Gone to the Woods

Paulsen, Gary. Gone to the Woods. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2021.

If you are a teacher of any grade in any place except perhaps a school for girls, you probably know the power of a Gary Paulsen novel. Paulsen (1939-2021) has written and published “more than 200 books for children and adults” and I know if I have a reluctant reader in my classroom, I can hook him (or her) in with a Gary Paulsen book. They are usually short (150 pages or less), raw, realistic, and engaging. He writes from his experiences and adventures. He writes as a child who learned how to survive from an early age. Gone to the Woods is his final memoir. It is a must read for any teacher who depends on Paulsen’s novels to turn reluctant readers into eager readers.

I suppose the question is whether this is an appropriate book to teach. Amazon suggests that it is written at an 8-12 year-old reading level (Lexile 1030) but is appropriate from 7-9 grade readers. Unlike most of Paulsen’s books, this one is lengthy at 368 pages. For a reader with a much higher reading level, it is a fast read taking only a few hours from start to finish. As all of Paulsen’s books, the topics are gritty.

Do you utilize literature circles?

Here are some great resources to get you started if you haven’t tried them in your classroom yet secondary or elementary. The cool thing about literature circles is that they provide choice, but the best thing about them is that they move the work onto the students and away from the teacher! If you haven’t tried them yet, I urge you to create a literary circle unit for next year, you won’t be sorry. You can also use the concept for a whole class novel, it isn’t as freeing for you as the teacher or as exploratory for the students, but the small group discussions are much more interesting than whole group discussions could ever be.

Since this book has so many pages, it would be a great offering for you students who are reading below grade level. If your more confident readers select a meatier novel such as Moby Dick or Jane Eyre, your struggling readers will not feel slighted like they might if you gave them a skinny novel such as The Scarlet Letter or a play such as King Lear.

Start off with a book talk.

When I offer choice to my students, I select a variety of novels with various reading levels, varied settings, and interesting plots and then I explain the differences between the novels in a book talk. This can work at the beginning of the year to get to know your students or at the end of the year when you already know them well.

I know this sounds counter intuitive as a teacher, but when I introduce a novel, I always summarize it for my students. As a student, I hated it that the teacher knew everything about the book and then expected me, who was reading it for the first time, to be able to discuss it on the same level as the teacher. That never worked. I always felt like the teacher was trying to trick me to say the wrong thing. In college, my favorite teacher always explained everything about the book before we read it. Some might think that a student wouldn’t need to read it after that. Not true. Have you ever read a Spark Notes synopsis of a novel? It might be enough to pass a multiple choice test about the content, but it would never help you really discuss the writing.

I like my students to read like writers. If you haven’t read How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster, I encourage you to put it on your summer reading list. You will return to school with a new outlook on teaching reading.

One refrain I hear from fellow teachers is that “students don’t want to read something boring” and then they use that excuse to give students watered down books or worse to do what Kelly Gallagher calls commit Readicide. Readicide is when we as teachers make reading boring by giving students loads of busy work designed to make sure they are reading. Boo to that. Instead, teachers need to know when and how to support students as they read interesting but challenging literature.

Here is a PDF of another chapter in Gallagher’s book, I highly recommend you read it if you are struggling with the idea of giving students a summary before they read a challenging novel.

Book talk for Gone to the Woods

Raise your hand if you are familiar with Gary Paulsen’s books? Have you read Harris and Me? Hatchet? Brian’s Return? What about Sula? Do you hate reading boring books? Do you want a book with a masculine protagonist? Do you want a book that has a man vs nature plot? If you can say yes to any of those questions, listen up because Gone to the Woods may be for you.

This Paulsen book is actually a memoir. If you are a fan of memoirs, you may like this book. Some popular memoirs are The Glass Castle, Educated, Angela’s Ashes, Somebody’s Daughter, Hillbilly Elegy and etc. Has anyone read or heard about a memoir recently? Who can describe what a memoir is like and how it is different from a standard novel? You may have noticed that memoirs feel like the stories we read in novels but are often written in past tense. The narrator seems very believable because the narrator is writing from personal experience. Still, a good memoir also follow the traditional story arc so there is excitement in the telling.

A very cool aspect of this memoir, Gone to the Woods is that in it Paulsen fills in some of the gaps in his story. If you remember the character “me” in Harris and Me, and always wondered what his life was like before he got to the farm to spend the summer with Harris, this book will answer those questions.

In Gone to the Woods, Paulsen talks about a summer on a different farm with his mom’s sister and her husband, being forced to rejoin his mother when she moved the the Philippines on an Army base to live with Paulsen’s father, his life back in the states, his life as a soldier and probably most importantly how he became a writer when he rarely attended school and barely “earned” a high school diploma.

Some of you may share some of Paulsen’s experiences with parents who haven’t measured up. Some of you may have great parents and a great homelife, but are interested in learning what life is like for people who don’t. For me, I was lucky and had parents who were devoted to providing a safe and nurturing homelife – surprisingly because neither of them had that. My parents both struggled as children because of their parents’ bad choices and lack of devotion to being decent parents. When I read Paulsen, it helps me understand my parents better. It gives me some empathy for them and for others in that situation.

Typical of Paulsen’s other books, he doesn’t really dwell on his hardships that much. He mostly focuses on his solutions to his hard life. He talks about his survival tactics. There is a place late in the novel that I really liked. He was very successful in the Army mainly because he did not have a soft life prior to joining the Army like a lot of his fellow recruits. The Army was a place for Paulsen to get paid for having a hard life. At one point though, he is watching some fellow soldiers drink and play cards and realizes that he wants more out of life. He says, “He wanted to grow and be more and do more than just that, sit by a footlocker drinking clear liquid out of a jar talking in low sounds about battles long gone, long fought” (355). He ends by saying that at 80, he found a box full of old things and stumbled upon the first story he every wrote in a notebook and decided to write this book.

I can’t end this book talk without mentioning that this book, typical of Paulsen’s books, is easy to read. It looks long at 368 pages, but it is written like all of Paulsen’s books with a vocabulary that all of us can manage. That’s not to say that it is appropriate for young children! The subject matter is definitely at your level and it is not something I would ask a younger student to read. This is definitely a book for adults.

How can this book change lives?

For me, it opened my eyes to the struggle that many people have growing up in families that are dysfunctional. It also reminds me that the way out of poverty is through hard work and not hand outs. That is not to say that compassion isn’t necessary or that struggling young people don’t need assistance – they do! My parents’ lives would have been much sweeter if there had been free and reduced cost lunches, foster care, food stamps, and etc. I don’t mean to say those things aren’t necessary. But Paulsen shows us that at a certain point, for him it was as his stint in the Army was up, it is time to make the life you want through hard work and perseverance.

For my students in struggling families, it will give them both hope and a roadmap. For my students in supportive homes, it will give them empathy. For almost everyone, it will provide an interesting read.

Have you read a great memoir lately? Do you use literature circles in your classroom? Will you be reading Foster or Gallagher?