I don't think many kids question their surroundings. Everything seems so permanent and inevitable growing up, even chaos.

When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

After my parents divorced, my father remarried and my brothers were born when I was twelve and sixteen. I was thunderstruck at these kids. The "baby-ness" of them. Their toes. I had never been around babies before.

Most kids who grow up in Alaska and spend a fair degree of time in the wilderness, grow up being pretty self-reliant. You have to be, in order to survive all the animals and cliffs and crevasses and rapids - at some point, your brain has to kick [out of] that childish daydream world and start making I-want-to-live decisions.

My natural inclination is to think in scenes. So that's how I write, and the issue for me is usually: what to compress for speed.

It's much harder when you're writing about your life, than when you're writing fiction.

If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.