The Open Road Blog

Editor's note: Today for Banned Books Week, some of Open Road's fiction writers weigh in on their favorite banned or challenged books.

"When I was twelve, I memorized a poem for English class:  Walt Whitman’s “This Dust Was Once The Man.”  I chose it because Whitman was the “good gray poet” and I a good green girl, because he wrote it when Lincoln was shot and it was a hundred years later and Kennedy was shot. I chose it because it was four lines.

When I was sixteen, I was a pent-up aching river with a body electric that wanted to break into native moments and unfold from the folds I had been in. I breathed my fragrance, listened to how my belched words loosed the eddies of the wind, dreamed of twenty-eight young men bathing by the shore, young men so friendly yet so lonesome; I dreamed of me as the woman who owned the fine house by the rise of the bank and the twenty-eight young men below. I was simmering, simmering, simmering, brought to boil by Whitman.

When I was twenty, I learned that Leaves of Grass was a pun, that ‘grass’ was a publishing term for trash, and ‘leaves’ were the pages of this trash. I learned that Whitman spent his life on this trash, losing jobs, being denied publication, because the leaves simmered.

I’m sixty now—a good gray woman.  I’ve read Leaves of Grass for 48 years—longer than Whitman worked on it. Because of these leaves, I know that one world is aware and by far the largest, and that is myself."

—Glen Chamberlain has won a Pushcart Prize, the first Gilcrease Prize for fiction, and the Rona Jaffe Award for both fiction and creative nonfiction. The Rona Jaffe Award named her “one of the six most promising women writers in the nation.” Her story collection Conjugations of the Verb to Be was published this month. She lives with her husband in Bozeman, Montana, where she teaches writing at Montana State University.

"People are scared of this book. They should be.

Not for its supposed pro-communist philosophy, nor for its language or sexuality, but for the image of Winston in Room 101, strapped to a chair, about to be devoured by starved rats.

There’s nothing to fear about bad art. People tend to remember and discuss the ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four more than its narrative, but those ideas gain strength because Orwell’s artistry makes a gray world feel vivid and characters—so close to emotional deadness—feel alive.

The fact that the novel—which has become the embodiment of a struggle against censorship—has been challenged and suppressed is not only ironic but a kind of democratic doublespeak. This is precisely the type of book that young people should read, when they’re at an age full of simultaneous anxiety and hope. The book warns that politics—like all belief systems—are just one generation away from being fully adopted or fully abandoned. This goes for a love of free speech and the arts, as well.

So we should be a little afraid. As younger readers, we’re spooked by Orwell’s vision of dystopian fantasy. As we get older, our fear is that we’re already getting glimpses of it, in reality."

—Adam Schuitema is the author of the short-story collection Freshwater Boys. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous magazines, including Glimmer Train, North American Review, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, Black Warrior Review, and Crazyhorse. He is an assistant professor of English at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he lives with his wife and daughter. Learn more about him here. 

"The first book banning that is seared into my consciousness came down not from church or state but from my mother—who found me curled in the wing chair by the bookshelves with East of Eden—in Dubuque, east of the great plains, west of the Mississippi, south of the north woods, and north of Civil War battlefields, though home to graves of Union soldiers and perhaps stations on the Underground Railroad. I lived on the river (“Father of Waters,” said the schoolbooks) my first eighteen years. My mother said I could read The Red Pony instead; I was not ready for East of Eden. Ready? How could I not be when I was already inside the story? No, she said, I was too young for the freedom of reading anything I chose. It was true that while reading my face often burned, but maybe not so much from the excitations my mother feared as from the more subtle aesthetic and creative thrills I was on the verge of discovering. Anyway, I gave up Steinbeck’s novel at fourteen, but a year or so later, below parental radar, found myself in the dark deliciousness of a movie theater with James Dean and Julie Harris in Kazan’s 1955 adaptation. So I got to finish the story, but strangely I don’t think I’ve ever read the whole book. I love it nonetheless: its forbidden status encouraged me to ponder, all at once and at an impressionable age, the words east and Eden and freedom."

—The author of three four story collections, Above the Houses, Pastorale, A Stay by the River, and Sarah’s Laughter, Susan Engberg has been awarded many prizes, grants and honors, including three appearances in the annual O. Henry Prize Stories. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband, Charles Engberg, an architect and jazz musician. Here Engberg shares a story about her favorite banned book. 

"The Catcher in the Rye was published just before my first birthday and yet it continues to thrive as a mirror held up to adolescent angst for its brilliant marriage of language, narration, and sensibility. When I was a girl, every high school social outcast clasped the book to her bosom as a bible, a defense of being. It was our voice in the wilderness. Its villains were our villains. Holden Caufield’s heroic impulses were our own, articulated. Perhaps it’s only logical that the book was considered subversive by authority figures struggling to hold on to our attention and fidelity. Caufield was a hero not because he caught us and saved us from ourselves and the world, but because he thought about it and went mad doing so.

One of the curious things about banned books lists is that one has to strain credulity to contemplate why works that might have been revolutionary in their time—Madam Bovary, Ulysses, Lolita—continue to offend. One particular experience I had in high school makes me wonder if the reason is that those who create lists of banned books and those who enforce them are not working on the same page. My English teacher assigned the class a book report. We were required to first submit a title for approval. I proposed The Catcher in the Rye and was told: Pick something else. Why? I asked. No sports stories! was the reply.

So at the tender age of sixteen I learned a new phrase to counter censorship: reductio ad absurdum."