The son went away happily and read the books, then dutifully presented himself for the talk. And the first thing his mother said was, “So, did the sex in those books bother you at all?”

The boy’s eyes went wide. “There was sex in those books?” he said in astonishment. “I better read them again!”

I mention this because once again it is Banned Books Week, and I’ve been poking around in the statistics on book challenges that the American Library Association has been collecting for the past twenty years. A few quick calculations show that sexual explicitness was a factor in roughly thirty percent of the challenges, and that 72% of the recorded challenges were to books in schools or school libraries…and the vast majority were brought by a concerned parent.

This is unsurprising, really. People will go to amazing lengths to protect children – their own or other people’s. And I don’t know anyone who, reading levels aside, thinks third-graders should be reading graphic horror, slasher books, or something like The Silence of the Lambs. The problem is with where to draw the lines, and with who draws them.

It’s also a problem of trust and fear. Challenges to books always are. We don’t trust other people to see the same things we do, to have the same objections, to be intelligent or compassionate or concerned enough to come to the same conclusions we do about a particular subject or a particular portrayal. We don’t trust them to agree with us – and why should we? There’s plenty of evidence around that other people don’t hold the same opinions, whatever those opinions may be.

When it comes to children, however, the issues of fear and trust come out even more strongly. As I’ve pointed out before, fiction is dangerous. Parents fear – sometimes rightly – that their children will be hurt, that they won’t be able to handle scenes or concepts that are too advanced, that they will be exposed to ideas and values that are contrary to the ones the parents believe in. That fear knows no politics; in talking with librarians and teachers, I’ve heard over and over that as many challenges come from the political left as from the political right. The objections are different; the reasoning is always the same: children should not be exposed to X because it will hurt them in some way.

And the more I see and hear of this, the more I wonder: Does anyone ever ask the kids what they think? Not often, I suspect. Yet the vast majority of children I’ve talked to seem to me to be much more sensible and aware than most adults give them credit for. They’re quite capable of spotting and avoiding books that bother them. They know a lot more, at pretty much every age, than most adults think they do, and they don’t automatically absorb and agree with things just because someone wrote about it.

Nevertheless, protecting children is an adult’s business. Unfortunately, protection is not a one-size-fits-all thing. The book that gives one child nightmares may be exactly what another child needs to read to help him/her cope with a difficult situation. The real decision is not “Should we protect all children from nightmares by removing this book from places they can easily find it?” but “Do we take the chance that one child will be hurt directly by leaving on the shelves a book that will give her nightmares, or do we remove the book and take the chance that another child will be hurt indirectly because he has been denied access to something that would have helped him?”

People who want books pulled off school library shelves are trying to protect all children, without recognizing that different kids have different needs and without trusting young people to stop reading books that are too much for them. They come down hard on the side of preventing direct harm (as they see it), rather than preventing indirect harm. Yet it’s a lot easier to teach children not to put a hand on the stove because it will burn them (immediate, direct harm) than to convince them that eating greasy hamburgers from the take-away place is bad for them (long-term, indirect harm) – at least, my siblings and I begged for the take-out hamburgers for years and years, despite our parents’ explanations, while I don’t recall any of us ever defying them over the stove.

Adults, as a group, don’t really trust anyone under twenty-one to make good decisions or good choices. But while it is obviously true that the younger the child, the less life experience they have from which to draw conclusions, I don’t think that young people do any worse, as a group, than adults when it comes to a lot of the decisions they have to make. I also think the old saw about the way you avoid making mistakes is through experience, and the way you gain experience is by making mistakes. And frankly, making a mistake about what kind of book to read is a lot safer than some of the, um, experience I remember gaining along the way.

Lines do have to be drawn sometimes, but I think that decisions about what is appropriate for all children (as opposed to a particular parent’s individual child) need to be made with great care and consideration, and probably with the default being to let a particular book stay on the shelves. Because I think that children can be trusted considerably farther than many adults think when it comes to avoiding – or, like my friend’s son, just not seeing – material in books and stories that are harmful to them.

