This month’s guest columnist is June Pulliam an instructor in the English department at LSU. June was one of the first people I met when I arrived at LSU. She was teaching the YA literature course frequently, so we had to have lunch. She is one of those fantastic people keeping the department running smoothly through her contributions as a teacher, colleague, and a scholar. 
I admire her energy and her commitment to teaching is fantastic. Much of her scholarship focuses on a topic that terrifies many of us—Zombies, Monsters, Werewolves, and all things horrible. She often teaches classes that explore the horror genre and has authored two books. The first is Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction and the second is co-authored with Anthony Fonseca Encyclopedia of the Zombie: The Walking Dead in Popular Culture and Myth. In addition, she is also the editor of Dead Reckonings: A Review Magazine for the Horror Field. I know that you will enjoy her comments and I hope you check out her scholarly work.

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Stories Are the Wildest Things of All

In Patrick Ness’s novel A Monster Calls[i], the monster who visits Connor O’Malley tells him three stories, because “stories are the wildest things of all” as “they chase and bite and hunt.” This monster calls on thirteen- year-old Connor, whose divorced mother is constantly ill due to her cancer treatments, leaving only Connor to care for her. The monster, a giant yew from the graveyard next to Connor’s home, promises that once he finishes his three stories, Connor will tell a story of his own, one that will be true--this story, the most painful one of Connor’s young life, will help him deal with his mother’s impending death. A Monster Calls, which has been described as a darker version of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, also demonstrates how YA horror fiction is uniquely able to help teens make sense of a world where they have difficulty defending themselves against the complex forces that act upon them.

Horror can be loosely defined as any text containing a monster, something that is wholly “Other” and represents our darkest fears. The horror genre’s fantastic tropes are uniquely able to describe the complex subject position of adolescence.  In his book, The Uses of Enchantment and Magic, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim sees the unrealistic nature of fairy tales as an important literary device to convey the inner processes that take place within an individual rather than information about the external world (25). In this way, the fairy tale permits the reader to find her own solutions within the story. Bettelheim’s observation about the value of fairy tales also applies to horror fiction, a genre that employs unrealistic tropes to explore that which the reader has no words to reference. Or in other words, horror fiction reveals the monsters among us who walk in plain sight, and who can only be dealt with when they are seen for what they really are. Young Adult horror fiction, then, is particularly helpful to teens, since it shows them the monsters in their everyday lives and suggests strategies for dealing with them.

So, this Halloween, I would like to take the opportunity to share with you some of my favorite works of YA horror fiction. Each uniquely articulates the experience of adolescence, where teens lack the ability to fully comprehend overwhelming situations, let alone have the power to change them. I am particularly fond of these works in how each emphasizes how storytelling gives people the ability to comprehend and control their situations.

Andrew A. Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle highlights how narrative is a fundamental component of developing a coherent sense of self that allows the individual to be more than someone who is acted upon by external forces. Austin Szerba is at the epicenter of the apocalypse, brought about after a highly-infectious plague strain is accidentally released in his small home town of Ealing, Iowa.  As the people around Austin are turned into giant praying mantises who eat other humans, he struggles to record the final moments of the human race while he races to bring his friends and family to a shelter where they will wait out events indefinitely. Austin’s attempts to both document this event for posterity and construct an adult sense of self that has agency are emphasized through how his narrative keeps stopping and starting, as he edits the story to include a broader perspective of the disaster, signifying that he is coming to understand how larger events are connected to this moment in history. Austin’s account is related through a teen perspective characteristic of most YA fiction in how he initially views himself as the center of the universe. However, in this case, Austin IS the center of the universe: he must repopulate the world with his girlfriend Shannon if the human race is to survive, and his history of the world could very well be the only account of the event. Grasshopper Jungle is unique for its absurdist sense of humor that is typical of some other YA novels such as Pete Hautman’s Godless  < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godless_(novel)>, where the protagonist rebels against his father’s Catholicism by inventing a religion where acolytes worship the town water tower.

