Author thrills Sisters readers

Colorado children's author Will Hobbs entertained a captivated audience of budding writers and readers at Sisters Middle School on Wednesday with his tall tales of growing up in Alaska and a slide show of his many fascinating adventures that inspired his stories.

Hobbs, born into an Air Force family, is the author of 18 books of outdoor adventure fiction for elementary, middle school and young adult readers. His popular stories are wildly entertaining and big with both boys and girls. Seven of his novels were named Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association (ALA).

Recently, ALA has also named "Far North" and "Downriver" to their list of the 100 Best Young Adult Books of the 20th century. "Ghost Canoe" received the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award in l998 for Best Young Adult Mystery.

"I wasn't born a writer," he said, showing a picture of himself as a baby sitting on a Panama beach. "You become something by working at it and caring about it."

Taking the crowded group of school kids in the lecture/drama room through his life in the woods, glaciers, mountains and rivers of the United States, Hobbs shared tips and thoughts on his rich life of teaching and writing, with a variety of interesting subjects and stops to ponder the wonders of a baby beaver, Mars rocks, fishing boats, dinosaur bones and meteorites, even Kokopelli, the magical Indian flute player.

"If it's a good story, the writer doesn't hit you over the head with the writing because he respects your imagination and intelligence," he explained. "You and the writer play a game, he helps out with the basics and you fill in some of the details with your mind, it's a 50-50 partnership."

Hobbs offered his opinion on the best way to make your writing better at any level.

"Pour all your writing through the five senses - sight, sound, touch, smell and taste," Hobbs said. "The language can be very sensory. And you need to have tension in a story, the main character always requires some sort of problem to solve."

Hobbs was a reading and English teacher for 17 years in Durango, Colorado. His many years of hiking, rafting and backpacking often become the basis for his character's adventures.

"When a teacher reads one of my books aloud in class it's one of my greatest honors," he said. "My first story was about a grizzly bear and a Ute Indian boy in southwest Colorado. This came from a news piece I'd read about the last of the grizzlies in Colorado. Sometimes you take pieces of your life and put them into your stories."

For more information visit http://www.willhobbsauthor.com.