined the army, had children, and graduated from college. He was working as an electrical engineer, and one night, he decided he wanted to write books. He left everything, even his marriage, and went to Hollywood. He found a job as a proofreader, and two editors said they would help him become a writer if he turned in one piece of writing to them every single day. If he missed a single day, they would no longer help him.
He writes, “I have been writing for over 30 years, spent most of it starving…and it has always been hard…I love writing even more now, I think, than I ever have. The way the words dance, the rhythms and movements of them, is grandly exciting to me.”
It is hard for me to write every day. I try! I have journals and other projects I am working on, but being a true writer is hard. I feel inadequate sometimes, and most of the time, I do not consider myself a writer.
Students enjoy reading this memoir, and no matter how often I have read it, Paulsen inspires me, too. Books are a means for many to escape, dream, or hope. When teachers heard of his passing, many expressed deep gratitude to a man whose plot-driven stories captivated readers, young and old. So glad his books live on….
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