Ban This! Author Bites - Anne Spollen

On this first day of the official Banned Books Week, Anne Spollen talks about a sneaky kind of book banning. Thanks for contributing, Anne!

“Adam was but human – this explains it all. He did not want
the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was
forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then
he would have eaten the serpent.”

– Mark Twain

Whenever I hear of books being banned, I am absolutely thrilled. I am beside myself with joy. It’s the same feeling I get when I walk past a bookstore and see a long line or when Amazon runs out of copies of a title.

By banning books, people are speaking my language. They are telling me exactly what I want to hear: that books have power, that they still matter. And that’s something I don’t hear very often.

When I tell people I would love to quit my job and just write all the time, they look at me and say what you‘ve probably heard time and again, “You want to write books? Yeah, but who reads any more? Books are just about extinct. Publishing. Heh. Now there’s a dying art.”

Well, apparently not. Enough people read to make books targets. People ban books because they are perceived as dangerous. Books are ideas. They cause change by broadening our world, our beliefs, by touching us. That doesn’t sound like a bad thing, now does it? Problem is with the word “change” -- change means deviating from the status quo and most books are banned because they upset that comfy status quo.

The type of books that are banned generally deal with sex, the occult, the paranormal, mental illness -- basically any themes that are not squeaky clean traditional. And I think most of us object to blatant banning of books and we all pretty much ignore the parent who stands up at the board meeting and hollers about Harry Potter being against Christian values. But there are more subtle ways to ban books that we have to watch out for.

I used to teach English in a school where the oldest children were fourteen. As one of two English teachers, I worked very closely with the librarian. In fact, we team taught some lessons. And we both became familiar with a small group of parents who consistently reviewed books in that library and consistently asked us to remove books dealing with frank discussions of adolescent sexual development.

Well, no, we told them. We reminded them of the guarantee of freedom of speech. We reminded them that children had to learn to make choices regarding their reading material. Did we have to remind them that we had ordered those books as a means of comforting their children as their bodies began undergoing puberty? And who among us doesn’t need comfort during that time?
They responded by going to the school board and complaining. They weren’t noisy or obnoxious; they were politely persistent. They believed that children, their children specifically, most of them already in puberty, would be harmed by reading about the very processes their bodies were undergoing.

The result? We didn’t remove the books, but signed permission slips were required in order for the children to borrow them. You can imagine how many kids wanted to bring home that permission slip for mom to sign and how many kids wanted to take out books on that “special” shelf. Indirectly, those books were banned.

Puberty, however, continued.

You don’t need bonfires or a fascist regime to attempt to control ideas: you only need a few fear-addled folks. Books are our unflinching mirrors: they show us as we are, warts and all. Books can serve as guides to understanding those warts. The power of the written word has always been to connect us through our experiences. And that‘s the kind of power that should never instigate fear.

Anne Spollen on YA Writing

I loved Anne Spollen's Light Beneath Ferns so much that I asked her to do a blog post about it and/or her writing. Come to find out, not only do we share similar perspectives on a lot of things, we share really similar writing styles. No wonder I was able to nuzzle my way between the lines of her book and cuddle in. It's like we're in each others' heads. So yeah, Anne says she took over my blog. But my soul does feels a little crowded . . .

I am taking over Donna’s blog for a little while. It would probably be a whole lot more interesting if I could take over her mind or her soul, but her blog is all I can manage for now. When you think about it, in a small way, for a short amount of time, writers DO get to take over your mind and soul. (And, I guess now, occasionally your blog…)

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a YA writer with two books currently out, and more writing news to share soon. One of the things I try to do when I blog hop is anticipate questions folks might want to ask. An awful lot of avid book readers and blog stalkers (yes, I stalk blogs, too) are aspiring writers, so I think a good place to begin would be to speak about writing.

Whenever people ask me why I write, I always answer, “Because I have to.” Writing is my one addiction. (I am visualizing the people who know me, nodding and saying, “Yes, but so is her chocolate consumption” – but that’s another post)

I have always had to write, the way some people have to jog or eat certain foods to feel normal. If I don’t write for longer than a few days, I feel really irritable, as if my mind is cluttered and clouded. Writing is therapy. All the images and impressions that have been gathering in my brain come out on paper.

I write really quickly, not really caring how it all hangs together at first. I go back and revise later on, after the ideas are down and my brain is less frenzied. It’s not entirely unlike a binge and purge episode, only in this case it’s images and bits of dialogue that are rambling around in my head instead of food.

I know in writing classes they teach you to make outlines or to fill in plot outlines in organized, logical sequences. A friend of mine once gave me colored index cards to organize my work. She explained her writing teacher told her to use the blue ones for character, the salmon ones for setting details and so forth.

For a long time, I thought maybe there was a correct, accepted way to write the way there is a correct, accepted way to go about producing an oil painting. I don’t plan. I don’t make outlines. Sometimes what I am writing takes a totally unexpected direction. I don’t quite understand the process of writing, but now I do understand that there is no method, no way of utilizing color coded cards or outlines that works. What works is telling a good story. It’s that simple – and that impossible.

I think what happens is I see someone, or hear something, and at the time, it does not seem at all significant. Later on, that experience shows up on paper.

When I began The Shape of Water, my first story, I saw a girl standing on a beach: I recognized the beach as the one I had grown up on. It was windy, and the girl walked over to the marshes and lit them on fire. A disturbing image, and I’m not sure where it came from, but I began this odd kind of “listening” when I revisited the image and the novel began to take shape.

