A Letter To Those Who Wish To Ban Books

Dear You,

You, who try to stamp out these books, which have not grown to harm our children, but rather, have sprouted from the hands and the souls of writers who were once children, who now wish to spark a flame in the mind, and to heal a wounded heart. You who try to say these books are not important, that stories are not important,  have you ever had someone say your story is not important to this world? 

How can you say that children should not see and hear the things that are happening around them? How can you say they should keep their noses out of books, and instead, pressed to the glass of school bus windows where children sit and talk with mouths full of words we'd rather they not speak? How can you say we shouldn't talk about the things, which hurt our children, and torture our children, that come up to our children with a plastic cup filled with beer or whiskey or whatever they can find to drown out the pain? Why would you rather they taste the booze between those sweet lips instead of tasting it through a voracious literary appetite? 

Why should we let girls struggle with weight and rape and the utter pain of a broken heart, alone? Why should we let boys treat girls like they don't matter? Why should we categorize and stereotype the experiences of these young adults? And for that matter, why should we call them young adults if we do not let them behave like adults who are young? 

Why would you take away a hunger for words trailed across the page like spaghetti, wound around the mind like pasta around the tines of a fork? Why would you discourage a belief in books, in magic, in wonderful words, which broaden the mind and make the world beautiful, and true? 

You see, I just don't understand. I am a believer in books. In words. I stories. But you see, I am a writer. And I am a reader. And I was a girl who walked through school hallways with bullies and wounds that could not be bandaged over. But you see, I did not become like those girls on the news. I did not become a statistic. Books rescued me. And that's why I can't understand why you'd take a book from the hands of our children and instead replace it with a smart phone. I can't understand why you'd let these things poison them from the inside out when words could heal them.

 I guess I'll never understand because I believe in books.

Just Another Drop In the Ocean

Yesterday, I briefly touched on my views of book banning, but figured I'd wait and do an entire post about this controversial topic today. Let me preface this post by saying I believe in books, and intend to fight for them as long as there is a fight to be had. As a voracious reader, and a writer who would like to be published someday, book censorship is a topic close to my heart.

Recently, I found that a number of books, including Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, were being challenged at my former high school. At first, I felt outraged, but then, I just felt saddened. Much of my writing grows from these more intense emotions, and this time was no different.

You can find my response to this news in a letter I wrote here. I've thought and stewed and simmered about this since the beginning of January, but I've finally done something about it. I sent a letter to the superintendent of my former high school, and included information to help her understand why no book should ever be banned. And I included why I thought The Bluest Eye held literary and personal importance for students. Then I added a wonderful article and manifesto from 2010 about the dangers of book banning, which you can find here. This is a beautiful and powerful manifesto written by one of my favorite YA authors, Ellen Hopkins. She has certainly seen her fair share of her own books being banned because of the tough topics covered therein. But I've always thought that was what made her books so uniquely important to young adults. 

Of course, I understand why books are being challenged. Books are the most dangerous weapons we have at our disposal; all at once having the power to broaden the mind and connect people, which, can be dangerous. And of course, I understand why canonical texts are used, why they're important, and how the Common Core is changing education. But still, I don't think censoring literature is the answer. 

Why am I talking about this here?

Do I hope all of you invisible readers out there will understand how important books are? Yes, of course. But I also want you to understand that you have the power to stand up for these books, for your ideas, and for your right to read. In my quest to begin a campaign against book censorship, I found a wonderful website, which reviews banned books and explains why they are important. You can find that website here.

I passed the website along to the superintendent as well, and then reached out to R. Wolf Baldassarro, the writer and publisher of that amazing website. I wanted to share my gratitude for his site, explaining how it helped me organize my thoughts around this campaign. He very graciously emailed me back yesterday, and thanked me! And then, he emailed me again with a link to his page where he not only thanked me, but said some very poignant and beautiful things about this cause. You can find his post here. 

In the post, he said something remarkable:

 "We are each of us a drop of water, but together we can wash away the fear and ignorance of the world."

So I suppose, though I am just a drop in this vast ocean of people fighting against book censorship, my drop makes that ocean bigger. His post ended by saying that "the ripples have begun. In time it shall become a tidal wave." I am hoping all of us, the readers and the writers of the world, can become that tidal wave.

A Very Merry Unbirthday

Although yesterday was Lewis Carroll's real birthday, I thought it would be more appropriate to wait until today to celebrate this amazing writer! After all, today is his unbirthday, a term coined by Carroll himself in Through the Looking Glass. Looking back, Disney's Alice in Wonderland is probably my favorite film from childhood. I used to watch it at my grandma's every time I was sick, and now, I'm just as enthralled with Wonderland. 

I think it is Carroll's world, among others, that taught me it was okay to have an imagination, to dream, to create a world of my own, which, I now have done with my writing. I still think about the beautiful, mysterious, and dangerous world Lewis Carroll created, keeping that as one of my touchstones as I write fiction, and especially while I write the Falling series.

Despite any controversy that surrounds this story and its creator, I think it's fair to say that he deserves a shout out on his un-birthday for everything his books have given to me. I agree with Einstein who said:

 "if you want your children to be intelligent read them fairytales."

It seems today, so many people are afraid that fairytales and fantasy will rot children's brains, or worse, turn them into practitioners of black magic. And so, they ban these books, they hide them in locked cabinets. But what these people seem to have forgotten is that the heroes in fiction mirror our real life heroes, and so too do the villains.

Before I get too far off on my quest to end book banning, let me just say Happy Unbirthday to Lewis Carroll, and to all you invisible readers out there who are also celebrating your unbirthdays today!