I want to thank everyone who joined us this past Saturday morning for the Grand Canyon  Sisters in Crimes panel on Self Editing. It was a lot of fun, especially hanging out with Christine Estes, Susan Budavari, Denise Forsythe,  Yvonne Corrigan-Carr and other board members.  As usual, I had much to say and I believe there is a transcript of the panel available. They’re headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona and do SO much to help writers get published and sell their books. I cannot recommend this organization enough. Here’s a link to their doings–they’ve got a bunch of opportunities coming up.

This January finds me thinking a lot about my contributions to our complicated world. I plan to shine more light on the whole damnable and corrosive horror of banning books.  In a country with a First Amendment that affirms our rights to free expression. An insightful and delightful resource for learning about banned books is Ali Velshi’s Banned Book Club on MSBNC. He’s on Saturday and Sunday mornings and his penetrating analysis of the books featured, author interviews, and deep perspective about the role of books in our lives is invaluable.

Here is a link to the episode.

It’s also streaming on Peacock. You can also listen to his show via the podcast.

On January 11, Velshi  featured Ray Bradbury –one of my writing heroes–and his iconic novel Fahrenheit 451. Ironically, a novel about the dangers of book banning.  The segments that were highlighted were poignant and important and Lois Lowry  author of The Giver (another banned book worth reading) and Professor  Jason Stanley, of Yale discussed the implications of censorship in that the particular story. As Bradbury said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

And did you study Fahrenheit 451 in school?  In the Banned Book Club segment Velshi mentioned that Bradbury died in 2012 at 91 and wrote every day of his life since he was 12. No wonder he wrote 27  novels and 600-some short stories.

Here is Fahrenheit 451’s opening paragraph: It was a pleasure to burn. It was a pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blacken and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with the great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, blood pounded in his head and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of burning and tatters to bring down the charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that colored the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparking whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning. 

Prose and power to strive for, isn’t it?

Here’s a delightful short film about him, NEA Big Read: Meet Ray Bradbury. It’s impressive because he was impressive.  “The things that you love are the things that you should do and the things you do are the things that you love.”

Might I also heartily recommend Bradbury’s book for writers  Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You. It’s full of timeless wisdom and I’ll be writing about it more in coming  days.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

And please fight censorship.