JUDY BLUME
Author of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Blubber, and many other teen classics

When I began to write, thirty years ago, I didn’t know if anyone would publish my books, but I wasn’t afraid to write them. I was lucky. I found an editor and publisher who were willing to take a chance. They encouraged me. I was never told what I couldn’t write. I felt only that I had to write the most honest books I could. It never occurred to me, at the time, that what I was writing was controversial. Much of it grew out of my own feelings and concerns when I was young.

COMMUNISM?
There were few challenges to my books then, although I remember the night a woman phoned, asking if I had written Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. When I replied that I had, she called me a Communist and slammed down the phone. I never did figure out if she equated Communism with menstruation or religion, the two major concerns in 12-year-old Margaret’s life.

But in 1980, the censors crawled out of the woodwork, seemingly overnight, organized and determined. Not only would they decide what their children could read, but what all children could read. Challenges to books quadrupled within months, and we’ll never know how many teachers, school librarians, and principals quietly removed books to avoid trouble.

FEAR
I believe that censorship grows out of fear, and because fear is contagious, some parents are easily swayed. Book banning satisfies their need to feel in control of their children’s lives. This fear is often disguised as moral outrage. They want to believe that if their children don’t read about it, their children won’t know about it. And if they don’t know about it, it won’t happen.

Today, it’s not only language and sexuality (the usual reasons given for banning my books) that will land a book on the censors’ hit list. It’s Satanism, New Age-ism and a hundred other “isms,” some of which would make you laugh if the implications weren’t so serious. Books that make kids laugh often come under suspicion; so do books that encourage kids to think, or question authority; books that don’t hit the reader over the head with moral lessons are considered dangerous.

Censors don’t want children exposed to ideas different from their own. If every individual with an agenda had his/her way, the shelves in the school library would be close to empty. I wish the censors could read the letters kids write.

Dear Judy,
I don’t know where I stand in the world. I don’t know who I am. That’s why I read, to find myself.
Elizabeth, age 13

But it’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.
(Source: www.judyblume.com)

ROBERT CORMIER
The critically acclaimed author of The Chocolate War.

SOME THOUGHTS ON CENSORSHIP
I sympathize with the parents who want to have control over their own children. What their children should do, see, read. My wife and I exercised those kinds of controls. If [parents] object to their children reading The Chocolate War, I don’t protest. But when they forbid other children from reading it, then I strongly object. This, in fact, is the censorship problem in its most basic concept. Telling other people what they can do, see, or read. Invading rights of individuals in a free country.

I try to write realistic stories about believable people, reflecting the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. I think there is room in the great halls of reading for this kind of book. The hundreds of letters I receive each year from both teachers and young people are what sustain me at moments when censorship threatens my work. I owe a great debt to the many teachers, librarians, and parents who support my work. The blessing that in doing so they also strike blows for freedom. Freedom is what our nation stands for and what makes our country special.

The irony of book-banning attempts is that the publicity often causes people to read the books for the wrong reasons. If a book is controversial, perhaps the best place for it is the classroom where, under the guidance of a teacher, the book can be discussed and evaluated, where each student will be free to proclaim how he or she feels about the book and, in fact, can even refuse to read the book. The point is that free choice must be involved.

There are many victims of the censorship problem. Often, the children themselves suffer. There was a case in Massachusetts where the parents of a girl strongly objected to The Chocolate War and insisted that their daughter go to the school library when the book was being discussed in the classroom. A classmate of hers wrote to me of her dilemma. In his P.S., he added that she had read The Chocolate War a year earlier on her own. You see how impossible it is to protect young people from the world even when it is done by parents with the best of intentions? The world intrudes, whether through classmates or books and movies and television.

ZILPHA KEATLEY SNYDER
Three-time Newbery-winning author of The Gypsy Game, The Headless Cupid, and The Witches of Worm

The Egypt Game, first published in 1968, has earned several awards, among them the Newbery Honor Book, an American Library Association Notable Book, first prize in the Spring Book Festival in New York, a Lewis Caroll Shelf Award, and a George C. Stone Recognition of Merit awarded by Claremont Graduate School. It has been only in the past several years that I have heard of any protests concerning the book’s subject matter.

The setting of the story is Berkeley, California, where I taught school for three years while my husband was a graduate student at University of California. All six of the main characters are loosely based on kids who were in my class at that time. I feel that one value of the book is that it deals with children from different ethnic backgrounds who, for the most part, interact well with each other. And whose problems, when they do occur, have nothing to do with race—as was true of the kids in my Berkeley classes.