While many monsters in Young Adult horror fiction are supernatural, others are completely of our world. In Laura Whitcomb’s A Certain Slant of Light,[1] these monsters hide in plain sight. During the six days that the novel takes place, Helen, a ghost, inhabits the body of Jenny, a teen girl whose fundamentalist Christian family has repressed her so intensely that her spirit has fled her flesh and so now she is quite literally robbed of her voice. Before Helen arrives, Jennifer’s parents haven’t noticed that there is something different about their daughter, as the soul-less Jennifer is also an ideal daughter who speaks when spoken to and obeys her parents’ commands without question. Helen, in Jennifer’s body, helps both Jennifer and herself to reclaim agency in their lives. To do this, Helen must uncover the story of Jennifer’s life. As Helen pieces together the story of Jenny’s expurgated life, which includes “rewriting” Jennifer’s story that was in her diary before her father tore out the pages after reading of a sexual dream that she had, she helps Jenny fight back against her father, the novel’s real monster, whose fundamentalist Christianity requires that the women in his family completely subordinate themselves to him. After Helen pieces together a coherent narrative of Jenny’s life, Jenny’s spirit is finally enticed to return to her own body and speak up for herself to prevent her father from robbing her of her identity.

A Certain Slant of Light is typical of ghost stories written by women, where they consider issues that affect women’s lives such as such as domestic violence, women being dispossessed of their property, the need to know women’s history, and bonds between women in this life and even beyond the grave that help ensure their survival lives.[ii] While spirits in ghost stories authored by women can be considered as monstrous because they are not of this world, they also help the women they haunt.

A Certain Slant of Light is an atypical work of YA fiction because it lacks a teen protagonist. Instead, it is related through the perspective of a woman who died when she was 27, sometime before the American Civil war, and who has been dead for 130 years. Still, the much older Helen in Jenny’s body represents the subject position of adolescence, where teens are more “adult” in that they know more than their elders give them credit for. Also, the older Helen is nevertheless similar to a teen.  When Helen died, women had far less agency than they do in the first world in the twenty-first century, and so, while in Jenny’s body, Helen seems to be discovering her sexuality for the very first time as if she herself were a teenager.

Assisting Jenny also enables Helen to complete the story of her own life when she finally recalls the details of her own final moments. Helen is a wandering spirit because she cannot make peace with what happened before her death. In fact, the memory is so painful that she has repressed nearly all details of it. Only when Helen can remember her last moments can she stop wandering and go to the other side, where spirits exist in joyful communion with everyone that they loved in life.

Like A Certain Slant of Light, My Friend Dahmer is similarly unusual in that it is not related through a teen protagonist, but instead, told in flashbacks by the now adult writer, who went to high school with serial killer Jeffery Dahmer. Derf Backderf’s graphic novel uses storytelling to help the author come to grips with how he once knew the isolated and troubled teen who would grow up to rape and murder 17 men and boys before he was caught. Backderf expresses both helplessness and guilt at being unequipped as an adolescent himself to help the disturbed teen, who came to school blind drunk for every day of his senior year, and who frightened his acquaintances by his fascination with dead animals. This graphic novel is Backderf’s way of coming to terms with what he might have done had he realized the depth of his former high school classmate’s mental illness. Throughout My Friend Dahmer, Backderf constantly asks “where were the adults,” such as the teachers who failed to notice Dahmer’s chronic inebriation, or the parents, who were so wrapped up in their own bitter divorce that they left their son to survive alone in the familial home during his last year of high school while each began a new life elsewhere.

Backderf’s graphic novel, in black and white, starkly renders Dahmer’s sense of isolation and helplessness in the confusing world of high school, where teachers, counselors and peers would not and could not help him come to grips with the teen’s confusing feelings. The teenage Dahmer was just realizing that he was gay in a time when homosexuality was still thought of as a pathological condition. Backderf’s illustrations also show what words cannot about how Dahmer must have felt when realized that he was so different from his peers when he started having fantasies of killing men and having sex with their corpses.

