I love Pennsylvania. Almost every book I've written has been set here in my home state. Most in Erie, but I've written books set in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, too. I really love my state, but Pennsylvania's kids deserve better than being in the top ten of book banning states.
In 2022 a couple PA kids testified in front of the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee. Christina Ellis a senior at Central York (PA) High School
“Sadly enough, I spent the majority of my K-12 schooling, straightening my hair, so I wouldn’t stand out. I wanted to blend in and not be different. Books that highlight our differences and teach others how to address diversity are crucial. These books shouldn’t be up for debate.” That's just it. But more than that, books highlight our differences and point out our similarities.
I wrote a scene in Crib Notes about a secondary character, Cessy Keller's essay:
<<My family, by Cecily Keller.
When I was in fourth grade, our class made cards for our families for Thanksgiving. We traced our hands and turned them into construction paper turkeys. After school, I ran out and gave mine to my mom when Leslie, a girl in my class, came up and said, ‘You’re supposed to give it to your mom.’ I was confused and told her this was my mom, and she said it couldn’t be ’cause we didn’t match. Until that moment, I don’t think I ever thought that way about my family.
Oh, I knew my brother Zac always called me cocoa because my skin is the color of chocolate, and there was no way to miss that Mom is as pale as a white person can get. But I never saw those differences.
After that, I did. I noticed the looks my family got when we went out together. None of us are alike. We have brown hair, black, reddish-brown and blond. Some of us are very tall, a few are vertically challenged.
When I was ten, we all went to Disney World and Mom made us wear matching T-shirts that proudly proclaimed The Kellers. We got looks there, too.
The fact that we all were so very different made us stand out, and any school kid will tell you that standing out can be a problem. So I hoped no one would notice.
The Kellers took me home weeks after I was born. I have biological parents, but I never knew them. Then when I was five, my biological father took me back. I still remember that day. My whole family stood on the porch as the social worker led me away to her car. I didn’t understand what was going on. My mom had told me that I was going to live with my real dad, but I felt that my real father was the man on the porch physically holding my brother Zac, who was struggling to get to me. I was only five and I knew who my family was. The stranger the state decided should have custody was nothing to me. The six months he kept me were bad. I don’t talk about them. But they taught me something.
Before, I wanted to hide how different my family was, but then I figured out that biology might determine your skin and hair color, it might determine if you’re tall or short, but it’s your family that makes up your heart. It’s your family that makes you whole, the person you really are.
I took my family to school later that year for show-and-tell. Though in fourth grade we’d really outgrown the tradition, Mom stood by me and my entire family showed up and let me introduce them to my class. And I told all those kids that my family didn’t match on the outside, that we never would, but we matched on the inside and that’s all that counts.
And that’s what family means to me.>>
That one scene sums up my feelings on diversity. We're all different but it's what's inside that counts. Those differences allows us to see the world from unique perspectives. And those perspectives...they're what books can give us. We can literally walk a mile in someone else's shoes. I've lived hundreds of lives...okay, who am I kidding? I've lived thousands of lives.
I grew up a reader. One of my first school book fairs, I found a biography of Helen Keller. I was awed by her courage and fortitude. I read The Hobbit for the first time in third grade. I suspect it was way over my head, but I remember that riddle scene between Bilbo and Gollum. A year or so down the pike, a teacher asked me to read something from the book to the class. That was the scene.
I read. And I read. I suspect I read books that someone somewhere would want to ban. Wants to ban now. I did my first research paper on World War II. I read bits of Mein Kampf. I know I quoted it in the report. And I know that report taught me in a most down-to-my-marrow way about the horrors of the concentration camps and the people who ran them. The diseased minds that fomented that kind of hate. Those minds are still out there trying to create divisions. Reading books, living all those other lives is a sort of inoculation against that kind of hate.
For years, I was the kindergarten story lady at my kids' school. I read the five-year-olds the books I'd read to my own kids. I sang them the songs I sang with my kids. (
You do not have to have a great voice to entertain kids.)