“Intellectual freedom can exist only where two essential conditions are met: first, that all individuals have the right to hold any belief on any subject and to convey their ideas in any form they deem appropriate, and second, that society makes an equal commitment to the right of unrestricted access to information and ideas regardless of the communication medium used, the content of work, and the viewpoints of both the author and the receiver of information.”

–Intellectual Freedom Manual, by the American Library Association, 7th edition 

It is once again Banned Books week, and I still have a few things to say about the subject. I’m going to start by referring folks to the American Library Association website, where you can find information about banned books and an extremely interesting list of the top ten books challenged by year.

Books get challenged for all sorts of reasons, and by all sorts of people. A couple of years back, I was on a panel on the subject for a regional convention of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators that included a writer who’d been told that a particular young writers’ conference would allow him to speak but would not make his most recent book available to children because the main character was a high school boy trying to figure out how to come out as homosexual to his friends and family; a writer who’d been told by a different conference that they would allow him to speak but would not carry his book because it had overtly religious content; and me, which is an interesting story on its own.

I was on that panel because six months earlier, I’d been at lunch with a number of fellow writers who had just heard about the first incident mentioned above. They were all indignant, shocked, appalled, and surprised…and while I was just as indignant and appalled at the conference’s attitude, it fairly quickly became obvious to everyone at the table that I was neither shocked nor surprised that something like that could happen “in this day and age.” So they asked me why.

“Because that kind of thing happens all the time,” I said.

“No, no, certainly not!” they all told me.

So I told them about the teacher who almost got fired when a parent objected to her reading Calling on Dragons in her classroom, because “it taught witchcraft!” I mentioned the fellow YA author who was disinvited from a school visit (these are day-long programs where an author talks to several classes worth of kids and usually has lunch with the teachers, and for some YA authors, they contribute a goodly chunk to their income) because a parent noticed a title on her extensive bibliography that “sounded occult” (it was a mystery, with not a whiff of the supernatural anywhere in the text). I pointed out the well-publicized attempts to suppress the Harry Potter books (the series is #1 on the ALA’s top ten most challenged books of the decade for 2000-2009), and a few less-well-publicized attempts to remove from school shelves things like The Wizard of Oz (because Dorothy is too independent and solves her own problems), The Lord of the Rings (because it is “Satanic”), and Grimm’s Fairy Tales (because the stories are “too violent”).

None of this was, I thought, stop-the-presses news – certainly not to anyone who writes fantasy. But the other writers at the table were shocked all over again. One of them happened to be on the program committee for the regional conference, and she went home and put the panel together.

When she asked me to be on the panel, I immediately said yes, and then I went off to the internet to do some research. I wanted some examples that would hit closer to home. I found quite a lot, but as I looked through the web sites, I noticed something interesting. I live in Minnesota. All of the descriptions of book-banning incidents in Minnesota were from the websites of organizations based in distant states: Florida, Texas, Washington D.C., Georgia.

So I poked a little more. There were quite a few local web sites publicizing Banned Books Week, and all of them did indeed have descriptions of surprising book-banning incidents. Incidents that took place in other states, like Texas, Georgia, and California.

OK, I admit that this is not a scientifically valid statistical survey. Still, it’s suggestive. Book banning doesn’t seem to be something that anyone wants to admit happens in their own backyard. And it is extremely easy to avoid admitting that it happens, because it is very, very rare that more than a couple of people even hear about a challenge. Often, the librarian (or, rarely, bookseller) and maybe an administrator are the only ones who ever hear that someone has objected to a particular book. They don’t notify other parents (the vast majority of book challenges are to schools or school libraries). They certainly don’t notify authors unless there’s an appearance involved – the only reason I know about my book and that teacher is that she came up to me at a conference and told me herself.

You can find some of the information if you look for it. The ALA collects statistics, but they can only include challenges for which there is a record – a newspaper article or a written report. By some estimates, that’s barely half the number of challenges or objections. And how many people ever bother to go looking? For the stuff that isn’t reported…well, you have to ask the school librarian or volunteer for the library review committee (if there is one and if it includes non-employee members).

I support Banned Books Week. I support it for all kinds of books. Yes, there are some that I personally wouldn’t have in my house, but if I only object to the banning of books I like and agree with, I’m as bad as the people issuing challenges to books I love.

