Blogfest 2009

Angry. Censorship is a hot button issue for me. No one has the right to decide what someone else can or can’t read. I mean, a parent can try to influence what his or her child reads (but good luck with that, once they become teens). But that parent has no business deciding what someone else’s kid should or shouldn’t read. Let alone other adults.

I’d love it! I know, I know. What’s wrong with me? Well, the cold, unvarnished truth is banned books get press and press means more sales. Period. I would love to write a book so controversial that it makes people uncomfortable and requires them to really think and perhaps take a good, long look inside their souls. If one of my books were banned, more people would make an effort to read it, and that is the goal of every writer. To be read. And sure, if I get you to stick it to The Man by defying censorship to stretch the ol’ brain cells into considering a different point of view, then that’s just gravy.

Tough question. First, I think banning books, even books that the majority might find repellent, serves little purpose but to peak the interests of those a ban is designed to protect. For example, how many young women secretly read Go Ask Alice because they wanted to know what all the fuss was about? I knew a few.

On the flip side, parents helping children age appropriate material is important. I’ve got a 5-year-old son. Reading and watching TV and films are a family activity, and we talk with Mark about what we’ve read and seen. He’s clearly not ready to read (he’s still learning to read, but we read a lot) or see certain books and films because his mind is incapable of processing and dissecting the text and images and could cause him psychological harm. The Saw series would be a terrible choice.

Honored. If someone were to think seriously enough about one of my books to decide it had such a profound effect on readers that it should be banned, that means I wrote something pretty powerful. Since I stand behind and believe in what I write, it essentially would mean that I succeeded beyond my wildest imagination!

I would feel that my book was doing what it is supposed to be doing: moving people, stirring them to action, raising dustclouds in areas of their psyche that they would rather see shrivel up and disappear. Some of my favorite authors have books that have been banned – Judy Blume, Chris Crutcher, Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Carolyn Mackler, just to name a few.

The banned books these authors wrote were incredibly important. Some of them, I would clutch to my chest as a teen and hold close as evidence that someone out there knew what I was going through. Someone out there understood and cared enough to write the truth and, as a result, to challenge it in its current state.

I think it’s one thing to want to protect children and teens from harm – from what is age-inappropriate. That, I am one hundred percent in support of. But it is another thing entirely to keep children and teens from reading about things they are experiencing, or at least witnessing in their lives. In these cases, I find it’s always best to discuss and to explore the issues together. By banning all discussion, the only people being protected are the adults who then don’t have to address the issues. Children and teens ultimately have to address the issues with or without the help and support of the adults in their lives.