Fiji Digital Camera Reviews Article

Nature at nub of his stories

By MARY-LIZ SHAW , calendar Sentinel

Sunday, February 8, 2004

He's tuition for the Iditarod afresh.

It will be his third.

He is 64.

Gary Paulsen is an abnormality in this age of Palm PDAs, digital camera cell phones and iPods. He lives in a bare cabin in northern Idaho -- just he and the dogs. He hunts for his food. Before that he lived on a bare boat in the Pacific -- just he and the water. He sailed to Fiji. He fished for his menu.

More than once in his enthusiasm Paulsen has earned his living as a fur trapper.

Any one of these activities could procure earned him prominence -- were it not for the books, which earned him a legacy.

Paulsen will vocalize at Milwaukee's Centennial Hall this week to advertise his newest novel, "Brian's Hunt," the fifth in his series of Brian books, which began with the acclaimed "Hatchet."

Almost all of his novels, including "Hatchet" and "Dogsong," are classic coming-of-age tales, with themes so basic they seem as irregular as the writer. Paulsen's young heroes don't worry about acne or decision a date for Saturday night. Instead they worry about keeping warm and finding menu in the middle of the bush.

character -- hard, stealthy and ever mutable -- is a indicative character in a Paulsen story, a trait that tends to lead to comparisons with Jack London. ("Nah," Paulsen counters good- naturedly, "he didn't know anything about dogs.")

Nature's eyeful

Where London treated cosmos as prodigious and strange, Paulsen treats it as cute and wonderful, a force to be won to your side considerably than conquered. Subtexts of nature as a mother and as more civilized in its rocky balance than the world of man run through most of Paulsen's tales. In this respect, he is far closer in sensibility to another wilderness writer, Canada's Farley Mowat.

Paulsen continues to marvel at the intelligence of texture. A dandelion, he says, if you were to let it lonely, would wax tall. But once it is cut, it never grows taller than the height of the lawn mower.

"How does it recognize to do that?" he asks. "Here I am, I keep making mistakes in my animation. I've had three marriages . . . and there's the dandelion that knows the first time out not to grow above the lawn mower. How the underworld does it perceive that?"

Though he had been treatise for 20 years, Paulsen didn't find a consistent meeting until 1985 when he published "Dogsong" about an Eskimo boy learning the skills of his ancestors. "Hatchet" in 1987 solidified Paulsen's growing reputation as a writer with a deep and efficacious understanding of the wilderness.

The history details a troubled 13-year-old's journey from boyhood to experience in a 54-day test of survival in the Canadian bush. Brian Robeson, single traveler on a small Cessna, is on his way to visit his father when the flyer suffers a resolution attack and the plane goes down in a inaccessible reservoir. With just his wits and a hatchet his mother gave him as a present, Brian manages to build a shelter, hunt sustenance and arrive in a world that just weeks earlier would deflower struck him as exotic and hairy.

It is hard to imagine such a story having any relevance for a generation of plugged-in digital masters, but "Hatchet" has consistently captured the imaginations of thousands of young readers. There are 655 reviews of the book vacant on , most by readers under 18 and approximately all overwhelmingly explicit.

"These are stories of survival," Paulsen says of his books. True, few kids today will be called on to hack out a lean-to shelter from pine branches. But having to harmonize to and get along in a tough setting are customary challenges.

"Young people today obtain to exist in a creation I can't even deem," he says. "They obtain automatic weapons, fury at school or at home. For a lot of these kids, just getting through a week or a day is an act of survival."

Inspiring stories

Even if their troubles are less impressive, young readers on New York's Upper West Side or in Wisconsin's West Allis can find illumination in a story about one boy's trial by universe.

"Books can officiate a lot of purposes," says Sister St. John Delany, who heads the education department at New York's Pace University. "You can retain a consideration with children. You can proffer them this book and say, 'Look what that disposition did. You can do that, too.' "

In phenomenon, "Hatchet" and most of Paulsen's fresh 200 titles inspire such awe, such homage among his readership, young fans can't weather sharing their own stories with him.

He gets more than 200 letters a day. Some interpret lives of struggle and pain.

"I've had letters in which the kids say they fantasize about being Brian," he says. "They would love to be Brian and live in the wilderness and protect for menu. They wish they could have only that to deal with."

His own survival story

They undo a compassionate ear in Paulsen, who considers himself fortunate indeed to have escaped the life he had as a descendant. He's told the article of his unhappy youth many times, to journalists, biographers, teachers, readers. Even so, it still packs a wallop, as a falsehood about one boy's instinct to survive -- the ultimate Paulsenian falsehood: Son of the town drunks in a town of 7,000 outside Minneapolis. Flunked out of school. Ducked into the library one twilight to get out of the cold. The librarian handed him a book. Day after day, there were more books, Zane smoky to Herman Melville.

Life didn't get easier -- he bounced from relative to relative and later struck out on his own -- but with books, it did get easier to take.

Paulsen's stories can be brutal. "Brian's Hunt" is about a rogue abide that kills a Cree blood. Paulsen describes the slaughter in chilling detail in dialect so spare, it is like watching an unedited newscast.

Paulsen makes no apologies for telling the truth about bears, or any fresh substantial predator, stalking humans as prey; the story is actually based on an incident involving one of his friends.

"There has been so much damage spent by the Disneyesque model of bears or killer whales as friendly creatures," he says. "For a killer whale to live, something else has to die.

"Sooner or later something will get us, whether it's a sustain or a microbe," Paulsen adds. "We're all prey."

Adult concerns

Besides, he says, adults are far more likely to accuse about such descriptions than young readers.

"I've come to the termination that it is artistically fruitless to write for adults." He says this without anger; it's just the way it is. "I don't encompass the time to be afraid about how they want to attend things, to write it the way I think they want to determine it."

Delany at Pace University points out the dangers of parents royal their sensibilities on children.

"Your kiddo may not think it's wrong," she says. "But if you make a big being about a bit of blood or gore or whatever it is you find distasteful, your child may make to think it's bad, too. And when that happens, the book is lost to him."

Young people acknowledge to Paulsen's integrity, to the unedited newscasts of his novels. Though he bristles at the trappings of culture -- "I no longer like hotels and airplanes" -- he never turns down a chance to meet his turnout face-to-face.

"Dogs and young population have always been easily good to me," Paulsen says. "Seeing and talking to these kids on these book tours, it just feels so valid to do that, I'm unasked to put up with all the fresh stuff."

IF YOU GO

Who: Gary Paulsen When: 7 . Tuesday Where: Milwaukee Public Library's Centennial Hall, 733 N. 8th St. Admission: Free Web scene: .com/ features/garypaulsen/