Young Adult horror fiction differs from horror written for an adult audience in that it tends to be less graphic, perhaps because publishers know that they will meet with resistance from adults if they market works filled with gore and violence to a teen audience. As a result, some subgenres of horror are very under-represented in YA horror fiction, such as serial killer narratives. Backderf’s My Friend Dahmer is an exception, because while the writer does pen a story of the mass murderer as a young man, he pointedly does not go into detail about Dahmer’s career as a killer. This is because Backderf does not want to paint Jeff Dahmer as a monster, something that has already been done, ad nauseam, in the various accounts of his crimes. Rather, Backderf represents Dahmer as a weird and lonely teen. My Friend Dahmer is a 2013 ALA/YSALA Alex Award Winner.

These four novels are among some of the best YA horror being written today, and also demonstrate how stories are the wildest things of all. Read these books and let their stories chase and hunt and bite you this Halloween.

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Thanks June. We all seem to be both attracted and repulsed by the things that terrify us. For example, my grandson in kindergarten wanted to be a Zombie for Halloween until his mother showed him pictures of Zombie costumes on Pinterest that scared him. He decided to try being a ghost this time around. Oh well, maybe next year. As you can see, June clearly has a handle on what scary material we should be reading and worrying about for the rest week.

Until Next Week,

Steven T. Bickmore


[1] A Certain Slant of Light was an ALA book pick of 2006.

[i] A Monster Calls has won both the Carnegie and Greenaway Medals in 2012 (the British version of the Newbery Award) for outstanding contributions to children’s literature.

[ii] Lundie, Katherine A. Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women, 1872-1926. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Print, p. 1, Carpenter, Lynette and Wendy K. Kolmar, editors. Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Print., p. 10

I love days when people give me books. For me books represent possibility. They are unexplored lives, unexplored truths, and reveal connections, allusions, and serendipitous discovery. About a month ago, I walked through the dean’s office and his secretary waved me over. She had two books for me. The University Laboratory School was planning an author event and the dean wanted to know if I was aware of the event. I was not. She handed me two books and an invitation to the events at the school on Oct. 28 and 29.  Thus, began my exposure to M. H. Herlong, a great new writer and a Louisiana writer to boot.

The books looked interesting; the event looked like a good opportunity for me to promote a community literacy activity and explore a new author. I asked Charity Cantey, the Lab School librarian, for an introduction to Ms. Herlong. In a day or so, Ms. Herlong and I exchanged emails and arranged a time to discuss her books and her career as a writer. I settled in and began reading the books. Remember what I said about possibility, unexplored lives, connections, allusions, and serendipitous discovery? Wow, was I in for a treat over the next week as I read the books and prepared to interview this author.

First, I read Buddy, the book that has been chosen as the topic of the seventh grade reading event at the Lab School and the impetus of Ms. Herlong’s visit. Buddy is a wonderful middle grades novel set in New Orleans. Our first summer in Baton Rouge was 2008 and after about six weeks Hurricane Gustav provided us with an eye-opening introduction to the startling power of Mother Nature. We lived for eleven days without power and learned to cut and clear trees. However, as most people know, the effects of Gustav pale in comparison to the destruction, devastation, and loss of life that occurred during Katrina. When the levees breached, a new level of destruction occurred. Herlong’s Buddy is set in the context of Katrina during which a young boy, Li’l T, and his dog, Buddy, are separated during the storm. As you may not know, pet deaths and stranded animals was a significant issue during and after Katrina. No one imagined that they would be away from their homes and their pets for more than a day or so. I invite you to explore Ms. Herlong’s Buddy website, it is tremendous. Above all, read the book and pass it along to middle grades readers.

