Fire up the klaxons, friends: My new podcast, I’m With the Banned, has launched! This is a project I’ve been thinking about, considering, chewing on, mulling, deliberating, brooding over, contemplating, planning, dumping, killing, resurrecting, poking, nattering on about, and generally obsessing over for a year and change. And now, the debut is here. You can listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify today.
But what’s this here “podcast” about, son?
I’m With the Banned is devoted to examining American censorship through interviews with writers, readers, librarians, teachers, organizers, library advocates, young people, and any other fine folks who have something to say about it. I have a long list of guests scheduled, episodes about the stories of censorship incidents you might not know about planned, and more that I’ll cover during the upcoming year.
Each episode will feature part of a song by a Midwestern indie band or musician I like and hope you’ll enjoy. Just because.
Please consider subscribing to I’m With the Banned on Apple Podcasts or follow the show on Spotify. And when you do, please rate and review it where possible. They say it helps the show reach a wider audience.
Episode one: Jessie Ann Foley
My first episode features an interview with Jessie Ann Foley. Jessie is the author of the excellent YA novels, Sorry For Your Loss, You Know I’m No Good, Neighborhood Girls, and her first book, The Carnival at Bray. Since 2021, The Carnival at Bray has been challenged and sometimes banned from school districts in Tennessee, Iowa, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida for what its would-be censors claim is “sexually inappropriate” and “graphic” content.
The Carnival at Bray is a beautifully written, wrenching, and touching novel about a teenager named Maggie coming of age in 1993 and early 1994 after leaving Chicago for Ireland with her mom and her mom’s new husband. Maggie wrestles with loneliness, first love, and grief, and embarks on a forbidden pilgrimage to fulfill a dying wish.
The book won a Michael L. Printz Honor for “outstanding literary merit” from the American Library Association, received a starred review in Kirkus, in which they called it “powerfully evocative,” and was a finalist for the William C. Morris Award.
It’s one of my favorite YA books. I highly recommend you buy a copy now.
The Carnival at Bray is one of hundreds of books included on a handful of lists passed around by pro-censorship groups whose aim is to get those titles yanked from school and public library shelves in the name of “parents rights.” Often, the panicked individuals who object to the content of the books on these lists don’t have standing (i.e. they don’t have a child attending school in the district), haven’t read a single title on the lists (even as they file wholesale-removal requests), are funded by right-wing PACs, and/or represent a tiny minority of citizens. But because many school boards across the country have been captured by sympathetic and like-minded ideologues, many recent book challenges have been successful.
Despite public outrage, the censorship plague in our schools and communities is only worsening.
Against this backdrop, Jessie and I discuss her experiences defending Carnival over the last few years, which public comment about her book shocked her the most during one of the school board hearings she’s observed, the recent re-release of The Carnival at Bray, and her belief in the importance of complexity in literature and in life.
Go ahead and give it a listen.
You can purchase any of Jessie Ann Foley’s books here or wherever you like to get your books.
You can follow Jessie on Instagram for news and updates.
Other works mentioned and cited during this episode:
Boyle, T. Coraghessan. “Chixcalub.” Tooth and Claw. New York: Viking, 2005. Print.
Orenstein, Peggy. Boys & Sex : Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity. N.p., 2020. Print.
Orenstein, Peggy. Girls & Sex : Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. First edition. New York, NY: Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2016. Print.
And now…some words of thanks
Thank you, thank you, thank you to those of you who have chosen to support this Substack at the paying level. Your contributions will allow me to keep this newsletter and the podcast free and available to all readers and listeners, regardless of their ability to pay. Information, news, and analysis should be free and/or reasonably affordable in times of crises (i.e. now). Unfortunately, the many crises besetting our country and the world have been partially precipitated by firewalls, lack of access to trustworthy news and information, the decline of newsprint, and the rise of free-seeming, actually hugely-costly, manipulative social media sites that spread disinformation as freely as milkweed pods do when they burst open in the fall and send their silky, quiet seeds adrift on the wind to near and distant yards, fields, and forests. But unlike milkweed seeds, mis- and disinformation don’t land in the soil to create a plant that’s crucial to our ecosystem, they don’t provide food for important creatures like monarch butterflies and their tiny kin. No, as toxic information slops into the soil of our heads and our hearts, we all suffer. And that includes the butterflies.
Thankfully, we still have public libraries and conscientious folks like you who support independent media. I hope this site and the podcast can counteract, if even in a tiny way, some of what we’re all up against.
Thank you.
Thank you also to everyone who has subscribed, period. Your support and interest will keep me going instead of crawling into a cocoon and re-watching cult documentaries I don’t need to watch again. Thank you.
Finally, if you’ve wondered where I’ve been, I’ve been sick! As a lifelong asthma sufferer, the month of May, with its new grasses and cottonwood motes and dudes with their leaf blowers blasting fragments of moldy leaves and dust into the air, has always been brutal on my lungs. I have many memories of visiting the ER as a kid in late May and missing the final days of school because the allergens in the air had activated my asthma, which then transmuted into a bronchitis that would not take its damn leave for weeks, sometimes not until my pediatrician gave me a shot of adrenaline. (Yes, really, like in Pulp Fiction, except he would jab the needle in my arm, not my heart. Those shots caused a real alien feeling afterwards, sort of like I was floating up above myself, like I was made of rubber, and also like I could recite the Declaration of Independence, drum along to all my favorite Primus songs without missing a beat, and host a talk radio show, all at once). Unfortunately, this May/June was no different. After three doctor’s visits and two rounds of steroids, I’m better. Thank you for your patience.