A roundup of stories from our week together at Catapult.
Abbey Fenbert on “boys will be boys,” growing up a book lover, and that time she kinda sorta got Brave New World banned from her seventh-grade English class:
I wonder about an education not just in the ideals of free speech, but in the skills and practices of freedom. If kids learned to defend their rights, earn respect, question authority, survive criticism. If the anti-censorship brigades swooped in not just when syllabi are challenged, but when a girl is told that the appropriate reaction to mistreatment is silence. If we stopped conflating social vulnerability with intellectual cowardice, and the frame that pits safe space against free speech dissolved. If every kid’s basement were stuffed with books, and nothing was off-limits.
Nicole Chung is the author of A Living Remedy, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen outlets. Her debut memoir, All You Can Ever Know, was a national bestseller and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Find her on Instagram and Twitter @nicolesjchung.
“Although my main characters find themselves in difficult circumstances, they are not passive. They resist, confront, and sometimes arrive at moments of transcendence.”
“As a writer you get to know the characters so much better—their quirks and fears, the wirings and miswirings of their psyche—and it can be so much fun, and at times such an escape from whatever is going on in your own mind.”
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