Guest Post by Author Mike Mullin: The Censorship Game

Today we have a guest post from YA author Mike Mullin, whose debut, "Ashfall", will be released on October 11th (my review will be up on Oct. 10th). Mike’s first job was scraping the gum off the undersides of desks at his high school. From there, things went steadily downhill. He almost got fired by the owner of a bookstore due to his poor taste in earrings. He worked at a place that showed slides of poopy diapers during lunch (it did cut down on the cafeteria budget). The hazing process at the next company included eating live termites raised by the resident entomologist, so that didn’t last long either. For a while Mike juggled bottles at a wine shop, sometimes to disastrous effect. Oh, and then there was the job where swarms of wasps occasionally tried to chase him off ladders. So he’s really hoping this writing thing works out.

 

Mike holds a black belt in Songahm Taekwondo. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with his wife and her three cats. ASHFALL is his first novel.

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The Censorship Game

On the 28^th of August, I spoke at the Children and Young People’s Division of the Indiana Library Federation (CYPD). My topic: How Censorship Hurts Kids.

Since I don’t particularly love the sound of my own voice (and always suspect my audience doesn’t either), I decided to design a game that I’m creatively calling The Censorship Game. Every librarian got a card assigning a role as they came in the door. The cards sorted them into three broad categories: librarians, kids who were struggling with various issues, and censors. All the librarians got a few books with their cards. The books were almost all titles that have been banned or challenged—titles that deal with homosexuality, suicide, rape, and abuse. Titles that an unfortunately large group of children desperately need. The idea was for all the participants to mingle, talk to each other, and exchange books. 

It worked out fairly well. Next time I run the game I’ll explain it a little better and plant a ringer in the audience to get the game off to a fast start. Once they got going, though, the librarians really got into it. There were dozens of book discussions going on at once as the players bartered over the books they had, needed, or wanted to take off the shelves.
 
To make it more interesting, I created two types of librarian roles. Type 1 had an established selection and reconsideration policy in place and therefore was allowed to refuse to remove a book from the shelves. Type 2 had no selection or reconsideration policy in place, and had to surrender their books immediately in response to any challenge.

Both types of librarians were about equally effective at distributing books. In the 15 minutes we played the game, the two groups distributed an average of 2.3 and 2.6 books respectively. As you might expect, the group with a selection policy did substantially better in resisting the efforts of censors. The librarians with a selection policy had an average of 0.8 books banned, while the ones without a policy lost 1.4 books on average.

The other interesting thing I noticed about the game is what kind of “kids” had trouble obtaining books. The librarians roleplaying gay teens had no problems at all, probably because Alex Sanchez was speaking at the conference, and I had a lot of his books on hand. In fact, none of those roleplaying teens had much trouble getting books—it was the few librarians I’d asked to roleplay younger kids who couldn’t find the books they needed. Perhaps the selection of books I supplied was at fault, but I think it reflects a deeper problem. Edgy books for teens have become generally accepted, but it’s much rarer to see difficult subjects tackled in works for younger children.

Do younger children need edgy literature, you might ask. I wish they didn’t. But the sad fact is that many of the difficult topics tackled by courageous YA authors are equally a problem for younger children. Child abuse is not confined to teens. Sexual abuse in particular is more common among 8-12 year-olds than among teens. But brilliant works like Lyga’s Boy Toy or Rainfield’s Scars have no analogue I’m aware of for the middle grade set.

Overall, I’d say my censorship game was an interesting experience, both for me and the participants. I’ll post the materials I created for the game on my website—feel free to download it and try playing it at your library or school. And thank you Bea for inviting me to guest post at your banned book week celebration!

More book censorship at US schools

As summer ends here in the US, schools are resuming classes. In my area of the US, most schools are resuming in the next few weeks while in other areas school has already begun. This means curriculum are being re-evaluated and last minute decisions made. Not surprisingly, this is the time of year when bannings and challenges increase.

Last month, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five and Sarah Ockler's Twenty Boy Summer were removed from Republic High School in Republic, Mo. (This same school system has been in the news recently for making a middle grade female student apologize to the male student who raped her. Seems to me this school has serious issues.) You may have heard about Vonnegut Library's response, an absolutely AWESOME one in my opinion - they offered free copies to any of the 150 students who were originally meant to read the book in class. The cost of the books is being covered by an anonymous donor.