__________

The kingdom that had shut out dragons went on for many years, repeating the same three months over and over.  Nothing new ever happened; there were no new books, or new ideas, or new fashions, or new stories.  Everything grew steadily shabbier, drearier, and more boring, and the people grew sadder and sadder without understanding why.  That is what happens, when you shut out dragons.

And then one day, a wandering bard came down the road that led to the kingdom that had shut itself away from dragons.  No one had been able to cross that border in all that time, but bards have a way of looking sideways at things that lets them see what others can’t, and this bard saw the little crack between now and then,  and he slipped through it into the kingdom because he was curious.

He talked to the woodcutter, and to the merchant’s youngest son, and to some of the other folk of the kingdom, and he soon figured out that the place had been enchanted to repeat the same three months, over and over, forever.  Then he sat down and thought for a while, and when he was finished thinking, he went up to the palace of the king, past the apple trees laden with ripe apples..

“Your kingdom is going over the same three months again and again,” the bard said.

“I know,” said the king.

“Then you’re the one responsible for it, because no one else has noticed,” said the bard.  “Why did you do it?”

The king explained, and the bard shook his head.  “Well,” he said, “now you know the consequences of trying to shut out dragons.  Shall I just leave you to it, or shall I break the spell?”

The king hesitated.  “Leave it,” he said at last.  “Dragons are too dangerous and disruptive to have around.”

The bard shrugged, and left.  But on his way out of the palace, the princess came to meet him.  “I heard what you said to my father,” she told the bard.  “Is this kingdom really under a spell?”

“Yes,” said the bard.

“And can you really break it?” asked the princess.

“Yes,” the bard said again.  “But once I do, you’ll have dragons here again.  There’s no help for it.”

The princess shivered, then set her jaw.  “Do it,” she said.  “No matter what my father says.  He may be the king, but he has no right to make everyone else unhappy, too.”

“Call everyone in the kingdom into the town square this evening,” said the bard, “and tell them to listen when I play.”

The princess did as the bard had told her.  And when everyone from the woodcutter to the princess was gathered in the town square – everyone except the king – the bard began to sing and tell stories.  He told stories about dragons and woodcutters and princesses and the youngest sons of merchants; stories about hard-working tailors and knights with bright swords; stories about brave girls venturing into dark forests to confront witches and beasts; stories about women wearing out seven pairs of iron shoes as they walked the world in search of their dreams; stories of elves and unicorns, of magic rings and flying carpets, of wizards and tricksters.  Stories of all the wondrous, magical things that had been shut out of the kingdom along with the dragons.

The bard sang and talked nearly all night, while the people listened.  And finally, near dawn, a little girl asked timidly if she could tell a story.  The bard smiled, and brought her out to speak.  When she finished, others came forward, and soon the bard was silent and all the people were telling stories to each other.

And when the sun rose, the apple trees around the square were still heavy with fruit, not covered with blossoms, and the dawn light glittered silver and emerald and gold from the scales of hundreds of dragons sweeping through the skies above the kingdom.  And the people stared in wonder, and saw what the king had forgotten, or perhaps had never known.

Dragons are beautiful, as well as dangerous.

 -The End

Thank you for listening.

__________

Fantasy is about possibilities; that’s one of the reasons why I write it. I love fantasy, and always have.  I grew up on E. Nesbit and Edward Eager, the Narnia chronicles and the Oz books, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson.  I graduated to Tolkein in high school, and waited impatiently for each new release from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line in the early 70s. 

And I learned that things look different by the light of a dragon’s fire.  Ordinary things become extraordinary; common problems change shape and become either unusually interesting or utterly insignificant.  People become enormously important, regardless of rank; the hero never hesitates to trade his magic sword or his golden crown for the life of the little thief.  You really see things, sometimes for the first time.  And you don’t forget them when you close the book.  That, of course, is what makes fantasy dangerous.

