Hello friends,

I had an article published in HuffPost this week and some people who read it kindly signed up for this newsletter. If that is you, welcome! And thank you.

Creating titles and CEO

I’ve talked about the mystery of coming up with a good title here before. My HuffPost article has me interested in the SEO (search engine optimization) of title making. I really don’t understand SEO. I don’t mean that I don’t know what it is. I mean that I don’t understand what people find most interesting. My original title for my essay was “Sex, Lies, and Birth Control.” This is the kind of thing I’d pick up and read. And the article would deliver on that title. But the editor said her experience showed that lots of people click into articles whose titles say that some secret is revealed in a letter or found in a box. This article has a secret found in a box, so that’s what we went with.

The article was picked up by Yahoo News and has found its way to many readers, so the editor was right. I checked in on a few of the many comments. Lots of people have experiences similar to that of me and my sisters, and they appreciated the discussion. However in a smaller women’s Facebook group, it seems the readers were mad because the secret was a common one. Perhaps they expected a murder revelation at the end, something that has nothing to do with the story. At any rate, their expectations were based on the title and they didn’t like it.

I think SEO is also the reason for the article’s URL (below), which uses keywords rather than the article title: Catholic, birth control, sin, secret.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/parents-catholic-birth-control-sin-secret_n_664e38cfe4b048d73b55233f

I know there’s an SEO lesson in there for me somewhere. Maybe I should use the words ‘secret’ and ‘sin’ in all my fiction since a lot of it is about that.

The supernatural and my mom

The day after the article was published, I was in the shower and the squeegee kept coming away from the neck of the showerhead and hit the floor, skittering, no matter how carefully I replaced it. When I got out of the shower, I tried to put it back carefully a few more times. It continued to launch itself to the floor. Now, I’m not a big believer in ghosts. Maybe because I’m already haunted enough by reality. I don’t need the supernatural to find life spooky.

I do feel the presence of the dead just after they’ve left their bodies. It seems they are having some sort of immediate Bardo experience, but that sense disappears quickly and the connection is broken. And, of course, I’m a believer in science, which tells me that Bardo experiences or any sort of life after death is without evidence. But science is young and consciousness is strange. Because of my experience with the numinous, I do spend more time than I should wondering about consciousness and where it goes. I thought about that a lot during the years my mother was in the deep grip of dementia.

I think the thing with the squeegee in the shower was so weird that I started to think maybe my mom is mad that I published an article in HuffPost about what happened with my sisters and me, with the whole purity and chastity issue. So I just said to the universe, “Mom if this is you and you’re mad at me: First of all, the shower is not a good spot to show it. You’re invading my privacy. And second, I’m gonna go with Anne LaMott here and say that if you wanted me to write something else, you should’ve treated me differently. After I said this, I put the squeegee back and it stayed put.

Photos and my mom

That said, my young life wasn’t a competition in a trauma Olympics. As I told my sister this week, we were ‘medium traumatized.’

And our mother didn’t invent the nonsense she handed down to us. She had plenty of trauma of her own as the first daughter in a stereotypical Irish Catholic family—alcoholic father; long suffering, intensely devout mother. In spite of that, there was much goodness in her, and we loved her and took care of her for the last decade of her life.

I’m writing a 100-word ‘tiny love story’ about her that I’m hoping the New York Times will publish. I realize the odds aren’t great. Far less than one percent, I’m told—so if I don’t manage that, I’ll share it here. The trouble I’m having right now is not with the story itself, on which I believe I’ve done a good job. It’s with the accompanying photos, two of which are required. The best sort would have a juvenile me and my mother together.

My mother hated having her photo taken. I’m not sure why. She was a very pretty woman and quite slim when she was young. Seeing her wedding photo, in which she was five months pregnant and rail thin, my sister wondered if she was starving herself in order not ‘to show.’ I doubt this because my mother told me that she was always so naturally thin as a child that when she would visit her relatives, they would continually hand her thick slices of homemade bread, slathered in butter.

Perhaps that’s not a story to tell a pudgy girl who takes after her father’s family of linebackers. I fantasized about that sort of life, people wanting to feed me delicious things and demanding that I eat.

In the only photo I have of me and my mother alone together, she looks like a dying woman because she is, her head hanging. She was unable to lift it. I knelt on the ground next to her wheelchair, a mask over my nose and mouth as required by the nursing care facility during the pandemic. Mom spent the last few weeks of her life there, when we could no longer lift her. I’d had my husband take the photo so I could show my siblings her rapidly deteriorating state. This is something we all did, as if it was impossible to believe. Look! Look! She’s leaving us.

And then she was gone. Here’s a photo I took of her five years before she died. Dementia had already wiped quite a bit of her away, but it was her birthday, and I thought it would be fun to make her a special cake because she developed a serious sweet tooth in old age. Food was a way of connecting. So here she is with her apricot ring cake at age 84.

The rest

Last week, I mentioned that I might have won the 100 Rejections Club’s most rejected writer for the month of May with six rejections. I did win! I got a trophy emoji. Just saying.

