Inspiration, Prompts from Great Novels
Carrie is 50, the Comstock Act, School librarian week, and book censorship news
Carrie is 50!
It feels like the big book news of the week is that Stephen King’s Carrie is 50. King is something of a wonder—a writer who nearly tossed that first manuscript became a bestseller, continued to work like a horse, got better and better and has lived a charmed writing life ever since. Money, movies, recognition, and the freedom to say whatever the hell he wants on Twitter. Every writer’s dream, I imagine.
I’m old, so I read Carrie as a junior high school student when it came out. It scared the shit out of me. I saw the movie; Sissy Spacek was the first movie star I admired. This opinion piece in the NYT by Amanda Jayatissa is pertinent to the moment: female victims are still blamed and experiencing rage.
I believe we still too often look at women who fight back against their oppressors and see them as villains rather than assigning responsibility for their situations to the people who tormented them. Carrie has always been the antidote to that predicament: She forces us to confront our feelings about what happens when women instill some of the same fear in others that they are too often forced to deal with themselves. Carrie’s plight still speaks to feelings in women of rage, helplessness and a desire for justice or, failing that, retribution. None of that has gone away in 50 years.
Book Games
Electric Literature had a March Sadness Tournament. This link includes a graphic of all the match ups and the winning book for saddest.
The Comstock Act
The Washington Post’s Book Club, Ron Charles’s newsletter of book reviews and recommendations, is a favorite of mine. Since it’s a newsletter, I can’t provide a clickable link (I tried and failed), but I want to share one bit that struck me this week. We’ve all been hearing that the Comstock Act might be used to keep abortion pills out of the hands of women. I hadn’t thought of it being used to keep books out of all our hands. While this seems wild, considering Supreme Court ruling in the last few years, Charles makes it seem like a possibility:
Depending on how courts rule in the next few months, the Comstock Act could rise from its ashes and start burning down Americans’ civil rights (editorial). At the moment, access to abortion and the Republicans’ next target — birth control — are of primary concern. But the Puritanical old relic could spark collateral damage beyond reproductive health.
Consider that the Comstock law refers to “every paper, writing, advertisement, or representation that any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing may, or can, be used or applied for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose” (emphasis added). The edges of that legal cavern are so slippery and so murky that just about any written work could be shoved into the flames.
Today, First Amendment protection for books may look rock solid — and unrelated to the abortion cases — but we’ve seen how easily long-established rights and precedents can be flicked away by theocratic judges viewing their fantasies through the kaleidoscope of Original Intent.
Recommendation
’s Publishing Confidential is well worth recommending for her insights on what’s happening in the publishing world and how publishers could (and should) update their practices. If you’re a writer, I imagine you are subscribing. So while I recommend Schmidt’s Substack, I also want to recommend what she did this week: add a personal essay on a different topic. I loved the way this made me relate to her! I think I will add some personal essays to my site in the near future. I hope to read yours. Here’s hers:
Inspiration/writing prompts from beautiful sentences
I was reminded this week that I love using lines from novels for prompts when I read Fruit of the Dead. Such a great book for so many reasons—setting, characterization, mythological references, current issues, and elegant sentences. I think this sentence is one that opens the floodgate to memories.
A daydream knocks on the open door of her mind.— Rachel Lyon, Fruit of the Dead
Here’s one from Miriam Toews, Women Talking:
We are wasting time, pleads Greta, by passing this burden, this sack of stones, from one to the next, by pushing our pain away. We mustn’t do this. We mustn’t play Hot Potato with our pain, Let’s absorb it ourselves, each of us, she says. Let’s inhale it, let’s digest it, let’s process it into fuel.
Do you have favorite lines from novels that have fueled your writing sessions? (These two come to mind when I think about Carrie.)
School Librarians’ Week concludes
We are coming to the end of School Librarians’ Week, so here’s another quote from Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows
Yoli, she said, I’m just saying that apologies aren’t the bedrock of civilized society. All right! I agree. But what is the bedrock of civilized society? Libraries, said Elf.
And here’s a cool tribute from Renée Graef.
Book Censorship News
Author Julia Alvarez on book bans and her latest work
Two of Alvarez's novels — the coming-of-age tale "How the García Girls Lost their Accents" and the historical fiction "In the Time of the Butterflies," about the sisters who helped topple Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo — have at different points been banned, removed from reading lists or contested in schools over mentions of sex.
(PS— a good book for tweens by Alvarez is Before We Were Free (this is a link to my review).
Teachers Are Fighting Book Bans and Unjust Firings in Courts and State Houses
Banned books make up the sophomore English curriculum at this NYC high school
PEN Report on Florida: Our new white paper, Cracks in the Facade, shows how a groundswell of activism has helped the fight against these unpopular and nakedly discriminatory and censorial bills
Idaho Legislature passes bill requiring Idaho libraries move ‘harmful materials’
Sen. Mary Shea, substituting for Sen. James Ruchti, D-Pocatello, said the bill “invites mischief and grift.”
“It would be very easy to put a book you don’t like in the wrong place in the library just to file a lawsuit about it,” Shea said.
Sexual Assault Awareness Month & Book Banning: Book Censorship News, April 5, 2024
During the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent period for which we have an entire school year’s worth of data, PEN America found that the most commonly banned books in public schools across America were no longer books by or about people of color or LGBTQ+ people. The most commonly banned books in American schools were those that explored themes of violence and physical abuse (48%). Of those 48%, over half include instances of sexual assault.
In other words, 25% of all books banned in America being about sexual assault.
Student Voice: What young people can do about book bans (by a Texas high school student)
What I’m Reading
As mentioned above, I finished Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon. I can’t say enough about how much I loved it.
I read Death Valley by Melissa Broder. A quick read about a woman’s hallucinatory grief journey while she is lost in the desert—the actual Death Valley of California and the Death Valley inhabiting her. Good read, gave me new insights into my motto “Be a Cactus.”
I just started The Immortal Irishman: the Irish revolutionary who became an American hero by Timothy Egan. (I’ve written summaries of several books on Irish myths, legends, etc. If anyone out there is interested in Irish cultural, I can link or post them on this Substack.)
I really enjoyed this update and especially the reading of Carrie - I'd never considered it in that way before, despite watching it as a very angsty teenager. God knows I feel there's a lot of rage under my surface that I've been conditioned to suppress.
Also I see your beautiful prompts and raise you a new subcategory: prompts via first-lines of books. The two which immediately come to mind: 'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents' from Little Women & 'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink' from I Capture the Castle.
l appreciate your updates a great deal! l consider this such a valuable topic, and l always get information here that l doubt l would have seen otherwise. I appreciated the personal essay you included as well. Thanks, Victoria!