Fairhope Courier, Jan. 2004

Gary Paulsen has sold his boat.

The author, who has over 200 books in print including a five-book series with his most beloved character, Brian Robeson, has given up his life bouncing around the warm sea for slightly less comfortable surroundings. Now, in the sub-zero climate of mid-winter Idaho, Paulsen spends his days frozen to the bone, romping through the hills with 34 of his closest friends, a pack of sled dogs.

Paulsen is training the pack for the Iditarod, an 1,180-mile race thorough the Alaskan wilderness. It’s his third Iditarod, but his first with these dogs, and he couldn’t be more excited.

“I was so gone,” says Paulsen of his first experience with sled dogs at a charity event know as the “Ikidarod,” held in Spokane, Wash. by the Shriner’s Hospital. “You enter a state of exultation. I know a judge who gave up his bench, a pediatrician who gave up his practice, to race sled dogs.”

It’s no wonder then that Paulsen’s latest book, Brian’s Hunt, features a four-legged, fury friend for the now-teen-aged Robeson. In the book, Brian’s solace in the wilderness is broken by the sudden appearance of a dog with horrible wounds. The two become fast friends and go on to solve a terrible mystery together in the wilds of Canada.

Paulsen will take time out of his training to come to Fairhope for a book signing and discussion on Tuesday, Feb. 3. The event is sponsored by Page and Palette book store and will benefit the Fairhope Educational Enrichment Foundation.

Paulsen is a true dog lover. Aside from his sled team, he has an ever-growing pack of canines -- two border collies, a Bassett hound and three Chihuahuas -- at his home in New Mexico.

“Dog’s are such a part of my life,” says Paulsen, adding that he regularly takes trips to the local pound to retrieve a new pal. “I say, ‘give me the next one up on death row,’” says Paulsen. “I don’t even ask what kind of dog it is.”

Perhaps his need to rescue animals stems from the fact that Paulsen himself was himself rescued in a way by his current career.

Born May 17, 1939, Paulsen has risen from his youth living in an abusive, alcoholic family life to become one of American’s most popular writers for young people. Although he was never a dedicated student, Paulsen developed a passion for reading at an early age. After a librarian gave him a book to read -- along with his own library card -- he was hooked. He began spending hours alone in the basement of his apartment building, reading one book after another.

Running away from home at the age of 14 and traveling with a carnival, Paulsen acquired a taste for adventure. A youthful summer of rigorous chores on a farm; jobs as an engineer, construction worker, ranch hand, truck driver, and sailor and two rounds of the Iditarod have provided ample material from which he creates his powerful stories.
Paulsen’s realization that he would become a writer came suddenly when he was working as a satellite technician for an aerospace firm in California. One night he walked off the job, never to return.

“One night I just gave it up,” says Paulsen. “I just walked out.”

He spent the next year in Hollywood as a magazine proofreader, working on his own writing every night.

“I starved for 20 years,” says Paulsen. “I wrote books for $700 a book, mysteries, whodunits, just to stay alive.”

Times have changed, of course, for Paulsen, who has now won the prestigious Newberry Honor award, given by the American Library Association to authors of children's literature, three times. He says he could live well off Hatchet, his most acclaimed children’s book, and the first in the Brian Robeson series. As he has aged, so has his star character, and with age comes maturity. The 16-year-old takes on some fairly explicit natural adventure in Brian’s Hunt, which includes the death and mutilation of two people at the hands of a bear.

Paulsen says he thinks his readers have grown along with Brian, and so are ready to accept the stronger content of the new book.

“I don’t think that’s a problem at all,” says Paulsen. “Kids today are facing life and death problems.”

The scenes of the bear attacks are based on fact, according to Paulsen, who says a friend’s son was dragged from his tent at a Wisconsin Boy Scout camp by a bear. The animal mauled the boy while the entire Boy Scout troop held on to him, pelting the bear with rocks and sticks. To this day, the physical and emotional scars of the attack haunt the boy.

Another attack, on which Paulsen based the scenario in the book, left a man and his wife dead in the Canadian wilderness. A bear attacked the woman and was feeding on her body when the man tried to stop it. He too was killed and partially consumed by the beast.

“I decided to have a similar situation with Brian,” says Paulsen. “I like bears and I like wolves, but I also understand they can be dangerous. I’ve seen wolves kill and it can be horrible.”

Paulsen uses Brian’s Hunt as a platform to set the record straight, in a sense about dogs, taking a swipe at author Jack London, who wrote such notable books as Call of the Wild and White Fang.

“He really knew nothing about dogs,” says Paulsen, who wrote the foreword for a recent addition of Call of the Wild. “He was a good writer I think, and rich and a drunk, but he never learned about the things he wrote about.”

Most of what London leaned of the wild and dogs, Paulsen says, he gathered from freight drivers heading into the Alaskan wilderness. London would feed them food as they passed through, and the drivers would, in turn, tell his stories.

“I think they fed him a lot of useless stuff about dogs,” says Paulsen.

Paulsen needs little in the way of anecdotal assistance to make his books come alive. He lives the wilderness life he writes about, and his readers, kids especially, respond.
“I just write,” says Paulsen. “It’s artistically fruitless to write to adults. But you can write for children and have an artistically good time and they’ll accept it. It’s an amazing thing writing -- the idea of going inside someone’s head and dancing around.”