Mary Chapin-Carpenter
Caroline B. Cooney
Paula Danziger
David Diaz
Mem Fox
Kevin Henkes
William Joyce
Kathleen Krull Gary Paulsen

Interview by Alice Cary

What does a famous author do with the rest of his life? The last time I spoke with Gary Paulsen, nearly four years ago, we discussed his thrills and misadventures racked up during two Iditarod races, as described in his book, "Winterdance." But heart disease forced him to give up his beloved sled dogs, so he and his wife sold their Minnesota home and bought a ranch in New Mexico.

Lately, during this supposedly quieter period of his life, Paulsen has been keeping busy sailing the high seas. He fixed up an old sailboat, Felicity, and sailed from Mexico to Alaska, and now, back again. El Nino, however, was foiling his plans, stirring up the seas. When we talked, he was docked momentarily in Monterey, California, waiting for good weather. As usual, the amazingly prolific author was packing both his life and his prose with plenty of punch.

Paulsen says the 25- to 30-foot swells aren't a problem: "They don't break and you just slide over them. The problem was we were getting 25-knot winds on top of that, which made four- or five- or six-foot wind waves on top of the swells, and they would break. So you're looking at a 30-foot breaking wave. We were getting wet a lot. It was filling the cockpit all the time. It's not particularly dangerous; it just becomes very uncomfortable. The water's quite cold."

His goal is to sail to Cape Horn, seas permitting. He says he's neither being a daredevil nor trying to die. (Technically, thanks to a strict diet and exercise regime, he no longer has heart disease when he's at rest, which is, er, seldom.) Instead, something in his soul keeps him "seeking horizons," as he calls it, whether he's running the Iditarod, sailing or riding a Harley hundreds of miles to Alaska and back, a quest he describes in his roaring new adult book, "Pilgrimage on a Steel Ride: A Memoir about Men and Motorcycles."

In these pages he explains what others might see as a manic drive: "I could not stop it, could never stop it and I knew it then, knew I had to leave, to get moving again, to seek, to continue the run for the rest of my life and that if I stopped, even for a moment, 'it' would catch up with me -- whatever 'it' was -- and I would stop. Stop forever."

That "it," he admits, might be death, although he isn't sure. "I feel like the boat is a kind of requiem," he says. "Not that I will die sailing the boat or die after the boat, necessarily, but there's something I will write as a requiem. . . . This seems almost choreographed in a way, not by me, certainly, but by nature, by some flow of events. I don't want to change. I have no desire to sit in front of a keyboard for the rest of my life."

Gary Paulsen's advice for reluctant readers & their parents "I tell kids to read like a wolf. Read when they tell you not to read; read what they tell you not to read. That gets me in trouble sometimes. "A lot of people are upset by the 'Goosebumps' series and all that stuff, but anything that gets kids to read is fine. Some parents who worry that their kids don't read are kidding themselves. The kids are reading; they're just not reading what the parents like. Just get the kid to read something -- Classic Comics -- whatever."

Rest assured, though, he's spending plenty of time doing just that. The author of numerous books for children, adults and young adults -- fiction, nonfiction, historical novels, adventure tales and Newbery Honor-winners like "Hatchet" and "Dogsong" -- simply sets the steering vane on his boat and goes below deck to work. Thankfully, holing up with his laptop helps ease the frustration when wind and weather shove him ashore. Just published is "Sarny," sequel to his acclaimed historical novel and recent Disney Channel film "Nightjohn" about a slave who taught others to read, including a girl named Sarny. The new novel tells what happens next to Sarny, taking her life through and beyond the Civil War as a free woman until her last days in the 1930s.

It's a spare but riveting tale, tracing not only a compelling life but the story of civil rights in the United States. "It's all true," Paulsen says. "Not true for one person, but everything in the book happened to people. I didn't intend to write a sequel, because I was afraid I might dilute the power of the first story, but I got so many letters asking me to keep writing." Now he's on the trail of another historical figure, a 15-year-old Civil War soldier who was shot several times during terrible battles and survived, only to die a few years after the war of what is now labeled "post traumatic stress disorder." After the death of this young man, Paulsen discovered, the illness became known as "soldier's heart," also the title of the forthcoming novel.

Paulsen recently published "The Schernoff Discoveries" about a boy who befriends a 14-year-old science whiz and social nerd. The duo puts Schernoff's brain to work attacking problems like getting girls, making money and getting a car. It's a wacky, funny tale, and every word is once again true, this time based on Paulsen's own childhood and friendship with a genius.

For one brief moment in Gary Paulsen's long and varied life, which has included stints as an Army sergeant, actor, truck driver, trapper, migrant farm worker, and high-tech engineer, he actually felt settled. The contentment lasted about a week. He had a wife, children, office job and a lovely feeling of comfort, which suddenly disappeared. He left for Hollywood to write, with his wife, painter Ruth Paulsen, remaining supportive these many years, despite Paulsen's certainty that his life would never again be calm.

At one point soon after, the writer ended up in Taos, New Mexico, standing beside the typewriter and ashes of D.H. Lawrence.

"I stood there looking," he remembers, "and realized that this was it, I was going to have to write. That I could never accept 'normalcy' again, that I would have to write and my whole life would always be in flux. I didn't know that it would be what it is now. I did not know that I would run dogs or seek horizons so much. I just knew that I would never be settled."

But Paulsen's hero is not Lawrence, but Cervantes: "He was captured," Paulsen notes, "he was a galley slave, he had his arm shot off in combat -- it was just one thing after another, always in poverty. Finally, he wrote 'Don Quixote' just to get money. And then he went back to his life, which was a mess all the time. What a life!"

"Pilgrimage on a Steel Ride: A Memoir about Men and Motorcycles" (Harcourt Brace, $21, 0151930937).
"Sarny" (Delacorte, $15.99, 0385321953)
"The Schernoff Discoveries" (Delacorte, $15.95, 0385321945)