Episode Zero: Introducing Liberating Lit
Welcome to Liberating Lit, a podcast about the advocates doing the work of promoting literature. In an era of ever-increasing book bans, talking with those doing the work on the ground matters. This podcast aims to learn what inspires these advocates and what keeps them going, with the goal of helping inspire new advocates and refill the cups of those who’ve been looking to rekindle their spirits.
This is episode zero, where you’ll get to hear a little bit about my own journey with censorship and advocacy.
Show Notes:
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Transcript:
Welcome!
I’m really excited to share this limited-run podcast series as a means of both preserving and archiving the voices and stories of a wide array of pro-literacy, pro-library advocates across the United States and a means of inspiring new people into advocacy, while also refilling the cups of advocates looking to remember their spark.
This podcast was inspired by the United to Read Project’s Advocacy Institute, and it’s the product of my own lifetime of thinking about, understanding, and engaging in advocacy. As someone who believes in the power of the record–including and especially archiving the stories, voices, and work being done to build an accessible public history of this moment–this show is one piece of the kind of advocacy work I’ve engaged in my entire adult life. I believe in writing, the power of the word, and the power of storytelling. If we don’t tell our stories, someone else will. If we don’t record our history as it happens, someone else will.
My own history with advocacy–and with censorship–began early. My junior year of high school, I wrote a story for my high school paper. We’d just had a major shift in how the district educated students; instead of two two-year high schools, we split into two four-year schools. My class went to school with hundreds of our peers freshman and sophomore year, only to be separated from them junior year. The story I wrote for the paper was about how students felt about the split. Some were enthusiastic–there were more opportunities for student involvement in activities, clubs, and sports. Classes were smaller! There was so much more room in the school building. But many more were less than thrilled–two years of being around some of our peers ended abruptly, and many were unhappy about the new colors and mascot for the school (which in retrospect feels small, but at the time, absolutely not small because symbolism is important). The piece I wrote was reviewed by administration, as was the way of the student paper thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier.
The administration who read my story did not like it. That person thought it wasn’t positive enough, and given the stakes of the school split, we should be promoting how great this fresh start was. My journalism teacher gave me two options: make edits to the piece or pull it.
I hemmed and hawed.
Then I realized whatever I wrote instead of what I turned in wouldn’t be true. It wouldn’t be authentic to the work I did.
I pulled the piece.
That’s always stuck with me, and it happened at another critical juncture in my life as a teen. I’d just discovered that one of the local libraries was developing a Young Adult section. This wasn’t MY local library, but it was one local to me–and one I’d end up working at later that school year. I discovered Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak in that YA collection, and that book rattled something inside me.
Speaking up, using my voice: it mattered.
Living the experience of being censored and watching a teen girl my age struggle to find her own voice coalesced at that critical moment in my life, and it fired me up. I’d spend significant time in college working on issues related to censorship. I was a writer and editor for the school paper, and I worked in the college library, where I did an internship as I thought about going into librarianship as a career. My advisor crafted a book censorship project for me, and I spent that internship diving deep into the history and contemporary challenges of literary censorship; it bled into my senior English major capstone project, wherein a group project focused on the reality of children’s literature censorship. Why were books for young readers targeted so frequently? Why did children lose the right to speak and/or access to materials that spoke to them, in age-appropriate ways?
The rest, as they say, was history.
Working as a librarian exposed me to where and how people challenge books. I was lucky to experience one innocuous challenge–a letter slipped in an audiobook about age-appropriateness of the story–but less lucky to have an experience that forever changed how I thought about how isolating experiencing a challenge could be. My boss received a complaint about a middle grade graphic novel, and rather than bring it to me with support, she told me she agreed with the complaint.
I did not.
The complaint was about an image in the book where the tween protagonist experiences an erection, and it’s only visible through the costume he’s wearing. The complaint? This was age-inappropriate. My boss? She agreed.
I slipped the book in a pile on my desk for a week, and then I put it right back on the shelf. A book written for middle grade readers with a harmless image–one that mirrors an experience tween readers may themselves experience regularly–it wasn’t ban-worthy. It didn’t need to be censored.
What that experience taught me was that sometimes people whose job it is to defend the right to read simply don’t. Sometimes, you’re going to feel like you’re the one in the wrong, despite being the one absolutely in the right, with facts, figures, and stellar reviews to point to as to why a book belongs on the public library shelf.
I realized I never wanted anyone to feel that way. I want to support and encourage literary and library advocates to do what’s right and remind them that the work is not only worth it, but it’s the job. Defending the right to read is part and parcel of being a library worker.
And it’s part and parcel of being a literary advocate, period.
Advocacy isn’t limited to the library. It’s not limited to a building or a particular way of doing something. There are certainly ways advocacy works better in any given moment, but advocacy matters because the work being done is done by people with passion to DO something–and DOING something, no matter how small it may seem, is hard. It’s a challenge. It’s often lonely or isolating.
But it doesn’t have to be, especially as we build community and coalitions around shared passions and beliefs.
Liberating Lit aims to bring interesting people doing interesting things together over the work of literary and library advocacy. It’s a podcast about book bans and censorship, as much as it’s a podcast about being creative, navigating mental health challenges, and building capacity to continue doing the work–and not just surviving the work, but finding joy and love in it, too.
I’ve returned to Speak again and again and again. It’s the text that has changed my life each time I’ve visited it, and it remains one of the books that I cite as one that’s helped sustain my own advocacy work.
Between finding solace in literature, though, I’ve found incredible support through watching, sharing, and engaging with the work being done by others across the country. I’m excited and honored to bring those voices and stories together in this podcast. You’ll hear from familiar names–and perhaps on topics you don’t expect–and you’ll also be introduced to literacy champions who will be new to you. These are people doing work on a global scale, as much as people doing work in their own schools or communities that has incredible and life-altering impact.
The first season will drop every week for 10 weeks. The second season will hit your ears in early 2027. This two-season project is not intended to be comprehensive–no project can ever be–but it aims to be as expansive, as interesting, and as inspiring as possible. Feel bolstered and supported as a listener and know every single one of these advocates in Liberating Lit are excited to help light the match that gets you going, as much as they’re excited to rekindle the spark when times get tough.