Down in Virginia, Sherlock Homes came under fire. The Albemarle County School District removed the Sherlock Holmes mystery A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from a sixth-grade reading list this summer. Why? Parents complained that the book portrays Mormons in a negative light, according to Matt Haas, executive director of the county's schools. Now, I haven't read that one so I can't speak to that claim but it seems to me that the administrators passed up what we in education call "a teachable moment". The book was on the reading list as an introduction to the mystery genre, but it could also have served as chance to examine the portrayal of religion in historical fiction, an author's responsibility for factual accuracy; intentional bigotry versus unintentional bigotry, reading historical texts  from a contemporary perspective, and so on. The teaching possibilities are practically endless. Study of the book could have been incorporated into history, social studies, literature, and ethics to name a few. The book was moved to the ninth grade reading list and replaced on the sixth grade list with a different Sherlock Holmes book, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Remember that Banned Book Week, the ALA's annual observation and celebration of banned books and an individual's right to choose their reading material, is coming up in a little over a month. It runs September 24th through October 1st. I have something planned on the blog for every day of the observation.

Random Book News - Dr. Seuss, Censorship and an awesome indie bookstore

There were some really interesting bits of news today on the web so I've gathered up the ones that appealed to me so you could see them in all in one place. I also tweeted most of them.

First up, awards were being given out today at the Authors After Dark conference in Philadelphia. I caught a couple of announcements on Twitter; the Smart Bitches blog won for best blog (I don't know what the parameters were for the award but I do like their blog a lot so I was happy to hear the news) and Samhain Publishers won for best publisher. Again, I don't know what the parameters were but they do publish several of my favorite authors (Moira Rogers, Sierra Dean) and their website is fairly easy to navigate.

Over at the Book Lantern blog, there's an interesting post on censorship, sparked by an author's reaction to a reader's comment on her blog. I'm not a believer in censorship or banning, and for the most part I agreed with what the author had to say. However, the poster at Book Lantern also brought up some good point, particularly with respect to the author's analogy in defense of her work. I just discovered this YA blog today, thanks to a tweet on Twitter, but I will be visiting them often.


Random House announced that they will be publishing an anthology of lost Dr. Seuss stories called The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories. I loved the Dr. Seuss books as a child and I love them today as a teacher so this is awesome news in my utterly biased opinion. Dr. Seuss wrote books that were respectful of young children, were playful, blended fun with educational ideals and morals, and were pretty much timeless. The stories were originally printed in the womens magazine Redbook in 1950 and 1951. There are others from his magazine period but the selection was narrowed down to these seven. Because they were originally printed in magazines, the artwork was minimal and the vp's and publishers of Random House/Golden Books Young Readers Group made the decision to let the original artwork stand. For more details, see the PW article here.

And last, but certainly not least, PW Children's Bookshelf has an article about an independent South Carolina bookstore, Booklovers Bookstore, that took the initiative to help out their local school system. I say, next time you order a book, do it from this store and keep this awesome store in business. What exactly did they do? Here's a quote from the PW CB article:

...new initiative mandating dedicated reading time for all students has, despite its necessity, compounded a familiar problem for teachers: more to do and less time to do it in. Responding to the resource crunch, Booklovers Bookstore in Aiken, S.C.recently created a school liaison position for Pat Wood, a retired school librarian/media specialist with 32 years of experience in Aiken schools. Wood's job will be to help teachers "currently working on establishing a [book] collection to meet the needs of this new intitiative," which calls for each teacher to set aside specific time for reading. more

* Bolding added by me.*

I'm all for encouraging reading, but if you have ever dealt with a public school, you know that the demands on a teachers time are endless and time, of course, is not. Teachers have a difficult challenge already fulfilling all of the expectations and requirements but more and more gets dumped on them. This program has the potential to be a boon to the school and I hope that it works out well. 

Ok, that's it for now. There will be more random news posts, as I collect news and remember to post them, thus making them random in both content and occurrence. :D Now, back to finishing my book. The review is supposed to go up today; I don't know if that will happen. :P It may be tomorrow.