I'm very happy to be here,
very happy to see your beautiful faces.
In 2008, I gave a presentation
to a librarian group in Salt Lake City, Utah,
and afterwards, someone stood up and asked me
why I write about such terrible things for children.
It was not a friendly question.
(Laughter)
There are many reasons why books get challenged
with the hopes of banning them,
the 12 most frequent being:
offensive language,
explicit sexual descriptions,
incidents of violence or brutality, including rape,
disparagement of family values,
treatment of satanism, via cult or witchcraft,
New Age anti-religious stories,
examples of racism,
examples of substance abuse,
materials that include depressing or morbid topics,
attacks on patriotism, or established authority,
texts that include anti-feminism or sexism,
and derogatory imagines of the handicapped.
I can understand why people
who work with and live with children
might assume the right and responsibility to protect them.
Children are vulnerable,
their brains are different.
And people may think that by controlling the way
in which children encounter the things on this list,
they are protecting them.
Certainly, one can see
how the things on this list are important.
Look at sexuality,
when sexual experiences, whether real or imagined,
can influence your sexual identity,
and your sexual identity can affect
whether or not you are able to form a lasting relationship
that can carry you through life.
Look at religion.
If you are a person of faith,
you may very well want to make sure
that the children that you love
share this faith.
I understand these things.
Yet, I write about all the things that are on this list.
I have a book called "Song of the Magdalene,"
that takes place in the first century,
in the land we now call Israel.
The main character has epilepsy,
she falls in love with someone who has cerebral palsy.
In that time and place,
people with physical and mental maladies were pariahs,
so there is quite a lot of derogatory images of the handicapped.
And the main character is raped.
In "Alligator Bayou,"
which takes place in 1899 in Tallulah, Louisiana,
we are in the middle of the Jim Crow South.
The society is stratified along racial lines.
Sexism, my goodness, nobody was even aware of it!
The book is full of racism and sexism,
and there is a lynching.
In "Three days," which is a story that takes place contemporaneously,
a little American girl is driving with her father in Italy.
He has a heart attack,
he manages to pull off the side of the road safely,
but he dies,
and this little girl is waiting
until someone finally picks her up.
And the people who pick her up,
want her for their own reasons.
So, why on earth do I do these things?
You know, the last thing I want to do, as a writer for children,
is hurt my reader.
I love to tell a good story,
a funny, scary, mysterious, whatever story
but terrible things draw me.
Am I hurting children?
Let's look at the child
who is growing up with plenty to eat,
good food, her own bed,
a place to study,
she goes to a school where the teacher cares about what she's learning
and works very hard to make it a good day.
There are people who talk to her and listen to her,
and she can talk to them.
This is a loved child.
This is a protected child.
Let me set this child aside for the moment.
And let's look at the child
who maybe doesn't have her own bed to sleep in,
maybe doesn't sleep that well,
maybe there is no blanket to keep her warm,
maybe she went to bed hungry, she wakes up hungry,
she goes to an underfunded, overcrowded school.
Maybe she's very much loved,
but the socio-economics of the situation are such
that she is battling a number of things constantly.
And then, there are other children,
who are not so much loved.
And this has nothing to do with socio-economic status
or race, or religion, or ethnicity,
none of that.
We all know that all kinds of things happen behind closed doors
in every sector of our society.
So these are the unprotected children.
What happens to an unprotected child
when they read a book
in which the main character is also unprotected?
One things that happens,
is that they find out that they are not alone.
Children often do not talk about the problems that they have.
Sometimes because they know
they can't do anything about it,
so, what's the point of talking about it?
Sometimes, because they are loyal
to the people that they love.
Sometimes it could be because of fear.
If you tell and people believe you,
maybe you'll be snatched from your family, and then what?
And if you tell and people don't believe you,
then you have to go back to the situation you were in,
and deal with the people who know that you told on them.
It could be much worse.
So, there you are!
You are alone, and you don't know
what other people are dealing with.
There, in a book, you find out!
This person talks to you in a way
that maybe no one else in your life talks to you,
in a more intimate way!
If you have done something terrible,
really done it or just imagined it,
you may think you are an awful person,
and there, in a book, you'll find out
that absolutely ordinary people
do terrible things and think terrible thoughts.
There's no one as lonely as a child who thinks
that she's the worst person ever.
