Nationally-recognized author Ben Mikaelson visited Simon Middle School recently, encouraging students about their untapped writing potential and offering advice on how to deal with bullying. (Photo by Jim Cullen)
by JIM CULLEN
Montana-based author Ben Mikaelson paid a visit to Simon Middle School recently, a campus that has enjoyed his novel, “Touching Spirit Bear,” this fall. The visit brought a full set of the author’s warm and engaging presentations dealing with the life experiences that brought him to writing.
Mikaelson told of many experiences which were negatively colored by bullies. He described those experiences with self-deprecating humor, drawing peals of laughter from the first group that heard him, the Wolverines’ sixth graders. But the entertaining guest’s message was clear – that adults recognize the seriousness of bullying and that students who suffer from it have to find strategies to deal with it.
A fair-haired youth growing up in Bolivia presented its own challenges for Mikaelson, he told his young audience. He became accustomed to the word “gringo” at an early age, learning that he was the “diverse” party in that country’s diversity. He admits that, as with most young people, “I didn’t want to be different.”
But it was nothing compared to what he faced when he returned to the United States and enrolled in a boarding school as a twelve-year-old who could barely read or write English.
Regardless of his acknowledged challenges in expressing himself, Mikaelson told the Wolverines he had “a million stories in my head” and he was determined to tell them, “even if I (literally) couldn’t spell ‘the’”. Story-telling served as a partial escape from the daily bullying he endured, but it was a third-grade picture book adaptation of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” that emboldened and inspired him. He mused, “Wouldn’t it be something if I could be something special?” And he realized he couldn’t do it if he just “stood there.”
What became Mikaelson’s special talent was diving, a skill he honed for years until he was diving from 50-feet heights. Piloting planes became another passion and again he mastered a difficult skill. Over the rest of his academic career, in his own way, he came to master his story-telling, a life skill he’s enjoyed for the past 30 years. None of it came easy, Mikaelson told his Simon audiences, but all of it was worth it.
The lack of ease with which he tackled the challenges included a period of being “a very angry young man” who, he admitted, “saw the inside of a police station for the first time” as a result of it. His eventual encounter with and adoption of Buffy, what grew into the 750-pound adult black bear well-known to his readers, proved to be the component of his life that helped turn his heart and mind to positive goals…the kind of goals he firmly counseled his Simon audiences to seek.