It’s also what makes fantasy so attractive to many writers.  You can make up your own rules in a fantasy…though once you’ve made them up, you have to follow them.  And a writer can do absolutely anything in a fantasy that can be done in other kinds of fiction, right along with the fantastic elements.  There are fantasy-murder-mysteries, like Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy books; there are fantasy-historicals, like Kara Dalkey’s The Nightengale and my own Snow White and Rose Red; there are fantasy-Westerns, fantasy-Romances, and fantasy-rock-and-role novels.  And fantasy comes with built-in metaphors:  dragons and elves and magic aren’t really real, in the daylight world we all inhabit, so when authors use them in books, they are nearly always metaphoric or symbolic. 

Sometimes, writers play with this quite consciously. Among my writer friends, one has deliberately used magic as a metaphor for madness, another for drug addiction, a third for the creative spirit.  I don’t usually do this kind of thing consciously and deliberately in my own work; it took me years and years to figure out that in most of my novels, magic is a metaphor for power – the power to make things happen your way, which in our world is sometimes the political power, sometimes the power of great wads of money, sometimes the power of charm or talent or skill or intellect.  But one of the reasons I’m drawn to write fantasy is that in writing fantasy, I don’t have to think about what metaphors to use.  They’re built in.

But that’s one more thing that makes some people nervous about fantasy:  they don’t understand metaphors.  And even metaphorical dragons are dangerous and disruptive, and most grown-up people don’t enjoy being disturbed or shaken out of their comfort zone.  Fantasy can sneak up on you and do just that, because it isn’t “real.” 

People are on their guard when they read a modern novel about the extinction of the passenger pigeon – they almost expect to be preached at, and so it’s easier for them to ignore what they don’t want to hear.  But a fantasy tale about wizards killing off all the unicorns for their magic horns doesn’t trip those same warning bells – because killing off unicorns is not something people argue passionately about in the Sunday papers.  And so it’s easier, sometimes, to get readers to think in new ways with a fantasy tale.  Also, metaphors are more flexible than arguments:  what one reader sees as a metaphor for the way species are driven to extinction, another reader will see as the death of creativity, or of intellect, or as a metaphor for science killing off religion. And all of them can be valid and true and life-changing at once, which is very confusing for people who dislike dragons.

The dragons in my opening story are metaphorical, as all dragons are.  Partly, they’re a metaphor for change, which is often disturbing and destructive, but which is also necessary and inevitable.  But my dragons have elements of other things in them, as well – creativity and wonder, the unknown “other” who is so often demonized in a futile attempt to shut him out, the power of new ideas, the power of books (you can read the story quite easily as a fable about censorship).  My dragons will mean something a little different to everyone who hears that story – but they will always mean something that is powerful and dangerous and yet in some way necessary.

Children seem to understand some of these things about fantasy a lot better than many adults. I’ve gotten a lot of mail from children of various ages, and I’ve come to a couple of fairly obvious conclusions.  One is that, to kids, the real world is often just as inexplicable and non-obvious as the imaginary “weird” places in fantasies.  The rules of the real world seem just as arbitrary as the fairy telling the hero not to put the flashy gold saddle on the horse, but to use the dull, ordinary saddle instead.  When children read a fantasy, though, they’re on even ground with the grown-ups – adults have to figure out the rules of the fantasy world as they go along, just the same way that kids do.  And adults are often a bit out of practice at looking at the world that way.

Furthermore, kids hate being preached at even more than adults do … and they’re better at detecting it and shutting it out.  But again, fantasy can slip under that radar – partly because most good fantasy is very strong on story, and partly because kids know that a lot of adults find fantasy confusing, or even disapprove of it.  What kid could resist?  And most children still have the sense that the real world is a  wondrous and magical place – that sense of wonder that too many adults have lost or, like the king in the story, shut away because they are afraid of dragons.

But you know, you can’t really shut out dragons forever.  And so there’s a bit more to that story that I began with. (Which I will post tomorrow, as the last part of this speech.)

__________

I wrote that story for this speech, because I am a fiction writer, and stories are the way I say things best, though I don’t always know exactly what I was trying to say. In this case, though, I think that what I was trying to say is this:

People are afraid of dragons, and will go to great lengths to shut them out.  But it’s always a mistake to do that.

