Words with JAM
Contents
A Teenager’s Freedom to Read - Catriona Troth explores banned and challenged books, including input from Ellen Hopkins and Anne Rooney
Library Closures - latest updates from the Library Cat
Jasper Fforde author of the Thursday Next series and The Eyre Affair, Fforde talks about fitting a world around his characters, ignoring publishers, experimenting with different genres, and meta-fiction
60 Second Interviews with China Miéville and Anthony Riches
The First Casualty - procrastinating with Perry Iles
There ought to be a Word for it - Lorraine Mace talks about her past publishing deals and pulling bunny’s ears off
The Unbearable Lightness of Anal(ysis) - Derek Duggan on outrageous plots
A Conversation with Ann Cleeves - Gillian Hamer interviews Ann on the forthcoming TV adaptation of Telling Tales, and does a spot more Book v Film
Wading into the Indie Ocean by Donna Fasano
Andrew Ramsay on Comic Book Plots
Competitions
Flash 500 Humour Verse Competition - last quarter’s winners
Flash 500 Fiction Competition - last quarter’s winners
Words with JAM Short Story Competition 2011 Announcement
Are You Having a Laugh? Words with JAM Comedy Scene Competition Winners
We’re Feeling Lonely - giveaways for Facebook ‘likers’
Comp Corner - winners of the last comp, corralled by Danny Gillan
WIN a £500 General Critique by Cornerstones Literary Agency - FREE entry
Pencilbox
The Agent’s View with Andrew Lownie and Laura Longrigg
Cornerstones Mini Masterclass - exploring first pages with Helen Corner
Don’t Lose the Plot with Sarah Bower - the third of ten creative writing exercises
Scripts: Plot, Rinse, Repeat by Ola Zaltin
To Thine Own Self Tweet True by Dan Holloway
Three Ps in a Plot by Anne Stormont
Carver’s Couch - exploring the psychological aspect of writing with consultant clinical psychologist Sue Carver
Things you can do now to help your writing career by Janet Skeslien Charles
Question Corner - Lorraine Mace answers your questions on writing
Some other stuff
Dear Ed - Letters of the satirical variety
The Rumour Mill - sorting the bags of truth from the bags of shite
Horoscopes - by Shameless Charlatan Druid Keith
The Team
Sarah Bower is the author of two historical novels, THE NEEDLE IN THE BLOOD and THE BOOK OF LOVE (published as SINS OF THE HOUSE OF BORGIA in the US). She has also published short stories in QWF, The Yellow Room, and Spiked among others. She has a creative writing MA from the University of East Anglia where she now teaches. She also teaches creative writing for the Open University. Sarah was born in Yorkshire and now lives in Suffolk.
Sheila Bugler won a place on the 2008 Apprenticeships in Fiction programme. Whilst publishers debate her first novel, she is working on her second novel and spending way too much time indulging her unhealthy interest in synopsis-writing.
Clinical psychologist Sue Carver is serving a long apprenticeship in novel-writing. Her aphorism is: it takes as long as it takes. Her first novel is set in the world of psychological therapy and her second takes her far out of her comfort zone. She has published poetry under her maiden surname: Leppard, but she wasn’t made in Sheffield and, although she has wide tastes in music, she much prefers Raymond to Def.
Derek Duggan is a graduate of The Samuel Beckett Centre for Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin. He lives in Spain with his wife and children and is not a tobogganist.
Danny Gillan’s award-winning Will You Love Me Tomorrow was described as one of the best debut novels of 2008. Now, for entirely cash related reasons, Danny’s novel Scratch is available for Kindle readers (‘users’ sounds a bit druggy). It’s so funny it’s made people accidentally wee, apparently. Really, actually wee in their pants. True story ... www.dannygillan.co.uk
Gillian Hamer is a full time company director and part time novelist. She divides her time between the industrial Midlands and the wilds of Anglesey, where she spends far too much time dreaming about becoming the next Agatha Christie. http://gillian]wordpress.com/
Dan Holloway In June Dan’s novel The Company of Fellows was voted “favourite Oxford novel” in a poll of readers from Blackwell’s bookstore. On July 28th he took part in Blackwell’s Rising Stars panel alongside authors Naomi Wood, Nikesh Shukla and Stuart Evers, and on October 18th is being handed the use of the Oxford store’s world-famous Norrington Room to host the spoken word event This Is Oxford.
