Men Working

The men are in front of my house wearing yellow hard hats cutting the pavement with saws and digging with jackhammers. Today they are installing newer more efficient gas lines to the house next door. They have been working on this up and down the street for weeks, two houses a day. I rather enjoy the theater of it. The street is closed off to regular traffic and two police are parked here for the day with their lights flashing. Meanwhile I am inside, drinking coffee wondering when my ears will unclog. I guess if I'm going to have clogged ears I should be grateful it's happening during road construction.

find out

 Hey, kids! It's your old buddy Steve King telling you that if they ban a book in your school, haul your ass to the nearest bookstore or library ASAP and find out what they don't want you to read. Stephen King

Stephen King

The Book-Banners: Adventure in Censorship is Stranger Than Fiction

by Stephen King

Published as a Guest Column in the March 20, 1992 issue of The Bangor Daily News

"When I came into my office last Thursday afternoon, my desk was covered with those little pink message slips that are the prime mode of communication around my place. Maine Public Broadcasting had called, also Channel 2, the Associated Press, and even the Boston Globe. It seems the book-banners had been at it again, this time in Florida. They had pulled two of my books, "The Dead Zone" and "The Tommyknockers," from the middle-school library shelves and were considering making them limited-access items in the high school library. What that means is that you can take the book out if you bring a note from your mom or your dad saying it's OK.

My news-media callers all wanted the same thing -- a comment. Since this was not the first time one or more of my books had been banned in a public school (nor the 15th), I simply gathered the pink slips up, tossed them in the wastebasket, and went about my day's work. The only thought that crossed my mind was one strongly tinged with gratitude: There are places in the world where the powers that be ban the author as well as the author's works when the subject matter or mode of expression displeases said powers. Look at Salman Rushdie, now living under a death sentence, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in a prison camp for calling Josef Stalin "the boss" and had to run for the west to avoid another stay after he won the Nobel Prize for "The Gulag Archipelago."

When the news stories about my latest adventure in censorship came out, however, I didn't like the way that "the author could not be reached for comment" stuff looked. To me, that line has always called up images of swindlers too cowardly to face up to what they've done. In this case I haven't done anything but my job, and I know it's all too possible to make a career out of defending one's fiction -- for a while in the mid-1980s, Judy Blume almost did make a career out of it -- but I still didn't like the way it felt.

So, just for the record, here is what I'd say if I still took time out from doing my work to defend it.

First, to the kids: There are people in your home town who have taken certain books off the shelves of your school library. Do not argue with them; do not protest; do not organize or attend rallies to have the books put back on their shelves. Don't waste your time or your energy. Instead, hustle down to your public library, where these frightened people's reach must fall short in a democracy, or to your local bookstore, and get a copy of what has been banned. Read it carefully and discover what it is your elders don't want you to know. In many cases you'll finish the banned book in question wondering what all the fuss was about. In others, however, you will find vital information about the human condition. It doesn't hurt to remember that John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, and even Mark Twain have been banned in this country's public schools over the last 20 years.

Second, to the parents in these towns: There are people out there who are deciding what your kids can read, and they don't care what you think because they are positive their ideas of what's proper and what's not are better, clearer than your own. Do you believe they are? Think carefully before you decide to accord the book-banners this right of cancellation, and remember that they don't believe in democracy but rather in a kind of intellectual autocracy. If they are left to their own devices, a great deal of good literature may soon disappear from the shelves of school libraries simply because good books -- books that make us think and feel -- always generate controversy.

If you are not careful and diligent about defending the right of your children to read, there won't be much left, especially at the junior-high level where kids really begin to develop a lively life of the mind, but books about heroic boys who come off the bench to hit home runs in the bottom of the ninth and shy girls with good personalities who finally get that big prom date with the boy of their dreams. Is this what you want for your kids, keeping in mind that controversy and surprise -- sometimes even shock -- are often the whetstone on which young minds are sharpened?

Third, to the other interested citizens of these towns: Please remember that book-banning is censorship, and that censorship in a free society is always a serious matter -- even when it happens in a junior high, it is serious. A proposal to ban a book should always be given the gravest consideration. Book-banners, after all, insist that the entire community should see things their way, and only their way. When a book is banned, a whole set of thoughts is locked behind the assertion that there is only one valid set of values, one valid set of beliefs, one valid perception of the world. It's a scary idea, especially in a society which has been built on the ideas of free choice and free thought.

Do I think that all books and all ideas should be allowed in school libraries? I do not. Schools are, after all, a "managed" marketplace. Books like "Fanny Hill" and Brett Easton Ellis' gruesome "American Psycho" have a right to be read by people who want to read them, but they don't belong in the libraries of tax-supported American middle schools. Do I think that I have an obligation to fly down to Florida and argue that my books, which are a long way from either "Fanny Hill" or "American Psycho," be replaced on the shelves from which they have been taken? No. My job is writing stories, and if I spent all my time defending the ones I've written already, I'd have no time to write new ones.

Do I believe a defense should be mounted? Yes. If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. No book, record, or film should be banned without a full airing of the issues. As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them."

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell. Octavia E. Butler

  “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.”
― Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories 

“You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.
That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”
― Octavia E. Butler 

 

“All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles, and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.”
― Octavia E. Butler 

 

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”

― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower 

Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers. Octavia Butler

Stay present

The consensus was obvious: Stay present. Stay with what’s in front of you. Don’t get ahead of yourself, don’t worry about the middle and the ending, just stick with the page you’re on. Of all the writers, the hundreds of Sylvia Plath... and Agatha Christie quotes, Jane Smiley, author of fourteen books and the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, explained it most clearly. “Writing,” she said, “is only one word at a time. It’s not a whole bunch of things happening at once. Various things can present themselves, but when you face the page, it’s a couple of words, and then a couple more words, and, if you’re lucky, a sentence or a paragraph.”