In a book you find out that you are not alone.
If terrible things are happening to you
and you don't know they happened to other people,
you can feel that maybe there's something about you
that make them happen to you!
Maybe there is something wrong with you.
Maybe it's your fault.
You can suffer guilt.
There, in a book, you see this child did nothing to make it happen to her!
But it's still happened.
Terrible things happen to good people all the time.
It's very comforting.
Or you may think
that you're the only one it's happening to
and you develop a big chip on your shoulder,
you're angry about it,
you don't understand that lots of people around you
are coping with things that they are not talking about either.
So, it can give you a wonderful perspective
that allows you some consolation.
Another thing that reading these books can do,
is give you hints, help
in coping with your situation.
Not that these books are going to deal with the same situation that you're in,
they may be dealing with something
that's very different from what you are in.
But you see somebody persisting,
being resilient,
being resourceful, looking for help in different places,
and it gives you some ideas of how you might go about
trying to manage.
Now, sometimes, the problems that a child faces
are child-sized problems,
and are something that the child can influence.
But sometimes, they are not!
Children are our least powerful members of society.
So, these books over here,
they better not be saying
that the child can solve an enormous problem.
Richard Pak,
one of the wonderful writers for children,
says: "Writers for children
cannot afford to traffic in happy endings,
because if we do, we risk leaving our reader undefended."
It is very important for the child
who is in a situation that they cannot change,
to see what happens to a child
in another situation that they cannot change.
It is my job,
or I think it is my job when I am writing a story,
to let a child know that
you may not be able to change your world,
but with hard work and good will,
you will be able to find a way to live decently within your world,
even if it's only inside your head.
Hope, peace, even joy,
can be a strictly internal matter,
an it's very important for children to see that!
So, these books can be a life line to the unprotected child.
And now let's take the child that is protected,
and take a look at this child!
I want to argue that this child needs those books even more.
For one, the child will not always be protected,
you cannot put your child in a cotton-lined box for life.
The child will burst out, the box will be crushed from outside.
Things happen to people.
We don't live charmed lives,
and everybody needs to learn coping skills.
In the book you can see somebody coping,
and it can help to prepare you for when you need to cope.
But even more than that,
I think the child who is protected
really needs these books,
because without them,
if this child grows up
with only good things happening
and unaware
that terrible things can happen to people like them,
they run the risk of becoming intolerant and intolerable people.
They run the risk of walking past a homeless person,
who is emaciated, and perhaps, stinking,
and thinking, "It's his own damn fault!"
They think that all the good things that have happened to them,
have happened because they merited it,
they worked hard, they had a good spirit.
They don't recognize the role of luck in their lives.
People can work hard and have good spirits
and have lousy luck.
In a book, you crawl inside the skin of someone else,
you live what they are living,
you come to understand it,
you gain empathy.
Empathy is the corner stone of civilization.
Without empathy, we are each just in our little spots,
taking care of ourselves, and our children.
Who cares about the neighbor?
Empathy allows us to understand why we pay taxes,
why everybody deserves an education,
shelter, food, health care.
Empathy makes us decent people.
And there is no safer way
for a child to learn empathy,
than through a book.
I want to bring this down to the personal.
When I was a child,
my favourite book was "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."
I grew up in a family with a lot of problems,
that got realized in a number of ways,
one of which was financial insecurity, instability.
One of my worst memories of childhood was
coming home in the third grade to find everything that I owned,
- and I didn't own that much, I was just a little third grade kid,
but everything that I owned, mattered to me! -
to find everything that I owned out on the sidewalk,
because we have been evicted yet again.
And I didn't know whether or not,
anyone else was coping with this kind of thing.
Kids didn't talk about it at school.
But in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," I saw Francie Nolan coping with poverty.
It was very consoling to me!
It gave me a perspective that allowed me
to enjoy a lot of things about my life.
In that book, there was also a man,
at the foot of the stairs,
who was essentially a monster.
And Francie was very afraid of him,
and he had gotten other girls.
He does not get Francie,
and I was very glad that he didn't get Francie.
I would not have wanted him to.
But I would have given anything
to be able to read a book
about the girl who did not escape
the man at the foot of the stairs.
To me, it would have been a lifeline.
So, those books just were not available.
Today they are.
And I am very grateful for that.
And thank you very much.
(Applause)