>>FEATURE
Chris Crutcher
Wednesday, March 1 at 7 p.m.
McNally Robinson
Chris Crutcher is no stranger to censorship. The author and therapist – here for Freedom to Read Week, where his new book, The Sledding Hill, will be presented to city council – has had his books challenged since his first novel, Running Loose, was published in 1982.
His books detailing teen life have been attacked for their language and sexuality. "My experiences in the recent past have been with challenges made to Whale Talk and Athletic Shorts," says Crutcher. "A couple of the stories have characters that are gay, and any place with fundamentalist Christian groups won’t touch those issues."
The Sledding Hill hasn’t taken many hits yet – the book’s content, detailing the atmosphere and processes by which a book gets banned, is the real controversy. "I purposely put no bad words in it, so if they want to challenge it, it will have to be about the content," says Crutcher.
It’s frightening to think that such challenges to literature still occur. "I think it’s in as precarious a position as it has been in a long time," says Crutcher. "When the air cleared after the ‘60s, we had come to a better place where people knew about free speech. The whole conservative thing here has changed after the second Bush campaign. In places where you get banned, people don’t stand up to it, even if they don’t want to see it happen. Even librarians don’t want the fight, saying it’s not about banning books, but which ones should be banned."
Advocates of free speech will be incensed with the actions taken against authors like Crutcher, but teaching kids about these issues is equally important.
"Kids don’t like people taking stuff away from them. If it goes on, it’ll define what freedom is, put us in a place where we can’t talk to kids," he says. "If we don’t want to talk to them in books, then we don’t want to in life, either."
Events like Freedom to Read Week help to raise public awareness and encourage dialogue between parents and their children. "There’s a personal value to reading good stories, an intimacy with certain books you encounter that acts almost like a therapy session," says Crutcher. "There’s a real danger of people taking that away, because they’re afraid. Stories are one of those things that break things loose in a safe way." |
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