Second, after reading Buddy, I settled in to read Ms. Herlong’s The Great Wide Sea, her first published novel. Once again, her website is a tremendous source of information.  I wasn’t quite prepared for how smoothly this author was able to switch tone and subject matter. I became aware that I was reading the work of a gifted writer whose books deserve more attention. I was a bit upset that I did not find this first book when it was originally published in 2008. This book is not exactly a middle grades book, yet for those that love a good story, this book could be easily maneuvered. Nevertheless, its most natural appeal is for slightly older readers who love realistic adventure novels.

I didn’t just like this book, I loved this book. I read for a living. I go to sleep most nights knowing that the books will still be there in the morning. In this case, once I reached the halfway point, I had to stay up until I finished the book. It was that good. It reminded me of the best of Gary Paulsen. Readers who love Paulsen will love this story. I kept thinking Gary would love this book. I thought about it so much I convinced Ms. Herlong to provide me with a couple of extra copies so that I could try and get one to him. I sent two copies to Jim Blasingame, one for him to keep and one for him to send along to Gary. Jim is the only person I know who can get a book directly to Gary Paulsen. Jim breathes more rarified air than I do.

I don’t want to talk much more about these books. Instead, I want you to find a copy and read them. Below are some excerpts from the discussion I had with M. H. Herlong. I hope you enjoy it. For my part, I look forward to her visit to the Lab School and, then, her visit with my pre-service English teachers. Don’t you just love author visits?

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(SB) Your books immediately reminded me of couple of YA writers. The initial tone of Buddy, made me think of the books by Christopher Paul Curtis—it was funny, tender, and brought me right into a family that I wanted to know more about.  Who do you see as your literary influences, either in the world of children’s, young adult literature, or the larger world of “literature?”

(M. H. H.) Wow.  That’s a tough one.  I love Christopher Paul Curtis.  I knew of his book Bud, Not Buddy as I was writing Buddy but I did not read it—purposefully.  When I had finished Buddy, I read Curtis’ book and was delighted to learn that his character insisted on being called Bud, not Buddy, because Buddy is a name for a dog.  Perfect!  It is hard to point to influences in the YA world.  When I decided to try my hand at it, I went first to Hatchet because all my boys had read and loved that book (as had I).  I wanted to write something like Hatchet for my sons.  Obviously, I didn’t.  But I learned some principles—such as get rid of the parents, keep chapters short, and supply information about the world—which I was able to use.  In the larger world of literature, my favorite novels are usually Dickens or Dickens-style—comfortably paced, big stories.  I also like a book that gives back.  What I mean by that is a book that makes me think, that is not obvious.  Here I would list Wallace Stegner and Salmon Rushdie just off the top of my head.

(SB) Clearly, Katrina is a major influence in the book as well. You had personal experience with the storm, but did you also conduct interviews and/or study news accounts?

(M. H. H.) Because I live in New Orleans and had three sons at home at the time of Katrina, I knew intimately the pain and despair that so many young people experienced with the sudden dislocation.  At first I thought mostly about the high school seniors.  You work your way up the high school ladder toward senior year—to be quarterback of the football team, to be editor of the yearbook, to finally have a speaking role in the school play, to go at last to all the events as the one of the important people at school.  And then it’s gone.  You may go to another school but at that school there is another guy who has been working his way up to be quarterback, another yearbook editor, etc.  Your chance—as well as your friends, your home, the life you knew and expected—is gone.  At first, I wanted to write about that.  But a different character started talking in my head, and it turned out that he was twelve.  It turned out that he wanted a dog and that he had an awful lot to say about it.  And so Buddy was born.

I wrote out of my own experience as well as the experience of people I knew.  I did not need to conduct interviews.  I lived a lot of it, and everybody in New Orleans just tells (or told) their stories.  I read much in the newspaper and, in particular, was moved by a story about a man and his dog.

(SB) I also found out that Buddy is getting some notice from various award committees. (Ms. Herlong sent me a copy of the notification letter she received from New Hampshire—see below.)

