Reed Intermediate School students excitedly welcomed author Lauren Tarshis when she visited their school on Tuesday, June 3.

Tarshis, who lives in Connecticut with her family, is the author of the New York Times bestselling historical fiction series I Survived, which takes readers into some of the most terrifying moments across history through the eyes of a kid who lived to tell the tale.

Some events highlighted throughout the series include the sinking of Titanic, the American Revolution, and Hurricane Katrina.

While many of the events featured in I Survived are widely known, Tarshis said some are lesser known, such as the grizzly attacks of 1967 or the Wellington Avalanche of 1910.

To date, there are 24 books in the I Survived series, with the 25th book, I Survived The Dust Bowl, 1935, to be released in October.

Students in both grades of the intermediate school were overjoyed to see Tarshis. When she asked students to raise their hand if they read one of her books before, almost the entire room excitedly raised their hands.

Tarshis explained to them that whatever she writes about, whether famous or not, changed history in a way that they can feel today.

"I really consider all of these events important ... meaning it's not just some sort of random thing that happened, it's an event that has a lasting impact on our lives," she said.

To that end, Tarshis said she puts a lot of effort to accurately capture events of long ago and more recently through extensive research and interviews.

A large part of her research process, she said, is traveling to the places she writes about. From venturing to the city of Pompeii in Italy or trekking the Cascades mountain range in western North America, Tarshis said she is happy to travel the world for the sake of her research.

She was just as happy to share the lasting impact of lesser known events with students, such as the grizzly attacks of 1967. Otherwise known as the "Night of the Grizzlies," it was when two college girls who went camping in Montana's Glacier National Park were killed by different grizzly bears on the same night within an hour of each other.

The two girls did not know each other and slept in tents miles apart. Tarshis said there had never been a fatal grizzly bear attack in Glacier National Park's history before that night.

The event spurred rule changes not just in Glacier National Park, but in every national park across the country. Tarshis said there are now large fines for anyone caught littering and rules stating people are not allowed to cook food anywhere near where they will sleep. People can get kicked out of a national park for misbehavior, she noted.

These changes were made not because grizzly bears are inherently a threat, but because people had routinely destroyed the wilderness that grizzly bears thrived in with garbage and negative behavior, according to scientists and park rangers.

Tarshis said people are safer going to a national park today because bears can indulge in their natural behaviors, and the bears are much better off because they have a wilderness that is better protected from the negative impact people can have.

Tarshis always likes to start her presentations by talking about the "Night of the Grizzlies" because it shows how people can learn lessons and take action from events big and small throughout history.

“After the Titanic, it's not like people said, ‘Oh well, too bad 1,200 people died.' They thought, ‘How can we prevent this from happening again? What can we do to make things better in the future?’” Tarshis explained.

Overcoming Challenges

The hardest part of writing the I Survived series, Tarshis said, is writing the fictional characters who experience and survive the terrifying historical events. Tarshis joked with the audience that, when she first started, she thought she could take one of her kids or one of their friends, throw them into a hurricane, and call it a day.

However, Tarshis continued to create character after character from scratch, developing their personality and backstory beyond the historical events they survive through. Tarshis said each of her characters are already dealing with something really hard in their life before facing what they do in the novel.

Tarshis admitted she never expected to be an author. She flipped through a slideshow of photos throughout her life and said to the audience, "If you had asked all of [my classmates] to point to the girl who would never grow up to be an author, they would point to me."

Tarshis had a secret growing up: she could not read a book. All the way from first grade through ninth grade, she never read a book. She said she could read words well and sound them out fine, but whenever she read a page or paragraph, all of the words swirled around each other, she told the students last week.

Feeling ashamed and embarrassed, Tarshis never talked to anyone about her struggles, not even her own teachers.

That all changed in tenth grade, when her teacher gave everyone a copy of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Tarshis challenged herself to learn how to read it and realized that, if she read every paragraph two or three times and took notes, the book made sense.

While Tarshis said she did not instantly become the most genius girl in her school, the strategy worked for her.

"I was able to get through high school, get through high school, go to college ... start writing for the newspaper, and slowly the idea of becoming an author wasn't so crazy," Tarshis said.

Tarshis said she even struggled in her journey to become an author. Her first efforts to write a book ended poorly, she said.

She hated the first book that she worked on for three years, and gave up writing for several years after that. However, Tarshis watched two of her children, who were obsessed with basketball, go from shooting and constantly missing the net to becoming much better players over the years.

"At a certain point, I looked and realized they had no gift. I saw them fail ... They got upset when they didn't make the team, but they didn't quit. And they inspired me to try to write another book," Tarshis explained.

They inspired her to write again, and Tarshis published her first book at the age of 42.

"The main reason I told everyone this story is that they should not have to imagine instant success," Tarshis said.

She encouraged everyone to remember that it's never too late for what they want to do before happily opening the floor for a question-and-answer segment.

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Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.