Years ago, when my boys were still cruising around on big wheels, I would take them to a rural cemetery across the street from our house. It was safer there than the road as there was no traffic. Sometimes I saw this really wild teenage girl sitting by a rock at the edge of the cemetery. She looked so much happier there than she did when we saw her at the bus stop or walking around. She used to watch the river. Somehow that girl, the image of that girl, returned to me and I began writing Light Beneath Ferns.

Which brings me to my second question, one I am asked whenever I am asked about writing:

So why do you write about teenagers? Why not write an adult novel?

I may write an adult novel one day, but that question is usually asked in the exact tone that my English teachers used to coerce me into writing something for an essay contest. In other words, you have more potential than you’re using…

I have a standard answer for this question: I like to write for and about teens because I believe we are all still secretly recovering from middle school. I think that time in a person’s life is so easily recalled; the details are still so vivid.

In childhood, it never mattered who you ate lunch with or whether or not you wore white socks (I absolutely could not wear white socks when in middle school – I’m not sure of the reason, but when I found them in my drawer, I would dispose of them the way someone would dispose of uranium) Then comes middle school where everything matters, and it matters tremendously. Adolescence provides such a clear division in human experience, and I like to mine that border as it is so rich. People connect to that time instantly. I think that’s the appeal of YA, either, “Oh, that’s how it is. This author is speaking directly to me,” or “Yes, I remember that. Thank God I’m past all that now.”

I want to thank Donna for giving me a new place to rant a little today, and for her perceptive reading of Light Beneath Ferns. Sometimes it’s not just the readers who say, “Oh, this author gets me!” it’s the author saying, “Yes, that reader gets me!” Luckily, Donna was that reader.

Light Beneath Ferns by Anne Spollen

Published 2010.

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants for them is to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jaw bone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel - and discover an unimaginable secret. (book back blurb)

This is a ghost story. An awesome, awesome ghost story. I can't really say what it is that I loved about this book so much. Maybe because it was a ghost story unlike anything I've ever read. It wasn't scary but at the same time it was kind of creepy. They're not ghosts that haunt and torment but remind and maybe love. It was just so unique that I honestly want to read it again just to soak it in even more.

Elizah is a loner by nature, which some people just can't grasp the concept of. People think that because someone actually chooses to not want to interact with people that there's something inherently wrong with them. The guidance counselor that Elizah goes to feels this is the case and not only she but Elizah's mother forces social interaction on her in a gross attempt to make her "normal." I can kind of relate to Elizah simply because I'm a loner myself. Not quite to the extent she is but I am looked at oddly by some people because I choose not to go out and socialize. Not to say I don't have friends; I'm just horrendously picky of the company I keep and bar hopping every weekend is not only a waste of my money, it's just not my scene. I have better things to do. Like talk to the voices in my head.

My favorite aspect of the story was the imagery of Nathaniel's village. Just the way it was described your mind couldn't really picture it without it being coated in a cold mist, as if looking through an early morning lens. You could see what it looked like but at the same time it was never really clear. You knew it looked like that colonial reproduction village just down stream but it fades in and out of the shadows as the sun casts them through the trees. Or doesn't. It was just so gripping and ethereal, tangible and intangible at the same time. I wanted to go there and see it for myself and just hoped I'd be able to get back. It leaves you (or you leave it) with a sense that just maybe if you took the wrong turn, you might not make it back. It's not scary but it is unsettling.

The adults in this book irk the crap out of me. I kind of half understand the mother's situation because she was married to a degenerate gambler for so long that was so afraid of people coming after him for money that he forced his family into solitude. I get that. But at the end of the day she was really self-involved and didn't so much care about how Elizah felt but more how people would view her because of Elizah's "abnormal" actions. She really wasn't a likable character and I'm not sure if she was supposed to be. She's damaged, yes, but I was in Elizah's head with her in every conversation she had with her mother going, "yeah, it's all about you, isn't it?" I felt it. I don't think you even needed to be an objective third party to know that.

The rest of the adults were kind of stock characters, cookie-cutter cut-outs that were way too into normal. But maybe that was the point. Maybe this overwhelming sense of suburbanite normalcy that ran throughout the book was a means to overcompensate for what they previously lived through. Sure, Dirk was too into playing the father-figure role and took it on way too quickly, but maybe that was the point. He's normal. Elizah's mother wanted normal and fast. I guess it fits.

I loved how Elizah's father was often compared to the actions of a ghost, flitting in and out of someone's life, neither there or not. A presence more than anything tangible. It described him perfectly; except for how much of a creep he really was. Big creep.

Nathaniel is the best part. It's pretty obvious from the beginning just what he is, and it's pretty easy to make the connections once the character start talking about local legends and Indian lore but I don't think it was meant to be subtle. But what was was Elizah's and Nathaniel's inherent connection to each other. That was subtle and I really liked how in the background it was kept. The notion of past lives was barely even scratched but it was there enough to make you question what was going on in that entire situation. It left a whole different, and separate, story lingering at the end that you wished was filled in but you're left to use just your imagination.

It's a sad love story and a sad friendship story really. The only people Elizah connects with are those in the cemetery and really, being a loner isn't all it's cracked up to be. But somehow the entire situation is settling for her. She accepts it for what it is and while she wants to ask more of it, she doesn't because she knows she won't get it.

It's a story about a loner that isn't as much of a loner as she thought she was. It's a ghost story and a love story. A story of loss and healing. But really, it's just a great story.