(M. H. H.) For the award Buddy received in New Hampshire I received the following notification:

Dear Ms. Herlong,

I am writing to inform you that Buddy is the winner of this year’s New Hampshire Great Stone Face Book Award.  This award is given annually to an author whose book receives the most votes from 4th through 6th graders throughout the state.  The children vote for their favorite book from a list of 20 recently published titles that are chosen by the Great Stone Face Committee, and the voting takes place every year during April.  The purpose of the award is to promote reading enjoyment, to increase awareness of contemporary writing, and to allow children to honor their favorite authors.  Over 5,100 children in 66 schools and libraries cast their votes this year, and as the votes rolled in, it was clear that Buddy was the favorite.  We on the Great Stone Face committee consider this the highest form of praise that a children’s author can earn.

Thank-you for opening the eyes of New Hampshire children to both the similarities and the differences between their lives and the lives of children who faced the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.   Congratulations on winning the Great Stone Face Award. 

Warmest regards,

Sarah Hydorn
Amherst Town Library
Amherst, NH   03031

(SB) Thank you, I think that captures the impact of the book quite nicely. What do you like best about visiting schools?

(M. H. H.) Oh, an easy one.  The students.  I love talking to students and answering their questions.  I am also always impressed by what teachers and administrators do.  Visiting schools is the perfect antidote to any qualms one might have about the future.

(SB) Some writers of children’s and YA novels tend to have a specific focus, for example some always write about animals. You have chosen two fairly divergent topics for your first two novels. How do you choose the topics? Do you follow one trend or the other?

(M. H. H.) My goal is to follow no trend.  I have written what moves me.  I want to be always doing something a bit different.

(SB) You have a fairly elaborate website that is user friendly. Did you develop it yourself or do you work with somebody else? How do you decide what to include? For example, I especially like the connections to scientific facts that would enhance a readers understanding of the book. Do you track the blog traffic?

(M. H. H.) I developed the website myself but my son turned my ideas into reality.  I decided what to include based on what I guessed that readers and their teachers might need or want.  Both of my books are set in contexts that could be unfamiliar to a lot of students.  Sailing, for example, is its own world and has its own language.  As I wrote The Great Wide Sea, I tried to avoid too much sailor talk even though I myself love it.  So I knew a glossary would be useful.  The same principle applies with the Buddy section of the website.  It is important to me, for example, that readers of Buddy understand why Li’l T’s family made the decision to leave Buddy behind.  It can seem so cruel and short-sighted unless you have a good picture of the whole situation.  That is one reason I wanted to include a lot about hurricanes and especially the history of hurricanes in New Orleans.  As for the “Ideas for Teachers” sections—well, as a former teacher, I just couldn’t help it.  I do not track the blog traffic and, in fact, have not written in the blog for a long, long time because I found it to be taking away from what I primarily want to do.

I am also proud of the video trailer for Buddy because my son made it for me so I am allowed to brag. 

(SB) Good reads has an impressive collection of reviews about Buddy. Do you follow the reviews as an author or do you ignore them?

(M. H. H.) I used to follow reviews—and my editor and agent will send me ones from national publications.  But I sometimes find myself paying too much attention, both to the good ones and the bad ones.  I work better as a writer if I can ignore the world.  My husband, however, focuses on the reviews a lot and sometimes will insist that I look at one on Amazon or Goodreads.

(SB) Both books deal with loss. Do you find your way to this theme accidentally or do events and observations in your own life encourage you in some way to write about this issue?
 
(M. H. H.) Hmmmm.  You might even be more specific.  They both deal with loss of home and with the question of what is home.  I have realized this before, though it was not intentional.  It makes me wonder if the actual theme is loss of childhood, which is a kind of home, and whether maybe all middle grade and YA books address this issue in some way.  The old adage “Write what you know” applies not so much (I think) to the situational center of a story as to the emotional center, and because I am human, I have experienced loss.  But what I really want my stories—or I should say, what I wanted these stories—to be about is not the loss itself but the recovery of strength and faith in life after the loss.  To me the important step, the step toward maturation and human fulfillment, is the movement through loss to the new normal. 