Perry Iles is an old man from Scotland. If he was a dwarf, he’d be grumpy. He lives in a state of semi-permanent apoplectic biliousness, and hates children, puppies, kittens, and periods of unseemly emotion such as Christmas. He pours out vinegary invective via a small writing machine, and thinks it’s a bit like throwing liver at the wall. He tells anyone who’ll listen that this gives him a modicum of gratification.
Andrew Lownie is a member of the Association of Authors’ Agents and Society of Authors and was until recently the literary agent to the international writers’ organisation PEN. In 1998 he founded The Biographers Club, a monthly dining society for biographers and those involved in promoting biography, and The Biographers’ Club Prize which supports first-time biographers.
Lorraine Mace is a columnist with Writing Magazine and co-author, with Maureen Vincent-Northam, of The Writer’s ABC Checklist, has had her work published in five countries. Winner of the Petra Kenney International Poetry Award (comic verse category), she writes fiction for the women’s magazine market and is a writing competition judge. www.lorrainemace.com
JJ Marsh - writer, teacher, newt. www.jjmarsh.wordpress.com
Matt Shaw - author, cartoonist, photographer, hermit, Billy-No-Mates. www.mattshawpublications.co.uk
Anne Stormont - as well as being a writer, is a wife, mother and teacher. She is also a hopeless romantic, who likes happy endings.
Kat Troth grew up in two countries, uses two names, and has had two different careers. One career she has spent writing technical reports for a non-technical audience. In the other, she attempts to write fiction. She tries always to remember who she is at any one time, but usually finds she has at least two opinions about everything.
Ola Zaltin is a Swedish screenwriter working out of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has written for both the big screen and the small, including episodes for the Swedish Wallander series. Together with Susanne O’Leary he is the co-author of the novel Virtual Strangers, (available as eBook).
Editor’s Desk
Editor’s Note
Another month, another issue.
This time we’ve got more interviews residing in these pages than we can shake our pens at. Not only do we have an interview with the delightfully quirky Jasper Fforde, but also China Miéville, Anthony Riches and Ann Cleeves.
We’ve also got a few competition results. A huge congratulations go to Tony Oswick, Peter McGinniss, Thomas Willshire, Richard Gibney and Deborah Smith, for their winning entries in our first ever Comedy Scene Competition, and a big thanks to Danny for judging. We had a great many laughs reading your entries, and guarantee there’ll be a few more from our readers. I’ll be in touch personally in the next few days.
We also have a few new competitions to announce. Yes, you know what I’m talking about. Regular columnist, Helen Corner, has agreed to offer up a prize of a £500 General Manuscript Critique for one lucky winner of this issue’s Comp Corner. The competition closes on the 5th November, so there’s plenty of time. Plus there’s our second annual Short Story Competition now open for submissions. As popular as it was last year, we’ve been able to offer a bigger first prize this year, and if you want some inspiration, you can read last year’s winners on our blog. Judging will be our first ever cover author, Doug Jackson.
I’m slightly nervous to admit, but the first book by a ‘celebrity’ that I have considered purchasing has just been bought by Hodder. Is it just me? by Miranda Hart will be published by Hodder in October 2012, according to the Bookseller. If her BBC TV series is anything to go by, it should be good, and I’m interested to see how theatrically falling over translates onto the page.
Also, according to the Bookseller (spending far too much time on there) Philippa Gregory is to write a YA bestseller. Thought that was slightly presumptuous. Then I realised it read Philippa Gregory to write YA | The Bookseller. I blame the distraction of children tugging on the laptop power cable and unplugging the router.
Anyway, enough twaddling from me, or I won’t have space to tell you about next issue. For our second anniversary, World Literature is our theme and because we never do things by halves, guess who we’ve got on the cover? Only Paulo Coelho! One of the biggest-selling and best-loved authors in the world. He’ll be talking to us exclusively about celebrity, deadly sins, feminine values, self-piracy and what it means to be a writer.
For now, enjoy!
JD Smith
Latest Podcasts
Our Little Secret by Barbara Scott-Emmett
Our Little Secret, by Barbara Scott-Emmett was first published in her book ‘Drowning’. It is read here by the author. The day the Sandersons went home is so much more than just the last day of summer...