Now, dragons are powerful, dangerous, disruptive and disturbing; they upset the status quo; they carry off princesses and make them do cooking and cleaning (things which, under ordinary circumstances, no princess would ever have to do). Dragons destroy the livelihood of woodcutters and youngest sons, and force them to try things – like rescuing a princess or seeking their fortunes – that they would never have thought of doing on their own.  They open up all sorts of new possibilities…but they usually do it by tearing down or destroying the old, safe things.  So I don’t really find it surprising that many people are afraid of dragons.

What does surprise me is the lengths to which people will go to shut dragons out of their lives.  I see it most often when people ask me:

“Why do you write fantasy?”

I have noticed, over the years, that the only people who ask this question are those who don’t read fantasy any more.  And usually, the tone of voice in which they ask means “Fantasy is so…so weird; why would anybody write or read that?“  Sometimes, that’s even the next thing they say.  “Why do you write fantasy?  It’s so strange.  It’s so difficult.  It’s not real.”

But no fiction is “real” in the way they mean it.  Fiction is make-believe. Even the most gritty, realistic novel about the seamy underbelly of life in the drug culture is made up out of the author’s head.  All fiction is a colossal game of “let’s pretend” in which the reader and the writer agree that, just for the length of this book, we’ll believe that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are real people, solving real murders, or we’ll believe that Ebeneezer Scrooge is a real businessman seeing real ghosts.  Fantasy fiction is just a little more obvious in its make-believe, that’s all.

The true problem, I think, is that fiction is dangerous.  All fiction.  Even the worst novel makes readers use their imaginations – after all, they can’t actually see how tall the hero is, or just how red the heroine’s little Honda is.  At its best, fiction looks at the world and makes people see it in new ways; it challenges their assumptions and attitudes; it makes them sympathize with and understand characters they would never talk to in real life.  And fantasy is the oldest and most dangerous kind of fiction we have. 

I say that fantasy is the oldest kind of fiction we have, because all cultures have myths and folk tales and fairy tales – all of them, back as far as the records go.  And the same archetypes turn up in those tales, over and over – the Trickster, the Dispossessed Hero, the Wicked Uncle or Stepmother, and so on.   There are over 300 different versions of “Cinderella” alone.  Folk and fairy tales speak to something in all of us; the oldest and best-loved stories, the ones all of us know and recognize instantly, start “Once upon a time…” or “Long ago and far away…”  All that modern fantasy novels do is to take the raw material of fairy stories – the deserving younger sons and beautiful princesses, the dark woods and the brilliant palaces, the unicorns and the dragons, the magic and improbable common sense – and remake them into new tales.

I say that fantasy is the “most dangerous” kind of fiction, because fantasy begins by forcing its readers to re-imagine reality.  The foundation of fantasy tales is that anything is possible:  that odd little shop just down the street might sell you a dragon’s egg or a chemistry set that can make you invisible; there may be elves in your favorite rock band, or talking to you on your computer chat group; the eccentric gentleman who lives upstairs may be a transformed dragon or a powerful wizard; the statue in the park may come to life.  You can find the Queen of Faerie teaching at a small college, or a dragon incinerating trash at the town dump.  The world may have two moons, or three, or none; wizards and magic may have completely reshaped history or be hiding in the cracks of what we think we know.  Or not.  Anything is possible. 

And if anything is possible in fiction, it’s only a short step to looking at real life and asking awkward questions:  “Why can’t the woodcutter marry the princess – or the CEO’s daughter?  Why can’t the youngest son take up painting instead of running one of the branches of his father’s business?  Why can’t men do more of the housework?”

It begins with a story, because I am a writer and most things lead me to stories, sooner or later.

****

Once upon a time, in a far country, there lived a beautiful princess.  Or perhaps it was a woodcutter, or the youngest son of a merchant, or all of them at once.  They all had proper expectations for their lives: the princess would marry a deserving prince in due time; the woodcutter would chop trees and live a frugal existence close to nature; the youngest son would go to work on one of his father’s ships and maybe take over one of the offices in a nearby kingdom eventually.

And then one day, when the apple trees were heavy with fruit, a dragon arrived.  It burned down the woodcutter’s forest, sank the merchant’s vessel, and kidnapped the beautiful princess.  Dragons do those sorts of thing; they’re very disruptive.

