Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 14, 1993 TAG: 9310130360
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: E-29 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WENDI GIBSON RICHERT STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
For weeks the students prepared for the author's visit, studying Alaska, its people, the Iditarod dog sled race. They read her books: "Kiana's Iditarod," "Mammoth Magic," "North Country Christmas" and "Alaska's Three Bears."
Some fifth-graders even played instruments and sang an original song about the 49th state.
Excitement was high the morning they would meet face-to-face with the author whose Alaskan critter friends have become their own animal pals.
But the first assembly of pupils who sat in tiny rows on the gym floor was as still and quiet as snowfall in the night - until Gill launched herself into action.
An energetic speaker who does not bore even first-graders, Gill filled their heads with stories from home, tips for great writing and enthusiasm for literature.
Even the grown-ups learned a few things. Which is good, because Gill charges $800 a day for four presentations. She will spend seven days sharing her Alaskan experiences with Roanoke Valley schools.
To the tune of picture slides and her fast-paced rhythm, Gill told of her childhood days in Florida, seated beneath a tree, munching on a dill pickle and reading books by her favorite author, Jack London.
She dreamed of Alaska as a child, she said, especially an Alaskan Christmas. Christmas tradition at her house, she said, was taking turkey dinners to the lifeguards on duty.
"I couldn't imagine the things Jack London was talking about," she said.
But she could imagine the animals in his books, more than she could muster an appreciation for the alligators and toy poodles in her neighborhood. So when she had the chance to move to Alaska 20 years ago, she did. She fell in love with the the polar bears, the legendary wooly mammoth, the moose, the dogs. She also got her first dog - a husky - and named it Buck, after the dog in London's "Call of the Wild."
Gill's first job in Alaska was as a newspaper writer. One of her first assignments was to cover the first Alaskan Iditarod dog-sled race, a 1,150-mile trek from Anchorage to Nome. Back at her typewriter, she recalled the sights, smells and sounds of the race.
"Being a writer is the best job in the world," she told two assemblies of pupils. "That's what a writer does. They sit back at a typewriter, close their eyes, and they imagine - what would it be like out there?"
Rather than wonder forever what the dogs and racers experience on their journey through Alaska's snow-filled countryside, Gill decided to run the race herself. She became one of the first women to enter, spending about 19 days on the trail and sleeping for only one hour at a time - on top of her sled.
Though she came in 29th, Gill couldn't have been happier with her experience. Now she had the descriptions she would use in her children's books - how 20 degrees below zero felt, how loud the dogs could be when they all met up at a checkpoint.
But her favorite part of running the Iditarod, she told the pupils, was learning about the dogs and all Alaska's other "critters," as she affectionately calls them.
That shows in every book she writes, where animals are as much a part of the story as the human beings, and where the critters become her vehicle for sharing the history of the Alaskan people.
Cundiff students have learned more concretely about Alaska from Gill's visit than they could have from a text. The giant leg bone she brought from the extinct woolly mammoth will be remembered long after she's back in the North Country.
Said third-grader Mitchel Eakin, "I liked [Gill's talk], because she had those dinosaur bones and fossils and things. . . . I learned about the animals and things . . . and the people are different than us. I love the critters!"
by CNB