Tales of Unrequited Love by Anna Hobson
A selection of poems performed by the author. Anna tells us, “They are inspired by dark humanity; by the shifting seething turmoil within; by the sparks created by collisions of character. I write about love, pain and heartbreak; about blind instinct, manipulation, and the selfish guzzling of emotion.”
You can listen to episodes, download them or subscribe to the podcast either at http://wordswithjam.podomatic.com or on iTunes via http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/words-with-jam/id423101927 - and if you feel like giving us a review or a star rating while you’re there, that’s even better!
Blogging Along
As of a few weeks ago, we’ve started posting up articles from previous issues of the magazine, because we thought it was a bit of a shame to let them live in the archive that is the ‘back issues of Words with JAM’ filing cabinet, where although people do look and comment on how they are peeing their pants on them (due to laughter), it’s still a stigma for our written words. So far we’ve posted:
60 Seconds with David Nicholls
Promoting your book, promoting yourself by Jane Wenham-Jones
The perilous path to publication – getting an agent by Sheila Bugler
2010 Short Story Competition Winners
Visit www.blog.wordswithjam.co.uk
Subscriptions
The print version of the magazine is doing extremely well. If you want to receive a copy of the October issue through your letterbox instead of your inbox, visit www.wordswithjam.co.uk/paperissuesubscription for more information.
In addition, Words with JAM is not only available as a Kindle E-book, but also in a variety of other E-book formats through Smashwords.
Or there’s the good old fashioned free online copy.
Submissions
WIN a £500 General Critique by Cornerstones Literary Agency
Yes, that’s right, this month’s Comp Corner has one of the best prizes to date, and it’s absolutely FREE to enter.
Closing Date: 5th November 2011
Short Story Competition 2011
It’s that time again, our second annual Short Story Competition is now open for submissions, and this year we’ve bumped the first prize up to £500! What are we looking for: the best short story of up to 2,500 words. Stories can be any genre, but as we’re always on the lookout for the Best Short Story, we advise not sending bribes. They’re welcome, obviously, but we retain the right to keep them even if you don’t win.
1st Prize - £500
2nd Prize - £100
3rd Prize -
£50
Closing Date: 27th January 2012
Ask the Agent
Every issue, the best agents in the business will give us the view from the other side. Not only do you get insights, tips and expert advice, but YOUR questions will be answered personally.
Email jill@wordswithjam.co.uk
Reader Letters
We want to hear what you think of the magazine. The good, the bad, the ugly ... the good. Simply reply to this newsletter. We’ll be giving away a printed copy of the magazine to the editor’s favourite each issue (or a wine voucher/random book to those already a print subscriber).
Question Corner
Do you have layout issues, problematic characters, or struggle to get to grips with your grammar? Each issue, co-author of The Writer’s ABC Checklist, Lorraine Mace, answers your questions on writing: lorraine@wordswithjam.co.uk
NEW - Carver’s Couch
Sue Carver, consultant clinical psychologist and writer of fiction and poetry, has a keen interest in the psychological aspects of the creative writing process. She doesn’t entirely agree with Erica Jong that “all writing problems are psychological problems...”, but she would be happy to consider, from a psychologist’s perspective, any writing-related questions that you may like to pose.
Please email your questions to: editor@wordswithjam.co.uk with the subject heading Carver’s Couch.
Mentions
PS What I love about WWJ is that it’s so effing uninhibited. Okay, so I said effing instead of fucking, but you have to remember that I am a wrinkly.
By Nutmeg
(aka Mary)
From Facebook:
I’m reading right now. Brillant article by a Mr Zaltin, page 44. best thing in it IMHO. Susanne O’Leary
Perhaps I shouldn’t say this as a contributor but I think it’s another bloody marvellous edition. Well done. Sarah Bower
Another great issue. Well done to JDS and the rest of the team :o) Guy Saville
Oh it is ALWAYS the case. I get all excited - then get distracted and miss the big moment!!! Oh well - I can go and read the mag now at last :) Michele Poet
Thank you. Got my Kindle version. Tickled to see my John Lennon review in there. (((hugs))) Pam Howes
Twitter mentions:
Trish Nicholson @WordswithJAM It’s the cause of more burnt pans in this household than anything else!
