Banned Books Week 2013: Rainbow Rowell Discusses Censorship & Love with The Toast

Rainbow Rowell, author of Eleanor & Park and Fangirl, discusses censorship and love in a recent interview with The Toast. Unfortunately, I haven't read either books yet, but they're both sitting tall and proud in in my To Be Read Pile, and I hope to give them their rightful attention soon--as I've only heard wonderful things about them. 

It's truly sad that some places around the country feel the need to remove (or rally to remove) books from their shelves and, in the process, potentially deprive a young person of a story that just might change his or her life for the better.

There has also been an abundance of wonderful illustration work surrounding Rowell's story. One of my faves is above--the artist, Henna Lucas, here. 

While Banned Books Week officially runs through the 28th of September, we should celebrate the right to read stories--any and all types--all year round! The American Library Association has a really fantastic interactive timeline listing a few of the most frequently challenged books. Is your fave on the list?

Let's Get Sexual: Sex in YA Lit

As a YA writer, it's always interesting to hear how others deal with sex in their work. Carrie Mesrobian, author of the forthcoming Sex & Violence (Carolrhoda LAB, Oct. 2013), and editor Andrew Karre talked about sex in YA lit at the Children's and Young Adult Literature Conference at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. 

I wasn't in attendance; however, I stumbled across their main points of discussion on Mesrobian's blog (via YA Highway) and they're quite enlightening--especially if you're always thinking about how young adults/new adults view or contemplate sex, both inside and outside the realms of fiction.

Two points (as outlined by Mesrobian) I find particularly enlightening:

1. You can write YA that doesn't have sexual content in it. What you cannot do is write imaginable young adult characters without thinking about them with respect to sex.

6. Adolescence, the notion of childhood innocence, and the concept of privacy are all relatively modern inventions. Reluctance to speak about sex or even expose children or young adults to sex has not always been the norm throughout human history. Also, teenagers have very little privacy in general, less now in the social media age. YA stories that feature long expanses in which characters have uninterrupted romantical sex are in conflict with this reality.

Chinua Achebe: The Bravery, even, of the Lions

Chinua Achebe was a great writer and perhaps most famously known for his work Things Fall Apart. As a student, I actually read the assigned material (as opposed to my Sparknoting colleagues) and this piece, an intimate examination of colonial powers and their influence on traditional African culture, will always be one of those works of literature that I carry with me.

The literary world recently lost this great writer at the age of 82 and, in memoriam of his passing, I think we should all remember what great works of literature have the power to do: tell people's stories that otherwise might not be told or heard.

In a 1994 interview with The Paris Review, Achebe contemplates the importance of telling all sides--every side--of the story:

"There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail — the bravery, even, of the lions."

The bravery, even, of the lions.