(SB) I have one final question. The motif of story-telling plays a role in both books. Can you talk about that?

(M. H. H.) Yes!  In both The Great Wide Sea and Buddy a major motif is the practice of storytelling.  Besides the fact that both of them are written as if the narrator is telling his story to someone, both have many moments when someone is telling a story, referencing a past telling of a story, reacting to a story, etc.   That’s partly because I come from a culture of storytelling and so I think in stories.  But it is also because stories help us figure out how to live our lives and how to understand our lives.  Perhaps more important, though, is the fact that when we read and hear stories, we are learning how to tell them, and learning to tell stories matters because we need to be able to shape the story of our own lives for ourselves.  That is what both Ben and Li’l T needed to do and did.  They told the stories of their own lives in order to shape them and to understand them.

(SB) Thank you so much for the opportunity to chat with you. It has been great fun. I hope that in a year we are talking again and discussing how many more people are reading your books.

(M.H.H.) I hope so, too!

I saw an interesting article last week that reminded me of a project I have been working on over the last several years. Through the article I learned Lonesome George died two years ago, and his body is on display in New York City. Don’t panic, if you don’t know the name; Lonesome George was the last living Pinta Island tortoise of the Galapagos Islands.  Since his death in 2012, taxidermists have been working on preserving the animal. Now that they are finished, the American Museum of Natural History will have the animal on display through January 4, 2014.

What does this have to do with YA literature and an ongoing project? Today’s blog post has more to do with children’s literature and cross-curriculum connections. A few years ago, Ian Binns, a science education professor who was here with me at LSU, but has since moved on to UNC Charlotte, and I began thinking about using scientific children’s literature to meet the curriculum demands for both English Language Arts and elementary science through a cross-curricular approach. In many instances elementary teachers with a strong base in literacy and children’s literature find many of the science tradebooks—well, boring and a bit pedantic. A good number of offerings don’t capture the imagination. We sought out resources that might capture the imagination of elementary teachers and get those reluctant elementary teachers to embrace science instruction more readily.

Fortunately, we both had the good fortune to work briefly with Dr. Jim Wandersee at LSU before his passing last January. Jim was a noted science educator and one of the founders of 15° Laboratory. Among other things, one of the major contributions of the 15° Laboratory is the annual announcement of the winner of their Giverny Award. Each year since 1998, the organization has given an award for a children’s science picture book that teaches at least one important scientific principle well. In addition, the artwork must be in harmony with the text and the book must be a story with plot and characters. For a full description of the award and the criteria follow this link. The Giverny Award winner in 2004 was Lonesome George the Giant Tortoise. Thus, the connection and the reminder came from the news article that I haven’t thought about the Giverny Award winners enough lately.

After our introduction to these fabulous books, Ian and I began discussing ways that his pre-service students in his elementary science methods class might use one of the Giverny Award winning books to teach more science. The current educational climate focuses on reading and math. In the era of standardized testing and the new Common Core, it seems that what gets tested is what gets taught. We wanted to help pre-service elementary teachers imagine creative ways to teach science while still addressing the demands of reading instruction. Too frequently, teaching science becomes a subject that is fit in the creases between the teaching of reading and math in order to chase test scores instead of learning. Ian and I both believe that often the best teaching is cross-curricular in nature. If in-class reading time incorporated Giverny Award text, then that time might also be used to introduce accurate science. As a result, some portion of the instructional time assigned to reading might also lead to dynamic, exploratory activities that reintroduce more science instruction into the classroom. Over the last four years Ian’s students continue to create units, using books from the complete list of Giverny award winners, that demonstrate how smoothly science and ELA instruction can be melded together to create engaging learning.

