Quote

I grew up in Southern Oregon. My father was a sawmill worker and a logger, and his job put food on the table.

It's true that I had a bucolic, truly peaceful childhood, growing up in a house next to our family's orchard. We had a lot of books and art, but no electricity until I was eight years old. Since then, I have seen a lot of inner-city life, though.

I grew up on a farm - it was a lovely life; we'd make tree houses all day - and my parents worked from home.

I grew up during the war years in a tiny cottage with no electricity. Water for washing was pumped from a pond. My brother and I had to fetch drinking water from a tap at the end of the lane, and light was from candles, paraffin lamps, and our nightly log fire.

When we were on the farm, we were isolated, not just by geography but by the primitive living conditions: no electricity, no running water and, of course, no computer, no phone.

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.

We lived on a farm outside a town of about 900 people. My father was the principal of the elementary school. It was a typical Southern town - there are a lot of churches, and it's dry.

My parents were brutal to each other, so I slept in the basement by an old coal-fired furnace. I became a street kid. Occasionally, I'd live with aunts or uncles, then I'd run away to live in the woods, trapping and hunting game to survive. The wilderness pulled at me; still does.

I grew up in a wood cabin on Puget Sound in Manchester, Wash. My family taught me to appreciate the arts and the outdoors, and I still yearn for the absolute silence I experienced there when I was young.

When I was about 8 or 9, I lived in New Jersey with my mother and we were seven deep in one bedroom and sometimes we didn't have electricity.