Clair Humphries @WordswithJAM Looks great as ever, Jane :)
Trevor Belshaw: just found out I’ve won a priize in the @WordswithJAM last words competition. :) two wins today, my luck has definitely changed
Agnieszka’s Shoes - new on @wordswithjam - stunning podcast of poems that will rip your soul in two by @annacreates13 http://bit.ly/oJ3H06
If you wish to write in, please email me at editor@wordswithjam.co.uk. My favourite letter will receive a free print version of the issue.
December’s issue is all over the place – Literally …
For our second anniversary, World Literature is our theme and because we never do things by halves, guess who we’ve got on the cover?
Paulo Coelho, one of the biggest-selling and
best-loved authors in the world, talks exclusively to Words with JAM
about celebrity, deadly sins, feminine values, self-piracy
and
what it means to be a writer.
A Teenager’s Freedom to Read by Catriona Troth
No
one has the right to live without being shocked.
No one has the
right to spend their life without being offended.
Philip Pullman, March 2011
I can still remember the two books I read as a teenager that most disturbed me.
I had pretty much free rein over my parents’ bookshelves. They had an extensive collection of Penguins, Pelicans, Everyman’s Library, that sort of thing. But nothing I found trawling through those ever bothered me much – perhaps because if I ever stumbled on something that upset me, I simply put it back on the shelf and moved on. No, the two offending volumes were both on the school curriculum. So I had to plough on through regardless.
The first was I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Hannah Green (pen name of Joanne Greenberg), the semi-autobiographical novel of a teenager’s battle with mental illness. The young protagonist creates a fantasy world that (we slowly discover) was based on images from a book, and that fantasy world turns on her. As a fourteen year old whose own imaginary world was populated with any number of fantastical characters inspired by books, it scared the hell out of me.
The second, a couple of years later, was DH Lawrence’s Son and Lovers. I had already read Lady Chatterley (in my parents’ orange-and-buff Penguin original) and taken it more or less in my stride. But Sons and Lovers sideswiped me with a misogyny I wasn’t mature enough to dismiss.
I think what those experiences show is how hard it is to judge what any given teen may find unsettling. Finding books to suit a particular child is the result of a complicated mix of reading age, interests, maturity, experience – and, yes, values. The best parents can hope, when it comes to their own teens, is that we know them well enough to steer them – with the help of booksellers and librarians – towards books they are ready for. And to accept that occasionally we are going to get it wrong and be ready to talk things through with them when we do.
None of us should try to make that judgement for a generalised group of teens. But a few parents are trying to do just that.
Banned Books Week
A
word to the unwise.
Torch every book.
Char every page.
Burn
every word to ash.
Ideas are incombustible.
And therein lies
your real fear.
Ellen Hopkins, ‘Manifesto’
24th September to 1st October is Banned Books Week in the USA. Organised by the American Libraries Association, this has run annually since 1982 and is billed as a celebration of the freedom to read.
Every year in the US, several hundred books are ‘challenged’ – that is to say, a school or a library receives a formal written complaint – most often from a parent – requesting that a book be removed. The vast majority of these challenges affect books for children and – increasingly – for young adults. The reasons given include sexual content (33%), bad language(26%) and violence (11%).
Not all books that are challenged end up being taken off the shelves, but a fair few do. (I found it quite hard to find national statistics, but in Texas schools, for example, for every book challenged in 2009/10, about one in five was give some form of restricted access and one in four was removed altogether.) This means, in some instances, a book can be taken off the school curriculum in individual schools or school districts because of the objection of just one parent.
Judy Blume, in her 1999 introduction to Places I Never Meant to Be, dates the change in attitudes to the 1980 presidential election. For a decade before that, she says, she’d felt free to write pretty much what she pleased. But then “the censors crawled out of the woodwork, organised and determined.” She describes the moment when her own editor, who had always been completely supportive, circled a few lines in the manuscript of Tiger Eyes that referred to masturbation and made it clear that if she left those lines in, schools, libraries and book clubs would refuse to take the book. Blume took out the lines. “I still remember how alone I felt at that moment.”
