Famous #kidlit author left home & lived in the woods as a teen #literacy #lrnchat #elemed

Three-time Newbery Honor winner Gary Paulsen believes that young people are our hope for the future, and that hope drives his writing. An Army brat, he remembers his father’s last posting in the 1940s where he ran the streets of Manila in the Philippines to avoid his abusive alcoholic parents. The family returned to Minnesota after Paulsen’s father was dismissed from General Patton’s staff, and Paulsen began his slow migration to the Northern Forest at the edge of their small town. “I was never in the house when my parents were awake or conscious,” he says. By the time he was twelve or thirteen, he gave up on school and either lived in the woods or hid in the basement of his parents’ apartment building. He trapped animals for food, set pins in a bowling alley, and hustled the drunks at local bars to support himself. At 15 or 16 he jumped a truck to hoe sugar beets in the Dakotas with migrant farm workers and worked the Tilt-A-Whirl at a carnival. His real occupation, full-time survivor. More...