To further explain the background of the story, I would have to go back to when I was in fifth and sixth grade and our teacher took us through several inspiring and fascinating studies of ancient civilizations: Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Chinese. I loved it all, and throughout my entire life, my understanding of history and literature and culture has been enhanced by facts I learned at that time.

But it was Egypt that I found most fascinating. I played my own version of the Egypt Game, made up my own hieroglyphic alphabet, collected things Egyptian, and walked the several miles to school as various Egyptian personalities, including Cleopatra and Queen Nefertiti.

My own Egyptian period passed and I went on to other phases and games. I was a great game player and I was constantly involved in complicated scenarios based on not only Greek and Egyptian history and mythology, but also on stories from the Bible and, of course, on a multitude of beloved novels. My mother, a devout Quaker lady, never seemed to confuse game playing with being involved in some kind of pernicious pseudoreligious ritual. And I am absolutely convinced that there is no better way for children to stretch their imaginations, and develop their creative instincts than to be involved in such imaginative game playing.

The point is, the Egypt Game, just as the title suggests, was a game! Nothing else is ever implied in the story. And at the end, when the girls realize they have covered most of the interesting aspects of Egyptian culture, they are beginning to be on the lookout for new inspirations: “What do you know about gypsies?”

And as to any connection with “occultism” or “idol worship,” I am astounded and appalled. I truly fear for children whose parents are so fearful. Will they forbid their children to learn about Greek and Roman mythology, other forms of legend and folklore, and even fairy tales because of such fears? I certainly hope not.

And a word about imaginative game playing in general, in my opinion a well-developed imagination is necessary not only for any kid of artistic endeavor, but also in many other career areas. Imaginative approaches to problem solving are necessary not only for a successful professional life, but also in the area of personal relationships.

LOIS LOWRY
The esteemed author of The Giver, Gathering Blue, and The Messenger, published in 2004

In my early years as a writer for young people, I occasionally received letters from people who wondered why I had used a “bad word” in a book. I always wrote back, explaining that an author tries to reflect reality, and so book characters have to speak the way real people would speak; it didn’t mean, I always explained, that the reader should speak that way, or that the author does.

When I wrote The Giver, it contained no so-called “bad words.” It was set, after all, in a mythical, futuristic, and Utopian society. Not only was there no poverty, divorce, racism, sexism, pollution, or violence in the world of The Giver; there was also careful attention paid to language: to its fluency, precision, and power.

The reaction to the book was startling. It was startling in the number of letters and responses I received almost immediately, but it was even more startling in the degree of differences in the responses.

A Trappist monk wrote from his monastery that he and his brothers were reading the book as a Christian metaphor and finding it profoundly significant as a message of redemption.

At about the same time, a parent in California demanded that it be taken off the library shelves of her child’s school because of its immorality.

A private school in Michigan made it required reading not only for all the upper-school students, but for their parents.

At the same time, a teacher wrote to me that the Newbery committee should be chastised for their awarding the 1994 medal to a sensationalistic piece of trash.

The children of Belgium and France chose the book, in translation, as their favorite of the year.

A parent wrote to me that I should be ashamed for exposing children to “messy data.”

What’s wrong with this picture? I found myself thinking.

I went back and re-read the book myself. I tried to figure out whether these disparate people were, in fact, all responding to the same thing: whether there was actually a theme in the book that people found either uplifting or terrifying, or maybe both. And I discovered that it was the concept of choice. The Giver is about a world where those decisions are made for them. It seems very safe and comfortable, and I bet a lot of parents—later to object and censor—liked the book until they were two-thirds of the way through it.

Then it got scary. It got scary—and they decided to take it away from their own kids—because it turned out that it wasn’t safe and comfy to live in a world where adhering to rigid rules is the norm. It turned out, in the book, that such a world is very, very dangerous, and that people have to learn to make their own choices.

I sympathize with the fear that makes some parents not want that to be true. But I believe without a single shadow of a doubt that it is necessary for young people to learn to make choices. Learning to make right choices is the only way they will survive in an increasingly frightening world. Pretending that there are no choices to be made—reading only books, for example, which are cheery and safe and nice—is a prescription for disaster for the young.

Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of The Giver: the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.