We have seen wonderful lessons that clearly focus on ELA standards while teaching science. For example, seed germination by using Sam Plants a Sunflower, erosion with A Log’s Life, sustainable land use with Common Ground, ecosystems using Redwoods, and, of course, endangered species and extinction with Lonesome George the Giant Tortoise.

These pre-service teachers do amazing things when they are given the opportunity to create and think beyond curriculum dictates. One of my favorites is a unit that uses Daniel and His Walking Stick. This unit inevitably allows elementary students to create real or paper walking sticks that they are then allowed to use on a field trip around the school yard to measure things and to keep records. What group of students wouldn’t want to spend a little more time walking around instead of sitting still hour after hour?

 With the announcement that Lonesome George is now visiting the American Museum of Natural History, I am imagining how a teacher might develop a virtual field trip with photos from the museum and other sources. One quick google search found this video and links to others. I hope that many of Ian’s students, past and present, once again reimagine dynamic lessons and activities that utilize these wonderful Giverny Award winners in a cross-curriculum unit that can remind us that our subjects don’t exist in isolated compartments. If you know any elementary teachers or librarians I hope you will do your very best to share this list with them. If you are wondering what to send to nieces, nephews, and grandchildren, this is a nice list to start with. These books remind us that nature has a multitude of stories to tell.

Now that I am reminded that Lonesome George is gone, I am also reminded that Ian and I need to move our project beyond the analysis stage and finish the paper. Wish us luck.

Until next week,

Steven T. Bickmore

 

I was hesitant to start on this post. Last week was Banned Book Week and I enjoyed all of the posts on Facebook, on educators’ blogs, and on various news media outlets. Information and awareness are powerful. I don’t think books should be banned, period. There can be many interpretations on when to avoid or not read a book that makes sense given an individual’s ideology or circumstance at a certain place and time. (Notice, I said the individual, it is that intrusive need of some individuals or of small groups to dictate behavior for everyone that gives me pause.)

In school settings, however, I do think teachers should be responsible. They should be sensitive to their students' needs and to the concerns of their parents. Careful planning in accordance with age appropriate material is not book-banning. Listening to parents’ concerns and allowing them to select alternate readings is not book-banning. At the same time, parents should not produce knee-jerk reactions to a book without closely considering the teacher’s rationale for including a book in a specific unit plan. A reasoned decision to have your child read a different book is easily understood and, I hope, respected and supported by teachers and administrators. Forcing other people’s children to fall in line with your decision for your child is a totally different issue. It is a bizarre and intrusive type of censorship.

Instead, both parents and teachers should try more open communication. As a classroom teacher, I found two forms of communication helpful. First, a disclosure statement that covered classroom expectations, grading policies, and a list of books that we would be studying with a brief rationale was helpful. Second, I tried to hold a back-to-school night for my classes whether or not the school had decided to continue the tradition. (Remember, schools stop having such nights, not because teachers randomly decide to quit attending. It has more to do with the parents’ attendance patterns.) I found that such methods of communication allowed parents to participate in the plans for their children’s education; they become part of the educational process. They were more likely to encourage their children to keep up with the planned curriculum, support their independent reading, and, occasionally, they read a few of the books themselves. 

Nevertheless, I had a few bumps early in my career as I was learning the ropes. Early in the 1980s I was teaching One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  It is important to remember the context, it was before the fall of the Berlin wall and this was a book written by a Russian descendent—an author who was expelled from his country because of his brazen willingness to speak out about injustice. When he writes about a day in the life of man in a Russian Gulag prison camp, he writes from experience. He spent 8 years imprisoned in the Gulag as one of Stalin’s post-war guests. Even after his release he remained in internal exile in Siberia. Fortunately, Khrushchev found One Day in the Life a useful tool to critic Stalin’s heavy hand. Under Brezhnev, however, Solzhenitsyn begins to have trouble again he was finally expelled. It seems that Russian leaders failed to understand that writers write and they frequently write about issues that move them, what they feel is a true representation of the world. In addition, they don’t seem to be too concerned about asking permission from those who might be insulted, confused, or inconvenienced by what they might have to say. To understand Solzhenitsyn’s commitment to the power of art I recommend that you read his Nobel Prize speech which had to be smuggled out of Russia.

