'From A to Zeus,' Childrens' Writers Explain Their Craft at Bookshop Santa Cruz Wednesday

Some teens may be texting nonstop and doing more drugs and having more sex than some adults could have imagined, but Santa Cruz author Jill Wolfson says the basic elements of being a young adult are the same.

"I think the core experience never changes," she says in an interview before her Wednesday evening appearance at Bookshop Santa Cruz (tonight at 7:30 p.m., free). No matter what the externals, teenagers are still trying to discover who they are apart from their families."

Her latest book Furious mixes the world of a place very similar to downtown Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz High with the ancient Greek mythical figures of the three Furies the goddesses of revenge. It tells a tale of what happens when a bullied person gets power.

"Teens are still feeling like who am I in this world and how do i make my place in this world? They are still in the center of the world, with high drama. They are interested in love and being loved and the interior experience of hormones and figuring out who you are remains the same back to the 1800s. They were wringing their hands back then and trying to figure things out in the same ways.

One difference today is the number of families disrupted today by divorce, she says. Another is the amount of older adults who are reading books written for teens, says Wolfson, a former reporter at the San Jose Mercury News who now works in art and writing projects with teens in jail.

"Harry Potter and the Hunger Games opened turned older people onto the world of teen fantasy," she says. Not to mention Twilight, which brings to mind some of the characters in her newest book.

"The Furies were depicted either as horrendously ugly or tremendously sexy with perfect naked bodies and pink hair," she says. She got the idea to bring them to life in a novel from watching her daughter, Gwen, a Berkeley grad, dress up for Halloween as a Fury.

Her story includes a surfer girl, an environmental dreadlocked girl and a foster child. After co-writing a book for adults about the teenage justice system called Somebody Else's Children the Courts the Kids and the Struggle to Save America's Troubled Families  she became interested in writing for the kids she dealt with there and giving voice to what she heard from them.

She also wrote the foreward to a collection of stories by students at Mission Hill Middle School.

With Wolfson Wednesday are two other noted writers, Paul Fleischman, who just wrote The Matchbox Diary  and has done books for people of all ages, and Anne Ylvisaker, author of Button Down.

Their books will be available for signing tonight.