Teaching About the Paranormal Using YA Novels
The St. Augustine Trilogy – Young adult paranormal fiction as an instructional device.
Book I Sliding Beneath the Surface
Book III Targeting Orion’s Children
Jeff
As a retired schoolteacher turned novelist I thoroughly enjoy using my books to continue instructing young people.
I’m able to sneak in some history lessons, and through the development of the main character, fifteen-year-old Jeff Golden, I take the opportunity to drive home the concept that you have the power to create your own reality.
But to do all that, I use the paranormal as my hook. Young people, and a lot of other people young in spirit, like that sort of thing. It creates the excitement, suspense, mystery and drama that pulls readers right along until the explosive climax.
All well and good. For me though, in creating the the paranormal events that inundate poor Jeff and his girlfriend, Carla, I tap into my own personal history. You see, to my way of thinking, the paranormal actually exists side-by-side with the everyday reality we generally agree upon.
I didn’t always view existence this way, not by a long shot. It took the death of my father many years ago to shake me out of my narrow views about reality.
So many unusual things happened when I lost Dad that I felt compelled to investigate them further. In fact, my wife and I both did.
And as we researched and spoke with knowledgeable people, more and more paranormal type things happened in our lives.
Eventually, the documentation of what we learned and experienced became so voluminous that Barb and I wrote a nonfiction book about it titled, An Explosion of Being: An American Family’s Journey Into the Psychic.
Prentice Hall offered us a contract and published the book worldwide. We even did live radio shows from our home through the U.S. and up into Canada.
I tell you all this because I want you to understand how the paranormal aspects of my young adult novels are rooted in my real life experiences.
And when I say “rooted” I mean just that. I take little nuggets from what I’ve gone through and/or what I’ve researched, and I build on them.
Naturally, the end product is much more spectacular than what I truly know but that is the nature of fictionalization and capturing the attention of your audience.
Lobo
To guide Jeff and Carla through heart stopping and often dangerous events that befall them, I insert the tough and mysterious Native American shaman, Lobo.
Lobo is the quintessential adviser I would hope everyone looking for answers to paranormal questions might have in their lives. He is sort a tougher, bigger than life composite of those wonderful people who gave Barb and me advice as we made our hesitant leaps into the unknown.
Carla
Does all this mean that I’m trying to convince young people to blindly accept the weird, the strange and outlandish as real and something to believe in? Hardly.
But what I do hope, going beyond the excitement and fun that I want my paranormal writing to stimulate, is that young people will be open to all possibilities.
If I can expand their perspectives that will allow them to see beyond what they already think they know, I will have done my job.
And if I can get them to investigate life to the fullest using all of their God given abilities, then I will really have done my job.
I know, I know. Some folks say that the paranormal in all of its manifestations is bad, evil and should be shunned. I simply don’t agree.
To me, the paranormal is no more evil than is the everyday life we generally agree upon. Evil and danger exist in the physical world that we share and from what I can see, there is a continuation of evil and danger in the unseen worlds that we share as well.
But to ignore the unseen worlds because of that is just as ludicrous as ignoring it in the real world. To do so is to truly blindside yourself to something of great importance.
K
ids will be kids and some of them like to experiment. They will play with Ouija boards, conduct their own little seances and things like that. Well, if my novels teach anything about the paranormal its that you don’t just play around with it, you could get burned. Be open, be aware, investigate if something happens and get help from knowledgeable adults – that’s the thrust of what I try to get across in my writing.
So there you have it. Below are the trailers for the two trilogy books already in print. And below that, there are some links in order to fill in any of the blanks in what I’m doing with the St. Augustine Trilogy:
Sliding Beneath the Surface
Stepping Off a Cliff
Reading Motivation that Worked (The Pine Ridge HS project in Deltona, FL)
Rewarding Reading Excellence in Schools (ThePedro Menendez HS project in St. Augustine, FL)
Trilogy Locations in St. Augustine, FL
The Main Characters in The St. Augustine Trilogy
Teaching History Through Young Adult Novels
Teaching Resilience Through Young Adult Novels