Ellen Hopkins, author of Crank, the fourth most challenged book of 2010 and overall the most frequently challenged author this year, told me: “The current climate for YA fiction reflects the current climate in the U.S. especially. People are afraid. They’re afraid of real life, and so they are afraid to see it reflected in YA lit, especially contemporary YA.
“I don’t believe hiding behind pretty fiction will make the things we’re afraid of go away. Facing our fears head on is how we conquer them, and that goes for our children, too. Knowledge is never a bad thing. It keeps us from making mistakes. I believe the worst thing we can do for our children is to teach them to fear. Conquering fear is critical.”
It isn’t just the religious right that challenges books. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly challenged for its use of the word ‘nigger’. So much so that American professor Alan Gribben has produced a bowdlerised edition that replaces the word with ‘slave’. A recent Harris poll showed that a majority of Americans (including 60% of black Americans) oppose the change. But if it’s the only way to get the book past those who want it removed from classrooms altogether, it’s hard not to have a sneaking sympathy for Gribben.
Some challenges can seem very odd to European eyes. The most challenged book of 2010 – a place it has held for four of the past five years – was And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson. This is a picture book based on a true story from New York’s Central Park Zoo of two male penguins who together hatched an egg and raised a chick. The book has been repeatedly challenged and removed from schools and libraries for ‘promoting’ homosexuality.
Not Just Someone Else’s Problem
‘Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.’
JM Coetzee, ‘Giving Offence: Essays On Censorship’, 1994
Before those of us that live east of the Atlantic get too smug about all this, let us not forget the infamous ‘Clause 28’, enacted in the UK in 1988 and only repealed in 2003, which forbade local authorities to “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. One of the triggering factors for this legislation was an article in the Daily Mail in 1983, reporting that a copy of Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin - a fictional story about a little girl brought up by two gay men – had been found in a school library. Clause 28 led, at the very least, to a great deal of self-censorship by schools and other public bodies.
It is probably true to say that outright censorship has been less of an issue in the UK. I could only find one confirmed instance of a (church-based) school removing Harry Potter from their shelves because of ‘supernatural content’.
But don’t imagine that as a UK or European writer, the issue doesn’t affect you. Anne Rooney, a Cambridge based YA writer who had one of her own books removed from an elementary school in Texas last year, believes that writers elsewhere are being affected even before their books are published.
“Non-fiction publishers are more cautious than fiction publishers in my experience. Children’s non-fiction is illustrated, which is costly to produce. The publisher has to be sure they can sell into their targeted markets, which usually include the USA, or they can’t afford to publish the book at all.”
This can lead to publishers removing passages that might reduce sales in the US. Rooney, for instance, recently wrote something that included a case history of rape being used as a weapon in Libya. She had to remove information about charities providing abortions for pregnant rape victims because, even in that context, reference to abortion would damage the book’s prospects of being allowed in American schools.
With fiction, it is easier to target particular publishers who are more ‘liberal’ in their outlook. But all the same, authors need to pick their battles. Rooney is currently working on a series of edgy vampire stories which include a lot of violence and some sex. She has a publisher who is happy to work with that, but even so she’s had to cut out any swearing. “Realistic teen vocabulary is not deemed appropriate. There may be publicity value in having a book withdrawn because of controversial content – it can increase sales – but not in having it withdrawn because there is swearing in it.”
The number of book challenges has dropped over recent years (down to 348 last year from a peak of 762 in 1995) but Rooney doesn’t believe this is because the ‘freedom to read’ message is getting through. She suspect writers, especially non-fiction writers, are self-censoring more. “We know what is not going to get through and why make work for ourselves at the editing stage by including material that will be challenged?”
Seeing Yourself Between the Pages of a Book
Even if we don’t have the power to choose where we came from, we can still choose where we go from here.
Stephen
Chbosky:
The Perks of Being a Wall Flower.
A few months ago, writing about Pelican Post, I quoted Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talking about how important it is for young Africans to be able to read books that reflect their own experience. What is true for children in Africa is no less true for children growing up in troubled circumstances in the UK or the US or anywhere else in the world.
In an article in the Independent in the first days of the London riots, Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of the poverty action group, Kids Company, wrote:
“How, we ask, could they attack their own community with such disregard? But the young people would reply ‘easily’, because they feel they don’t actually belong to the community.”
