What books and movies helped you in the research for your book and it's Native American legend. Do you have a website you would recommend readers who are interested in looking into the subject more?
ELEANOR (The Unseen) is a young adult paranormal story about a young girl growing up in a small Wyoming town. She is called Eleanor. She lives in Jamesford, but she isn't from there. She's a transplant. And she's not so very young.
The
story was inspired by a southwest Navajo legend I first encountered
reading Tony Hillerman. I saw in that legend a metaphor for life and of
growing up. It gave me an opportunity to explore the complexities of
identity and change in the development of a true outsider.
That legend was the legend of the Skinwalker.
In
the Navajo tradition, Skinwalkers are evil sorcerers able to change
their form to trick and kill their enemies. It’s a type of magical
lycanthropy. Interesting, but then I got poking around the internet and
library and I was struck by how truly universal shape-shifting legends
are.
That
gave me the idea to focus on a reality beneath the myth, under the
conception that so many people seeing the same thing across centuries
and miles might have experienced the same thing. There are other
theories about concurrent legend, archetypes and such which explain it,
but not for my purposes.
In
researching the book I went to Dubois Wyoming and drove across the Wind
River Shoshone Reservation. I picked up a little book of Native
American myth called Stories of the Eastern Shoshone
by Trehero & Hultkrantz, 2009. In that book I found the story of
the “Nimirika” which has much in common with the Navajo skinwalkers. The
fictional town of Jamesford, where Eleanor
lives, is in Shoshone country so that legend needed to be brought in and
fell in easy. The Navajo legends are well documented on the internet so
I didn’t need to go far to get those. ELEANOR has deep connections to the Navajo.
For most of my research about “skinwalkers, I began with Tony Hillerman’s Skinwalkers, the
Leaphorn/Chee mystery that planted the seed. I then surfed from the all
powerful Wikipedia Navajo pages. My own strange library of arcane books
served me well, a couple notable tomes being The Monster Manual, a D&D reference book and John Michael Greer’s Monsters. But these only took me so far.
My
creatures are not skinwalkers, nor are they nimirika. Those are names
given to something strange. Like werewolves and doppelganger they
approach the issue but don’t encapsulate it.
What I have in ELEANOR
is something different and unique, an entity inspired by legend, shaped
by imagination and symbol and then brought into fiction. I have firm
threads reaching into the historical mythical past which touch into the
present. I can thus use the allegories and forms of legend to shape a
saga of rivaling cultures and species, humanity and nature, predator and
prey.
I
should mention one movie that crept into my thinking as I wrote THE
UNSEEN series, a movie that had quite the impression on my young mind
when I first saw it: THE LITTLE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE. It is a
dark story about a young girl’s survival in a world that wouldn’t have
her on her terms. The themes and tropes in that movie, and I suppose in
Laird Koenig’s book by the same name, are present in ELEANOR, (THE UNSEEN).
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THE UNSEEN, BOOK 1 OF 3!
JOHNNY WORTHEN!
It was a gamble for Eleanor to rejoin humanity, but she was driven to it.She’d been too successful forgetting. The last vestiges of her family hung by a thread in her transformed brain and drove her to be reckless.Ten years later, Eleanor hides in plain sight. She is an average girl getting average grades in a small Wyoming town: poor but happy, lonely but loved. Her mother, Tabitha, is there for her and that’s all she’s ever needed. But now her mother is sick and David has returned. The only
friend she’d ever had—the only other person who knows her secret—is back. And Eleanor again becomes reckless.
Eleanor is a modest girl, unremarkable but extraordinary, young but old, malleable but fixed. She is scared and confused. She is a liar and a thief. Eleanor is not what she appears to be.
•Eleanor is a raw, beautiful story with an unforgettable protagonist.Although it includes a paranormal basis in Native American legend, the story maintains emotions and complexity usually only present in literary YA novels.
• Unique and unexplored premise based on the Native American legends of skinwalkers.
http://www.amazon.com/Eleanor-The-Unseen-Johnny-Worthen/dp/1939967341/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1400344815&sr=8-1&keywords=eleanor+by+johnny
Barnes and Noble
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/book
About the Author!
JOHNNY WORTHEN graduated with a B.A. in English and Master’s in
American Studies from the University of Utah. After a series of
businesses and adventures, including running his own bakery, Worthen
found himself drawn to the only thing he ever wanted to do—write. And
write he does. When he’s not pounding on his keyboard or attending
writers conferences, Worthen spends
You can find Johnny Worthen online here:https://www.facebook.com/Johnn
https://twitter.com/JohnnyWort
http://www.johnnyworthen.blogs
An honor. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteEleanor is on my "to read" list. I didn't realize Tony Hillerman had been an inspiration. Thanks for the great interview.
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