LAUREN MARTIN

Telling stories really is a kind of power, and not an insignificant one.

There is one form of power that has fascinated me ever since I was a girl, even though it has been widely colonized by men: the power of storytelling. Telling stories really is a kind of power, and not an insignificant one. Stories give shape to experience, sometimes by accommodating traditional literary forms, sometimes by turning them upside down, sometimes by reorganizing them. Stories draw readers into their web, and engage them by putting them to work, body and soul, so that they can transform the black thread of writing into people, ideas, feelings, actions, cities, worlds, humanity, life. Storytelling, in other words, gives us the power to bring order to the chaos of the real under our own sign, and in this it isn’t very far from political power.

ELENA FERRANTE

pieces of a jigsaw puzzle

My work accrues sentence by sentence. After an initial phase of sitting patiently, not so patiently, struggling to locate them, to pin them down, they begin arriving, fully formed in my brain. I tend to hear them as I am drifting off to sleep. They are spoken to me, I’m not sure by whom. By myself, I know, though the source feels independent, recondite, especially at the start. The light will be turned on, a sentence or two will be hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper, carried upstairs to the manuscript in the morning. I hear sentences as I’m staring out the window, or chopping vegetables, or waiting on a subway platform alone. They are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, handed to me in no particular order, with no discernible logic. I only sense that they are part of the thing.

JHUMPA LAHIRI   

If I go outside to the street, it’s a huge help

I’ve found over the years that any momentary change stimulates a fresh burst of mental energy. So if I’m in this room and then I go into the other room, it helps me. If I go outside to the street, it’s a huge help. If I go up and take a shower it’s a big help. So I sometimes take extra showers. I’ll be in the living room and at an impasse and what will help me is to go upstairs and take a shower. It breaks up everything and relaxes me. I go out on my terrace a lot. One of the best things about my apartment is that it’s got a long terrace and I’ve paced it a million times writing movies. It’s such a help to change the atmosphere.

WOODY ALLEN

just serve your subject

 Just serve your subject. Each book*makes different and fierce demands. Each one uses up all you can do. Later you may be able to do more.

HILARY MANTEL

*or painting etc

One of the things writing does is, is allow you to be other people. OCTAVIA BUTLER

One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate. JOHN STEINBECK 

It is bigger than your overt consciousness

“It’s that being open—not scratching for it, not digging for it, not constructing something but being open to the situation and trusting that what you don’t know will be available to you.

 It is bigger than your overt consciousness or your intelligence or even your gifts; it is out there somewhere and you have to let it in.”

  Toni Morrison

laboratories and experiments

I enjoy books that don’t care if I think they should serve a moral function. Personally, I believe it’s more important that books be laboratories and experiments and it’s up to the reader to be moral. I trust my readers to know that, at times, I’m going to write wickedly and in a messed-up way, about messed-up characters who may behave in an unreliable or suspect manner.

JEFF VANDERMEER

Exzilda & Octave Cardinale

 We love these names from walking through Precious Blood Cemetery. Exzilda & Octave Cardinale.

Francis Poulenc

This caught my attention on our local WCRB FM radio station tonight and I had to go look it up on the playlist.

Sonata for Horn, Trumpet, and Trombone: III. Rondo

COMPOSER:

Francis Poulenc

ARTIST:

The Nash Ensemble

ALBUM:

Poulenc: The Complete Chamber Music / Nash Ensemble

Spinach Lovers Supper

I love spinach perhaps even more than Popeye the Sailor ever did. Last night for a quick supper for two I defrosted 3/4 pound bag of frozen spinach and added olive oil, Adobo, garlic powder, 2 slices of Pepper Jack cheese and 4 eggs. I cooked them in a frying pan. Then I placed green pimento olives on top for an edible garnish. It was so delicious I wanted to be sure to write it down. I might want to make it again tonight!

Tom Comitta

Write a novel in one night. I’m serious. Take three hours. Take five. Whatever time you have. Open a Word document and change the page size to 6 x 9. Figure out a way to fill 200 pages in one night. Copy and paste from websites, from Project Gutenberg. Play the computer keyboard like a piano. Increase the text size if you have to. Just stick to the 200-page goal and use your intuition. Think quantity, not quality.  Once you’ve filled the pages, design the cover. Don’t forget to put your name on it. Then publish it on a print-on-demand site before you go to bed. Order a copy.

As of that night you will be a published writer—no waiting necessary. You’ve written a full book, published it, and learned something about writing, design (which more writers should know about), and what it feels like to finish a book. When the book arrives, give it a look. Smell the pages. Hold it in your hands. How does it feel? What has this process taught you about books, writing, design, publishing? Is this book actually a novel? Is it any good? What is “good”? Now get to work on your next book. Tom Comitta

Doom and Glory

An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. JAMES BALDWIN

Dream

I dreamed I was walking in a wooded city park and came upon about 500 pounds of Muenster cheese and mozzarella in unopened packages. Must've been dumped from a restaurant, I thought. I took two round pounds of mozzarella and had a teeny bite. It tasted fine. I have to call the Mayor and tell her about the dumped cheese.

Then I witnessed a speeding red car bump another red car and it set off road rage causing six vehicles to scramble into crashing. Immediately there was a press conference inside the state house with city officials and police and detectives with guns drawn. The six crashed cars were there, indoors. I was high up watching with my dog. A detective told me I was in harms way and to come down.