A couple of weeks ago, I did a phone interview with YA rockstar Laurie Halse Anderson about Wesley Scroggins, the man who called her novel, Speak, pornography. Below is a little from the introduction. If you haven’t read Speak, watch this space–I’ll be posting an excerpt to the PopMatters Mixed Media blog soon.
Books, like children, are never what we expect. When a book enters the world, the story becomes what we make it, one part author, one part reader. But sometimes a reader can so completely mischaracterize a book that it becomes something else, something so far removed from its roots that it is not only unrecognizable to its author/creator, but also to its other readers.
Laurie Halse Anderson, an award winning childrens and young adult author, knows what it’s like to have a book mischaracterized. Earlier this month, her debut novel, Speak, was named in a baffling opinion piece by Wesley Scroggins, “Filthy books demeaning to Republic education,” in a Missouri newspaper, The Springfield News-Leader. Also early in September, the Stockton, Missouri school board banned Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, saying the book “had too much profanity to be of value.” Scroggins also submitted a 29-page document to the Republic Missouri school board, demanding among other things changes to the history and science curricula.
Read the rest of my interview with Laurie Halse Anderson over at the PopMatters books blog, Re:Print.
Speak Loudly: A Conversation with Laurie Halse Anderson on Topics Subject to Book Banning http://goo.gl/fb/rn6ux #YA #kidlit