In the middle of the unit, the principal asked me to visit his office; gratefully, this wasn’t a frequent occurrence. He had received a phone call from a parent suggesting that I was teaching an inappropriate book. All the way to the office I kept trying to think about what the objectionable book might be. I had taught about the whiskey priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. We had openly talked about examples of hypocrisy in religion—always dangerous ground. We had recently finished discussing the violent nature of apartheid in South Africa (remember Mandela was still in prison) with our unit on Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country. We had discussed the death of Steven Biko, compared practices of apartheid to American Indian reservations and to school segregation. I actually thought that, One Day in the Life, a book which describes how horribly a communist government could treat its own citizen, was actually one of the “safest” books that I was using. Several arguments come to mind that a parent in this school’s relatively conservative community might make about my selections. As I came to find out, I shouldn't have worried about violence, drunkenness, murder, false imprisonment, discussing religion in school, discussions of racial injustice, civil protest, or children fathered out of wedlock.

Nope, it was the dreaded “F” word. I actually don’t think the word has a place in open classroom discussions; it might, but it is hard for me to imagine after twenty five years in the classroom. It occurred a few times in One Day in the Life, but never in the context of a sexual situation. It was always within the context of a prison guard’s language as they addressed the inmates. Solzhenitsyn expertly used the word to help characterize the guards as dehumanizing brutes as they talked about and mistreated men who were primarily political prisoners. My principal, to his credit, was not worked up nor did he talk to me in an accusatory tone, he simply asked me to explain my rationale for teaching the book. I did. I like to think that I did it calmly, but I know I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rockers. I was still within the first five years of my teaching career. I still had more enthusiasm and energy than I did common sense and experience. After he took a few moments to think, he gave me what I still feel is one of the most sincere compliments I ever received from an administrator. He told me that I had almost persuaded him to read the book. I went back to class and, true to his word, the principal took care of the issue. I never knew which parent or which student raised the complaint and class continued.

Increasingly, we ask adolescents to grow up. We ask them to work, to fight our wars, to inherit our debt, and to solve our issues with race that have continued through generations. We leave the Statue of Liberty in the harbor, but our leaders do not model coherent conversations about immigration in our country without the use of racist language or belittling stereotypes.

Do we really want to take The Giver out of the hands of adolescents, because it describes a society that practices “mercy” killing of not only adults but of slightly delayed babies? Wouldn’t we rather have slow, coherent discussions that advance critically thinking?  Do we want to remove Roll of Thunder, Hear me Cry from our classrooms because of physical violence, intense racism, and clearly defined economic inequity? Wouldn’t we really rather promote discussions of the educational gaps between different racial groups and between the rich and the poor?

We want both men and women to continually demonstrate their patriotism by fighting in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and, perhaps, other places in the world; but we don’t want them to read books like Fallen Angels, The Kite Runner, The Things They Carried, and Sunrise over Fallujah not because they depict acts of military violence that we increasingly know leave too many of our veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, but because it uses a questionable word. Really? Do we expect them to confront the unspeakable horrors of war and return without hearing “questionable” language?

There are many other books that present controversial issues that happen to and involve teens—rape, physical abuse, divorce, drug abuse and addiction, genocide, the ravages of war, abandonment, and gang activity, to mention just a few. Shouldn’t they be able to read about them in the hope that they can, perhaps, vicariously experience them in order to avoid them or if, heaven forbid, they are in the midst of them find their way through?

            All of the books in this blog posting have been banned. Wouldn’t we, in the words of one America’s most frequently banned narrators, Holden Caulfield, be phonies if we didn’t teach books in a reasoned, deliberate manner while at the same time, fighting for individual choice?

Until next week.

Steven T. Bickmore