Library and book challenge/ban this week

I’m writing this post early this week because I’m headed off to my niece’s wedding. So my week’s book ban news actually ends with Wednesday. Just FYI.

Tennessee schools work to adapt as new law bans books with any sexual content, nudity from WCYB News

Some Tennessee school districts are voicing concerns about a new Tennessee law that bans books that contain any nudity or descriptions of sex, no matter how brief or the context.

The law goes into effect in just a few weeks and school libraries are scrambling to comply.

The old state law judged books by the entirety of the book, but this new law does not.

…

Williamson County school board member, Eric Welch, says this new law is going to have a negative impact on education.

He says because this forces schools to remove books by Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Steinbeck off school library shelves, including the book “Roots” by Alex Haley.

It’s been in our school library for 50 years. We have never received a parent complaint and the Tennessee legislature just recently declared that this book right here is a Tennessee treasure,” Welch emphasized.

Welch explains because it’s a book about slavery that includes sexual assault and violence. He emphasizes these are necessary books to prepare students for AP exams, college, ACTs, and SATs.

Winning the Culture War Against Queer Kids’ Books from Literary Hub

Michael Leali Imagines a World Where Queer Kids Have Access to Books That Celebrate Their Identities

Schools and libraries have become a battleground for right wing politicians and a small but vocal group of book banners claiming that they want to protect children. Their actions, of course, have nothing to do with protecting children. If people in positions of power wanted to protect children, they would listen to children. In doing so, they would discover possibilities of lived experiences beyond their own.…

These bans are taking a massive toll on marginalized authors, me included. Despite awards and critical acclaim, my books have been challenged and banned like so many others. My sales have taken a hit. Don’t be fooled—when a book is banned, sales rarely skyrocket. In fact, sales often decline, and author’s livelihoods are threatened.

More important than the impact on sales, these bans mean that young people aren’t getting to read my stories and stories like mine. I am a firm believer that books save lives. They provide a safe space to explore and wonder and dream. They let us try on situations and provide a quiet space to ask our most private questions.

ALI VELSHI BANNED BOOK CLUB ON ERASING IMMIGRANT STORIES from the Philadelphia Citizen

The MSNBC host and Citizen board member speaks with Laurence Yep about the immigrant experience in America and how important those stories are to our history

PRIDE MONTH: PUBLIC LIBRARIES IN THE CROSSHAIRS from Southern Poverty Law Center

Libraries are also under siege from legislation. EveryLibrary tracked 124 bills of concern in 30 states during the 2024 legislative sessions. These include criminalizing librarians under obscenity laws, limiting or removing funding based on participation in professional library associations, and establishing book rating systems that would result in certain topics being removed or segregated.

Overall, the ALA anticipates that the trends in book banning, in terms of targeted authors and content, will continue throughout 2024, especially in June, which is known as LGBTQ+ Pride month. Given the hyperfocus on LGBTQ+ materials and observations, tensions are high, with expectations and fears of escalated attacks. During a Pride picnic in Prattville last year, members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front appeared alongside others to protest the event.

According to Drabinski, “Pride month is a time when queer lives are celebrated, so it should not be surprising that the people who do not want our stories to be told ramp up their efforts to ban those stories at that time.”

This article also discusses news related to libraries in Georgia and Alabama

Florida parents challenge new law providing appeals when local school districts retain targeted books from the Florida Record

Three Florida parents have filed a federal lawsuit that challenges a state review process allowing school parents to appeal local school board decisions that decline to ban books and other instructional materials. …

“The state’s chancellor of K-12 education has declared that parents must be in the ‘drivers’ seat’ to ensure that concerns about their children’s education are addressed,” the lawsuit states. “Yet when those concerns relate to the availability of books and other material in public schools, Florida’s leaders only welcome input from those parents advocating for removing books from schools.”

Oklahoma Watch: Supreme Court rejects education department’s attempt to ban books From the Duncan Banner

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of Edmond Public Schools in a battle over books in its school libraries.

The state’s high court in a unanimous decision said Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters and the state Department of Education overstepped their authority in trying to force Edmond schools to ban two novels.

Local school boards retain the discretion to decide which books are in a school’s library based on their community’s standards, the justices wrote.

Jeff Bardach, a spokesman for Edmond Public Schools, said the district’s staff is grateful for the decision, which “protects our locally elected school board’s role in creating policies that determine how library materials are selected and reviewed.”

The two targeted books are The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, both award-winning novels.

10 Banned Books Written by LGBTQ+ Authors You Don’t Want to Miss from Mental Floss

These books include:

* All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto by George M. Johnson

* Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

* Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

* Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

* The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes

* Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

* Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H

* Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin

* The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

* Sacrificio by Ernesto Mestre-Reed

A little fun YouTube clip from the Daily Show a few years ago. I never saw it before this week. Levar Burton attempts to read some banned books.

What I’m Reading

Dracula by Bram Stoker for my family book club. I read it some years ago. Now I’m listening to an audio version with Alan Cumming and Tim Curry. Very good.

Agave Blues by Ruthie Marlenée. Just started! Family + ghosts—it’s what I like!

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