To celebrate Banned Books Week, Oswego State’s Penfield Library dedicated Sept. 23 to 29 to advocating for the continued reading of controversial books.

Activities included throwing a banned book into the frying pan, and getting to keep it, creating banned book-themed buttons and bookmarks and having students read excerpts from banned books.

In one activity, students censored a page from a banned book, making a poem out of the remaining words. Laura Donnelly, who teaches creative writing classes on campus, oversaw the activity at the event.

“It’s called erasure poetry,” Donnelly said. “In some ways, it’s a strange crossing-out of language, which we are not advocating. It’s also thinking of the way language can transform and we find new things in old text.”

Above: An example of erasure poetry created by Kenny Burnham

The frying pan book giveaway was fun, if odd, said Damian Campana, junior Creative Writing major.

“I liked the absurdity of throwing a book into a frying pan,” Campana said.  “Just because that’s seems ridiculous, like why would you do that? First off, that’s not even a convenient way of burning things. But, I thought the absurdity was entertaining.”

Campana said the weirdness served a greater purpose for the event’s theme.

“I think overall it was just a good satire event, if you will,” Campana said. “We’re actively pointing out how absurd it is, like now we’re throwing [the books] in the frying pan.” 

According to the official website for Banned Books Week, the celebratory week started in 1982 in response to surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries.”

While the event is relatively recent, the practice of banning books is almost as old as books themselves.

Many books have been banned because of obscenities, but Donnelly said it can sometimes be more complicated than that.

“They might say the issue is obscenity, but in the story of ‘Huck Finn,’ it was challenging temporary notions of race and race relations,” she said. Now it is less about outright banning, but rather individual schools saying they do not want the book taught at their school.

Donnelly mentioned an exception in the book “Howl” by Allan Ginsburg. The book was deemed obscene, and the publisher was actually put on trial. The book was not found to be obscene because it was a work of art.

According to the American Library Association, the most banned book of 2017 was “Thirteen Reasons Why” by Jay Asher. It has been banned in certain school districts for its depiction of suicide. With certain issues like these, it can seem appealing to want to remove a book that people think would cause harm.

Many books have been banned because of obscenities, but Donnelly said it can sometimes be more complicated than that.

“They might say the issue is obscenity, but in the story of ‘Huck Finn,’ it was challenging temporary notions of race and race relations,” Donnelly said. “Now it is less about outright banning, but rather individual schools saying they do not want the book taught at their school.’

Donnelly mentioned an exception in the book “Howl,” by Allan Ginsburg. The book was deemed obscene, and the publisher was actually put on trial. The book was not found to be obscene because it was a work of art.

According to the American Library Association, the most banned book of 2017 was “Thirteen Reasons Why,” by Jay Asher. It has been banned in certain school districts for its depiction of suicide. With certain issues like these, it can seem appealing to want to remove a book that people think would cause harm.

Sharona Ginsberg, the learning technologies librarian at Oswego State, says that an outright ban is too much.

“If you think about completely banning that book, it doesn’t really make the ideas go away, and then you don’t have that have that book available to study,” Ginsberg said. “You can’t even have people looking at it historically, to understand what happened or try to break down the viewpoint to maybe avoid similar things in the future.”

Campana said he took a different approach to the issue, arguing people could just choose to not read an offensive book.

“If someone feels the need to ban that story as a result of the material within it because it’s not age appropriate or if it goes against religious beliefs or it goes against something else, then I guess you’d just don’t have to read the book,” Campana said.

Many of the other top books are challenged due to featuring things such LGBTQ characters or relationships or topics like gender identity. According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, half of the top 10 most banned books of 2017 had LGBTQ issues or issues of gender identity as one of the reasons someone tried to ban them.

The event is also beneficial to writers, Donnelly said.

“Writing can be a pretty solitary activity, so it’s a way for the writers to get together and to talk,” Donnelly said.

According to Campana, the event has done well in that regard.

“Especially being a transfer student, it was a social event just to see some familiar faces from classes,” Campana said. “And then you can also see a couple of new faces and you get to interact with people while also starting a conversation and allowing for a community to sort of be built around the writing department and also be on the Oswego campus itself.”

Photo by Kassadee Paulo | The Oswegonian