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We had no electricity, no gas. Food was probably our greatest entertainment - the most fun thing that we could do was food.

During my adolescence, our family dwelt in rural Alaska. We were dirt poor, Depression-era poor. Tarpaper shack and kerosene lamps. In those days I read because that's all I had. I wrote because that's all I had.

Since we had little money and few documents, we had nothing.

We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.

Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.

I was brought up in a very open, rural countryside in the middle of nowhere. There were no cell phones. If your lights went out, you were lit by candlelight for a good four days before they can get to you. And so, my imagination was crazy.

I was brought up in a tenement house in a working district. We didn't even have a bathroom! We had a gaslight in the hallway and a black-and-white TV.

In my early days in school, I had no shoes, no school bags. There were days I had only one meal... I walked miles and crossed rivers to school every day. Didn't have power, didn't have generators, studied with lanterns, but I never despaired.

Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any.