The king sent out his soldiers to rescue his daughter, but the dragon burned them all.  His councilors then advised him to offer the traditional reward – the princess’s hand in marriage – to anyone who would rescue the girl, but the king didn’t like that idea.  He knew that both the woodcutter and the merchant’s youngest son had grudges against the dragon, and he didn’t want either of them for a son-in-law.  And he didn’t like the way the dragon had thrown his whole kingdom into disarray and upset all of his neat and tidy plans.  So instead of offering a reward, the king went off to see a witch.

“I want you to get rid of this dragon and give me my daughter back,” the king said to the witch.  “And I want you to make sure the dragon never comes back.”

“I can do all that,” the witch said.  “But there will be a price.”

“I’ll pay it,” said the king. 

“It won’t be what you think,” the witch told him.

“I’ll pay it anyway,” said the king.  “Dragons are too dangerous to have around.”

“Very well,” said the witch.  “Go home, and you’ll find the dragon gone and your daughter back in her room, as always.”

So the king went home, and found his daughter there, just as the witch had said.  The woods were back, too, and so were the merchant’s ships and the king’s whole army, and the apple trees were blooming, because the witch had slid the whole kingdom three months into the past, back to before the dragon had arrived. 

The king was very happy, at first.  But as the day drew closer when he knew the dragon was supposed to arrive, he began to worry about whether the witch had kept her promise to keep the dragon from ever coming back, and about the price she had said he would have to pay for her help.

On the night before the dragon was supposed to arrive, when the apple trees were heavy with fruit once more, the king paced his chambers without sleeping.  In the morning, he looked out his window, and saw no dragon, and again he was very happy.  And then he looked down, and saw the blossoms on the apple trees that, the previous evening, had been laden with ripening apples, and he realized that his kingdom had once again slipped three months backward in time.  He knew then what the witch had done to keep the dragon away from his kingdom forever, and he cursed his foolishness, but there was nothing he could do.  He and his people were doomed to live the same three months over and over, in a kingdom that grew shabbier and shabbier, and more and more dreary and boring, forever, because that is the only way there is to shut out a dragon.

I’ve felt rather strongly about Banned Books Week for a long time – even before I met the teacher who was nearly fired because she put “Dealing With Dragons” on the reading list for her fifth-grade class (a parent, who had not read the book, asserted that it was “teaching witchcraft”; fortunately, the principal of her school had a sense of humor and could recognize parody when he saw it). I’ve felt even more strongly since I was asked to participate in a panel on censorship and book banning a few years ago, and discovered that most of the readers and writers in the audience hadn’t realized this sort of thing was still happening (except maybe in one or two benighted places far, far away from them).

Which actually didn’t surprise me. Because it’s not as if most efforts to get a book removed from the shelves of a library are high-publicity incidents, even within the local community. Not even the authors know, most of the time. Nobody sends you a note that says “Teacher asked to remove book from reading list” or “library asked to take book off shelves.” I only found out about the one teacher because I met her at a conference, and she happened to mention that my books had almost gotten her fired. According to the ALA data, 70 to 80 percent of book challenges are never reported to anyone outside the few folks who are actually involved in the incident. It is not at all uncommon for parents to be uninformed of challenges to books that are taking place at the school their own children attend.

Even so, rather a lot of children’s authors have book-banning stories, because we do school visits and talk to library conferences. So sometimes, we do hear things from librarians or teachers. Sometimes, we experience them personally – one multiple-award-winning author was asked to speak at a school and then disinvited because the title of one of her many children’s books contained the word “seance.” (The book was a straightforward mystery, with no actual occult or fantasy elements. Yes, I am saying that she was disinvited based on the title alone.)  At least two others I know have been told they could speak at a conference, but that their books would not be on sale because of their content (in one case, a screamingly funny book about a gay teen; in the other, a series of poems and meditations on explicitly Christian themes).

This week is a good time to find out more. Many libraries have special events; if your schedule doesn’t allow for that, there are loads of web sites with information and lists of books that have been challenged.

Read a banned book today!

Learn more in general at: http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/

What you can do suggestions: http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/support.html