aaronleafdotcom

guernicamag:

(via Alice Walker: Writing What’s Right - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics)

Guernica: What’s most at stake when a book like The Color Purple is banned? What’s at stake for women, and women of color, when a story like this is silenced?

Alice Walker: Great Literature is help for humans. It is medicine of the highest order. In a more aware culture, writers would be considered priests.  And, in fact, I have approached writing in a distinctly priestess frame of mind. I know what The Color Purple can mean to people, women and men, who have no voice. Who believe they have few choices in life. It can open to them, to their view, the full abundance of this amazing journey we are all on. It can lift them into a new realization of their own power, beauty, love, courage. It is a book that unites the present with the past, therefore giving people a sense of history and of timelessness they might never achieve otherwise. And even were it not “great” literature, it has the best interests of all of us humans at heart. That we grow, change, challenge, encourage, love fiercely in the awareness that real love can never be incorrect.

• READ OUR BANNED BOOKS WEEK INTERVIEW  WITH ALICE WALKER
• READ MORE GUERNICA DAILY
• TELL US ABOUT YOUR FAVORITE BANNED BOOKS ON TWITTER

Hey guys, we’ve got a ton of cool stuff coming up for Banned Books Week over at Guernica Daily. Here’s a sample of what’s going on:

• Interviews: Alice Walker, Katherine Paterson, Sherman Alexie 
• Essays: Nat Rich on The Master and Margarita, Lucy McKeon on Beloved, Henry Miller Scholar James Decker on Tropic of Cancer, Anna Breslaw on Stephen King’s Carrie