Femme On

Banned Books Conversations: Where Radical Readers Discuss Prohibited Prose

Banned books are works that have been removed from a library shelf or school curriculum. Over the course of Banned Books Week, this series will cover seven different books, the reasons they were banned, and the value in reading them.

Wendy Wimmer: Fiction author by night, technical editor by day. Her book Entry Level is a short story collection that won the Autumn House Press fiction award. Find her at www.wendywimmer.com

Spider-Dan: Swing over to https://www.spiderdanandthesecretbores.com/ for some wacky, weird, controversial, and even sometimes banned films and comics.

Ada McCartney: Actor, poet, and teaching artist at the intersections of art, community organizing, and education, Poetry Theatre with the Femme On Collective. Collaborates on publishing projects with the Wisdom Body collective. Find her at www.aamccartney.com

Summary
Tonya hosted a discussion with Wendy, Spider-Dan, and Ada about Charlotte's Web. Spider-Dan says he never stays away from controversial, tends to run to it, and likes to study what makes things controversial when they were published and currently. Wendy is most interested in who gets to do the banning. She remembers when she and her fellow high school students succumbed to the Satanic Panic because the book was sold as non-fiction. She thinks it is important for readers to be alerted about what they are going to read, but nothing should be banned. Ada feels it is important to keep people reading and that criticisms are never about the stories or the ideas in it, instead recycled criticisms. For her it is critical to decide for herself and model that for students.

Host: Tonya Todd
Video Producer: JP Butler
Audio Producer: Ria Carrogan
Graphics: Mike Burton

Catch the video version at https://www.youtube.com/@mstonyatodd