Those years with the kindergarten classes meant the world to me. I wrote about them in
Carry Her Heart:
<<I’d been the story time lady for the younger grades for years. Generally kindergarten, but sometimes through second grade. I read stories, sang songs, and basically had a wonderful time with them. My singing voice is less than stage quality, but the wonderful thing about young kids is, they don’t care. Rumor has it, I sing a mean rendition of “I Have a Rooster,” and don’t even get me started on my expertise with “Up on the Housetop” at Christmas.
I would not sing around the older students because I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be as forgiving as the kindergarteners.>>
Kids. I realized then that kids need stories. They need to find themselves in books and conversely walk those miles in other people's shoes. They need to see the world from different points of view and conversely they need to see themselves in those fictional characters.
That's what book banning tries to take away. It diminishes our kids' lives. Rather than giving them the world, book-banners want to narrow their world.
I was blessed to have teachers who encouraged my love of reading. I was just talking to a school friend about Miss Mac. She was tough and but man did she make the world a bigger place for all of us. And the librarians on my book mobile, who found out I loved sci fi/fantasy books and would tuck up books for me. They gave me books I might not have picked up on my own...they gave me the world. Right now, some states and school districts are trying to take away their ability to do that for this generation of kids. There was a picture of empty class room book shelves in Florida. That hurt my heart.
Someone posted a meme on my page that said, The good guys are never the ones who ban books.
That's the truth of it.
Read. Read everything. And if someone tells you not to read something, definitely read that!
I'm working on a different story right now. One that focuses on the magic of books. That's what they are...magic. They transform us...if we have access to them.
Holly
Quotes that impacted me:
"Pennsylvania is second on a recently published list of states with the highest number of banned books. Across the state, there are a staggering 456 bans across nine districts. Plus, the school district with the most bans across the nation can be found in the Midstate." ~Lauren Rude, ABC 27
"In that nine-month period, PEN America lists 1,586 instances of individual books banned across the nation, affecting 1,145 unique book titles, 874 different authors, 198 illustrators, and nine translators. The bans come from 86 school districts, representing 2,899 schools, in 26 different states." ~Lauren Rude, ABC 27
“Most books being targeted for censorship are books that introduce ideas about diversity or our common humanity, books that teach children to recognize and respect humanity in one another,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland .
“I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s both the number of challenges and the kinds of challenges. It used to be a parent had learned about a given book and had an issue with it. Now we see campaigns where organizations are compiling lists of books, without necessarily reading or even looking at them.” ~Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom
“Librarians urge everyone to take a minute to consider why a book or resource makes us uncomfortable, what it might be trying to teach us and what we are resisting to learn. While we are willing to fight, and those fights are always worth it, they take time. They take energy, and most importantly, they remove us from our students, from our classes and from our libraries.” ~Samantha Hull a librarian in Lancaster County, PA. “Administrators have made hasty decisions, school board members have jumped to conclusions based on out of context excerpts, and librarians scrambled to play catch up to fight for our students’ rights.When books are removed, communities lose the voice that that book represents.”
More Articles to Read:
abc27
Pen America
Smithsonian Magazine
Top Ten Most Challenged Books, ALA
2 students who helped reverse their high school's book ban
I’m a teacher in Florida. Here’s what the DeSantis book bans look like in my classroom.
More Than 1,500 Books Have Been Banned in Public Schools, and a U.S. House Panel Asks Why
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I just got back from a northern, mid-state weekend. We did a lot of hiking and touring in the rain. But as my grandmother used to tell me, I'm not sugar, so I didn't melt. If you haven't been following me on Social Media, my daughter and I are trying to visit all of PA's 123 State Parks. So we rented a house last weekend and, despite the rain, we had a blast visiting nearby parks. We were sad we didn't get to enjoy star-gazing at Cherry Springs State Park. But we're planning to go again someday soon!
It really was a great time. I'm keeping track of the parks with this cool PA State Park board!
might think that talking about Pennsylvania doesn't really have anything to do with Sweet Success, but since most of the books I write are set in the state, even more specifically in my favorite city, Erie, it does!