She described working in areas where youth centre staff lock themselves in the office because disturbed young men dominate the space with their violent dogs. Where the estate stairwells are littered with condoms and needles. Where, on entering a lift, “the best outcome is that you will survive the urine stench and the worst is that you will be raped.”
Those who work with youngsters in areas like this – youngsters at risk of becoming gang members and petty criminals – say that the best time to reach them is before they are drawn into what Batmanghelidjh calls “their own parallel antisocial communities.” Before they decide that our communities have nothing to offer them.
Reading can only be a tiny part of the solution to a huge problem. But if the only books on offer reflect a safe and comfortable world that’s alien, then why read? And once kids are turned off reading, one of the principal ways to connect with the rest of the world is closed off.
In the US, censorship of books showing the sexual or violent reality of some kids’ lives may be parentally imposed. In the UK it is more likely to be the narrow strictures of the National Curriculum that prevent teachers from using such texts. Either way, this could be a disaster for children whose only encounter with books is in the classroom.
For those lucky enough not to grow up in such desperate circumstances, reading books that don’t hide away from these things can give a measure of compassion and understanding that we carry with us into adulthood.
Of course not all children are ready to read about brutal realities – or brutal fantasies that warn about still more brutal realities. For those children, let librarians, booksellers and wise parents steer them towards the wonderful body of YA literature that takes a gentler path.
Challenged Books - Two Reviews by the Library Cat
I couldn’t write an article about books for young adults without sampling some of the controversy for myself. So I raided the shelves of my teens (16 and 18 respectively and well able to choose their own reading matter) and came up with The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and The Perks of Being a Wall Flower by Stephen Chbosky.
One thing the two books have in common is that the authors have both sidestepped the obvious to give us a ‘war story’ narrated by a fifteen year old girl and a ‘relationships story’ narrated by a fifteen year old boy. As Joss Whedon knew when he created Buffy the Vampire Slayer, turning people’s expectations on their heads can give you a whole new way to explore old and well-worn paths.
The Hunger Games is set in a dystopian future. Our civilisation long since broken down in the face of some unspecified disaster and in its place we have twelve (once thirteen) districts ruled from The Capitol – an all-powerful eyrie somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Some seventy-five years ago, the Districts rebelled unsuccessfully against the Capitol. Now, while the citizens of the Capitol indulge in every sort of excess, the people of the Districts are little more than bond slaves, kept perpetually on the edge of starvation. As a yearly reminder of the futility of rebellion, each district is required to send two of its children to the Hunger Games, a form of reality television where 24 children are left to fight to the death.
Suzanne Collins describes herself as an ‘army brat’. Her father spent time in Vietnam, but he was also an historian and political scientist who made sure his children understood the stark realities of war. “It wasn’t enough to visit a battlefield,” she says in the interview at the end of the book, “we had to know why the battle occurred, how it played out, and the consequences.”
In her highly critical article about YA literature (‘A Darkness too Visible’, Wall Street Journal), Meghan Cox Gurdon described The Hunger Games as ‘hyper-violent’. I don’t find that an accurate description. There are violent incidents, certainly, and Collins does not shirk from describing them. But much of the writing is tender, focused on emotions rather than actions. No death in The Hunger Games is without consequence. No killing is without consequence for the killer.
If I had to choose between my child reading a book like this and reading one of those old fashioned ‘Boy’s Own’ style war stories, where war was glorified, the enemy dehumanised and the consequences of death and killing brushed aside, without question I would choose The Hunger Games.
Settling myself in a coffee shop to read The Perks of Being a Wall Flower, I was accosted by a young woman in her twenties. “I just had to tell you,” she said, “I think that’s the best book I’ve ever read.”
The book consists of a series of letters written over one school year to an anonymous recipient. At the start of the book, Charlie is 15 and about to go to high school. His best friend from middle school has just committed suicide, and he is lonely and struggling to understand. Over the course of the year, Charlie is introduced to great books by a sympathetic English teacher who recognises his potential, makes friends with a group of Seniors, plunges into a range of experiences, good and bad, and starts to come to terms with some dark secrets from his own childhood.
