My gift to you for Banned Books Week

It’s Banned Books Week, and this seems like the perfect occasion to revive my much neglected blog.

As an author, I have celebrated Banned Books Week before. And by celebrated, I mean I have posted about the slippery slope of censorship and book banning. This year, Banned Books Week feels a bit different, and unless you live under a rock, you probably can tell why. All over the United States school boards, concerned parents, and conservative organizations like Moms for Liberty have been locked in battles over what is and isn’t appropriate for kids to read. In Missouri they even staged a book burning.

I happen to live in one of the first communities where the talk of banning and even burning books started. Here in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. It started in 2021 when the conservative majority on our school board voted to remove ‘sexually explicit’ books from our school libraries. Of course, the books they deemed to be ‘sexually explicit’ were almost exclusively books with LGBTQIA+ characters, and in most cases it was just the existence of those characters that made the books explicit. Between the ACLU and parents in our community who showed up in droves to stand up against censorship and for the LGBTQIA+ kids in our community (like mine) we stopped the initial ban.

You see our county and almost every school district in this country already had a protocol for challenging whether books are appropriate for school libraries. If parents think a book is inappropriate, all they have to do is follow the challenge procedure. Enter Jennifer Peterson and a couple of other women in the community. Ms. Peterson has made it her personal mission to challenge books. I’ll give her credit for actually reading the books, but who gave her the right to decide what is appropriate for all the kids in the county. You can read more about Ms. Peterson in this interview she gave to the Washington Post.

So, the concerned parents like Ms. Peterson embraced the challenge protocol, boy did they. In fact they embraced it so much that (per that Washington Post article) one high school librarian estimates that it was an entire full-time job to review all of the challenged books, organize committees to read and comment on them, and produce reports on the committees’ work. A full-time job (I might add) that NO ONE is getting paid for. Unfortunately for Ms. Peterson, that process didn’t result in banning all the books that were challenged. The initial batch of books that were challenged were reviewed by committees, read by multiple volunteers and none of them deemed worthy of being banned from schools. Then after a single meeting with one parent (Peterson, I think) Spotsylvania Schools Superintendent Mark Taylor decided unilaterally to ban 14 books.

Now, I’m a parent. I definitely understand limiting the books our kids read to those that are age appropriate, and there are plenty that I as a parent chose not to let my kids read until I thought they were old enough. I don’t know many parents who don’t do that. However, those decisions were made by our family for our family. I don’t think I have a right to make those decisions for other families.

In our house not only did we encourage our young readers (I use past tense because my kids are old enough to make these choices for themselves now.) to read, but we also encouraged them to talk to us about what they read and what they like to read. When they were very young, we would read the same books to make sure they were appropriate. We were not overly permissive, but we also were willing to let them stretch themselves intellectually as long as they talked to us about anything they had questions about. Sometimes, they would read something for an older audience, and when they got to a part that made them uncomfortable or that they thought was inappropriate THEY would put the book down and say so. Because WE empowered them and gave them the critical thinking tools to make those decisions themselves. It’s also because (And I think this is key) we never shamed them for what they liked to read, and fostered a relationship where they felt comfortable talking with us about what they read.

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I can’t speak to the relationships these ‘concerned’ parents have with their kids. But the fact that they don’t trust their kids to make good choices even when it comes to what they read suggests that their relationships do not foster trust or allow open discussion of the issues that kids may encounter in today’s world without shame or judgement. These parents are afraid that their children might hide what they’re reading, or doing, or who they are from their parents. That’s also where these terrible policies that force teachers to out trans students to their parents come from. That kind of distrust often creates a self-filling cycle. But it starts with parents making their kids ashamed of their interests whether those interests are literary or something else.

I am by no means a perfect parent, but my kids talk to me, and they know they can come to me about anything.

Fortunately, Spotsylvania isn’t being held completely hostage to likes of Mark Taylor and Jennifer Peterson. There are folks here pushing back. The banned books are still available in the library. And one local bookstore, Riverby Books has been leading the charge. They’ve been sharing news of the challenges and of this fall’s school board election. They will also loan Spotsylvania students copies of the books that have been banned.

Here is my little contribution to Banned Books Week. I have made bookmarks of the 14 books banned by the Spotsylvania County Superintendent. I had some printed out back in June and gave them away locally. But here is a downloadable PDF that anyone can print out. there are two versions for color or black and white printing. On one side is the list of books. On the other is a quote from the great, Judy Bloom. Feel free to download, print and share.

And of course, read banned books.