Award-winning author meets middle school students

Meeting the author of some of your favorite books is a rare opportunity. About 100 local students got that chance when award-winning author Ben Mikaelsen spent 90 minutes at Sisters Middle School last week.

The event was sponsored by the Deschutes County Library.

Mikaelsen, whose titles include “Petey,” “Touching Spirit Bear,” and “Tree Girl,” has won numerous awards for his books including the International Reading Association Award and the Northwest Readers’ Choice Award.

Mikaelsen spent a good portion of his talk explaining his upbringing and youth in Bolivia and Minnesota.

“I didn’t do any kind of formal schooling until my family sent me to a boarding school in Bolivia at age nine and I couldn’t even spell the word ‘the,’” he said.

Despite his struggles with the conventions of writing, Mikaelsen was a story teller from an early age.

“The boarding school was like a prison and I risked punishment when I would hide under my blankets and write stories,” he said.

By the time his family moved to Minnesota for his seventh grade year, Mikaelsen was ready for a change because he thought he would finally fit in since he would no longer be the only “dumb, white kid” as he had been labeled in Bolivia.

“I got off to a rough start when I showed up for school the first day in my boarding school uniform,” he said.

Over time Mikaelsen decided to just be himself and pursue his own dreams.

“You can’t just stand there,” he said. “If you have a dream you’re the one that has to make it come true.”

By the time he graduated from high school, he had not only earned a pilot’s license, but had become the high school sky diving champion of the state of Minnesota.

When he entered college he still had little mastery of the English language, so when his first English professor asked the entire class to write a short story he worked as hard has he could to make it presentable.

“When I got it back there was more red ink on it than black and I expected I had earned an ‘F’,” he said. “I was astounded after class when the professor pulled me aside and told me that my essay was the best in the entire class of 300.”

The professor helped Mikaelsen learn the basics of grammar, sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation.

Mikaelsen, who lives near Bozeman, Montana, showed a slide show highlighted by many photos of his pet black bear “Buffy,” which he took in after learning it was going to be destroyed if an adequate home couldn’t be found for it.

He started writing full-time in 1984 but didn’t get a book published until 1991 with “Rescue Josh McGuire.”

At the conclusion of the presentation students got a chance to ask a few questions and to get books and bookmarks autographed.

Linda Olson, teen librarian for Deschutes Public Library, helped facilitate the visit.