The book is pretty frank about both sex and drug use, and has met with opprobrium and praise in pretty much equal measure. Despite the bluntness of the language, the issues are handled with great sensitivity. Charlie is a deep thinker and through him we are constantly forced to question the morality of what he sees. But because we are right there in the thick of things with Charlie, the book doesn’t preach.
I probably wouldn’t have wanted my children reading Perks aged eleven or twelve. But even when I was fourteen or fifteen, I was aware that a lot of the things Charlie describes were going on. And if that was true in schools forty years ago, you can be sure it’s true now. However much us parents might wish it weren’t so, sooner or later kids are going to confront issues like, ‘is it okay for my boyfriend to hit me if he says he loves me’, and ‘how do I say no if I’m not ready for sex yet?’ (If you doubt it, read the article in the Guardian by Lizz Pearson, producer of last year’s BBC Radio 4 programme Teenage Kicks, about teenage girls facing sexual violence and abuse from boys their own age.)
Reading this book won’t guarantee teenagers will find the right answers, but it could certainly help.
Canada holds a similar event, called Freedom to Read Week, at the end of February. This year, Canadians were invited to ‘Free a Challenged Book’: to take a favourite from the list of challenged books and release it on Bookcrossing.
As big fans of Bookcrossing ourselves, Words with Jam thinks this is a great idea. Why not pick a banned book of your own and set it free? It doesn’t have to be from the ALA list. You can choose any book that has been banned at some point in its history. (If you want some ideas, take a look at http://www.banned-books.org.uk/) Then write and tell us what book you chose, why, and where you left it. We have a copy of The Hunger Games to give away for the best entry.
Library Closures Latest by Catriona Troth, the Library Cat
“The first and greatest difficulty in running a successful library is to get the right person as librarian. Too often, alas, one has to put up with someone whose only qualification is that they have the time to give to the work.”
WI member, Mary Close, 1919
I expected by now to be able to bring you the result of the Judicial Review into the Brent Library Closures. The hearing was in July and the judge’s decision was due in August but has now been deferred until October.
Mr Justice Ouseley is probably taking his time because he’s only too well aware of how much rides on his decision. Shortly after the hearing ended, a row broke out that threatened to split campaigners from different areas. One of the planks of the Brent protestors’ argument was that the Council had rejected proposals to allow volunteers to run the libraries as an alternative to closure. Some other protest groups felt this undermined their argument for a council run, professionally staffed library service.
The fact that the Brent case is the first to be heard – and thus the judge’s decision will establish a precedent – makes this an incredibly sensitive issue. There are places around the country where local residents believe that they have the resources and expertise to take over threatened libraries from councils, and would rather do that than lose their libraries altogether. Other areas, for good reason, don’t want the so-called ‘Buckinghamshire model’ foisted on them by Councils anxious to shed the costs of running libraries.
In different circumstances, both positions may be valid. But echoing the concerns of her predecessor from 90 years ago (when local authorities refused to set up libraries in rural villages), WI chair Ruth Bond* said recently, “Whilst volunteers have an important role to play, they should not be a replacement for a trained, professional library service, and local communities have real concerns about their assumed ability to take on the running of local libraries, particularly around their ability to raise sufficient funds to keep library premises running and replenish book stocks.”
(*See The Bookseller, 16th September, 2011)
If things weren’t already complicate enough, Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, is due to announce shortly whether he will hold an inquiry into closures in Brent, as requested by the protestors under the terms of the 1964 Museums and Libraries Act. The judicial reviews for Gloucestershire and Somerset are due to be heard in September. (The Isle of Wight’s request for a judicial review was turned down in July on the grounds that protestors had taken too long to submit their claim.)
Meanwhile, Arts Council England, which is taking over the role of the Museums and Libraries Authority (with a budget of £3M as opposed to the MLA’s £13M) has produced its first library strategy document: Culture, Knowledge and Understanding: Great Museums and Libraries for Everyone.
And Amazon has announced its first foray into book lending. Available at first only in the US, this would allow users who pay an annual fee to have access to a library of ebooks.
How far do you have to go to find a book these days?
Council-run library services around the country are already being lost and a patchwork of alternatives are starting to appear.
