Teacher turned author

One Tulsa Union elementary school teacher is doing his part to get kids to fall in love with reading. <br/><br/>By day, he teaches music, but in his spare time, he's created a magical world for young

Thursday, March 2nd 2006, 10:18 am

By: News On 6

One Tulsa Union elementary school teacher is doing his part to get kids to fall in love with reading.

By day, he teaches music, but in his spare time, he's created a magical world for young readers to enjoy.

News on 6 reporter Ashli Sims talks to a Peterâ€™s Elementary School teacher turned author. Strumming his guitar and conducting class, Shane Taylor seems to be in his element, but there's another side to this jovial music teacher.

Shane Taylor spends a lot of time in a magical world, conjured right out of his imagination. Now that world is coming to life in the pages of his new book. â€œSome friends and family read it and said hey you really oughtta do something with this instead of just keeping it and so I started looking into publishing it and here we are.â€

The music teacher who's constantly getting his kids to exercise their creative juices writes about a "boring" school teacher, who's lost his imagination. â€œHis profession had to be modeled off of something close to me but its not modeled after any particular teacher.â€

Magic of Mortals will be hitting the shelves of Wizard's Asylum soon. But ironically this teacher turned author wasn't a reader growing up. â€œI tell these kids when I was their age the teachers had to put my arm behind my back to get me to read. I didn't want to read. I didn't like to read until I found fantasy and science fiction and stuff like that."

Taylor says since he discovered fantasy books, he's never without one. He hopes his book can have that kind of impact on young readers. And he hopes his main character's rediscovery of his imagination will teach kids something too. "Its OK to keep your imagination to keep your creativity and you can grow up without you can grow older without necessarily having to grow up.â€

Shane Taylor self-published his first book. The folks at Wizard's Asylum on 71st and Mingo says it should be in the store early next week.