New Cross Library, closed by Lewisham council on 28th of May, reopened on 10th of August as the New Cross People’s Library. It is run by volunteers and opens three days a week. Currently they have a six week tenancy, but they are hoping that if this trial period is successful and they can raise enough money, they can open the library permanently. But it’s a tall order - they estimate the cost at £41k.
Four other libraries in Lewisham are now run as ‘community libraries’, one by Age Concern and three by the not-for-profit company Eco Computer Systems, whom I wrote about back in January.
In Buckinghamshire, schemes for three more libraries to be taken over by volunteers have been approved by the council (a process which one town councillor described as ‘like swimming in treacle’) and there are probably another four in the pipeline. One library in Somerset and one in Wiltshire have become volunteer run in the last few months. And Wandsworth and Croydon Councils have confirmed that they are considering jointly tendering for an outside company to run their library services.
According to the website http://www.publiclibrariesnews.com, since 1st April, 5 library buildings and 31 mobile libraries have closed, with another 430 remaining under threat. They also note the strange new phenomenon of councils like Cambridge and the Isle of Wight referring to libraries with paid professional staff behind the counter as ‘Libraries Extra’.
And it’s not only libraries that are closing. The Telegraph recently drew attention to the rate at which bookshops are closing, leaving some areas without any bricks-and-mortar source of books. In the UK, almost 2000 have closed since 2005. Last year, the Bookseller estimated that independent bookshops were closing at a rate of two a week. There are apparently now 580 towns in the country without a bookshop.
The last bookshop in Southwold, a north Suffolk town with its own annual literary festival, closed in September. A year ago it still had three. Its library was originally one of 29 in the county slated to be closed, but Suffolk Council has now said that none of its libraries will close and that alternative means will be found for running the service.
Toronto fights the cuts too
The UK isn’t the only place battling library closures. In Toronto, where city councillor Doug Ford stated back in February that they would ‘outsource everything that isn’t nailed down,’ a consultant’s report recommended massive cuts including ‘rationalising the footprint’ of libraries, which means reducing service levels, cutting hours and days of operations and closing some branches. Unions say that the cuts recommended amount to 20% of the library budget.
Ford, who seems to have a knack for a memorable sound bite, also said during the consultation process that Toronto had ‘too many libraries’ and claimed (wrongly) that one district had ‘more libraries than Tim Horton’s coffee shops.’ But according to a recent poll, three quarters of Toronto residents are against closures, and almost as many are against privatisation.
Torontonians make exceptionally good use of their libraries. (According to the 2010 annual report, Toronto’s public libraries have the highest circulation per capita of any comparably sized system in the world.) And they don’t want to lose them. In a protest action spearheaded by Margaret Atwood, they recently flooded councillors’ offices with messages opposing the cuts and overloaded the website hosting an online petition.
The library workers union sponsored a Why My Library Matters essay competition for adults and children. Eleven Toronto authors, including Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, volunteered themselves as prizes. They’ll each take a small group of prize winners on a literary tour of Toronto, followed by lunch at a restaurant of the author’s choosing. (Sadly, the competition was only open to Toronto residents!)
And it seems that the city council is listening. A few days ago it was announced that there would be no library closures in Toronto – at least not in 2012. But there is no permanent reprieve, and the library service must still find ways of cutting ten per cent of its budget.
I have a feeling they won’t have silenced Margaret Atwood just yet.
Jasper Fforde - an interview with Danny Gillan
A world where books and literature are accorded the status we accord rock music and football is probably a secret fantasy of most writers. Is that where the parallel universe in the Thursday Next novels began? How did you decide where else your parallel universe would depart from ours?
The existence of this world came about through necessity. I wanted Thursday Next to be the person she is and do the things she does but she didn’t really fit into the way we did things in our world. Instead of modifying her to fit in with us I thought I would modify our world to fit in with her. It started simply enough with everyone having an increased interest in things literary but her world grew even weirder every day and before I knew it I had 30 different SpecOps divisions policing everything from recapturing werewolves to looking after ripples in Spacetime. I had the Crimean war still raging, an all-powerful Goliath Corporation, Czarist Russia; reverse engineered pet dodos and Wales a Socialist Republic. It’s a bit like eating Pringles - difficult once started to be able to stop. Whenever I thought up a bizarre idea, I simply adapted our world to suit it. I describe Thursday’s world as ‘Like ours, only more so.”