Conversation with author Machado at Colby College to launch the first Maine Lit Fest

WATERVILLE — Acclaimed author Carmen Maria Machado talks about his personal experience in response to the growing effort to remove books from school libraries.

“It’s just that (students) know and understand less about the world they’re about to enter,” Machado said Tuesday.

The award-winning writer, who first gained attention for her 2017 collection of short stories, “Her Body and Other Parties,” is set to speak Friday at Colby College as part of the inaugural Maine Lit Fest.

His speech will be the first in a series of conversations, roundtables and workshops to be held in Waterville through Tuesday., before the festival moves to Portland for the rest of next week. Fifty authors (many of them Mainers) will participate.

Readers can expect to hear Machado talk about “breaking literary molds, writing about gay relationships, embracing the weird and her writing process,” as well as new projects she’s working on, according to the festival website. Machado shared that she writes two books, one sold to a publisher and the other yet to be sold, both highly anticipated by fans as Machado, 36, has not published a book since 2019, the famous “In the Dream House”.

As quickly as this memoir hit the shelves, calls began to pull it.

The book is a haunting account of Machado’s experience in an abusive relationship and continues to receive backlash in some conservative circles. “In the Dream House” takes a unique structural approach, with each chapter (page, sometimes) assuming a different genre or literary trope for tackling domestic abuse. The memoir attracted not only high-profile literary awards, but also the attention of school districts who removed the novel from libraries and reading lists for what was considered inappropriate discussions of gender, sex and gender. sexuality.

A similar controversy erupted in Maine over one book in particular, “Gender Queer: A Memoir.”

In June, “Gender Queer”, a graphic memoir following non-binary author Maia Kobabe’s journey with gender identity, was banned by Dixfield-based Regional School Unit 56. No other book in the country is more targeted for removal from school shelves, according to at the American Library Association. The Buxton-based School Administrative District 6 is now considering removing the briefs of its libraries, several parents called it “pornographic” at a recent school board meeting. RSU 40, which covers Knox County, is due to make a decision next month on whether to remove Kobabe’s book from its high school library.

The situation is all too familiar to Machado. “It’s such an obvious political ploy that has devastating ramifications,” she said.

“There’s a lot of talk about ‘grooming,’ like, that having these books in libraries and schools is grooming,” she said. “It’s just a homophobic dog whistle… When you legislate the identity of children in front of them, it’s really harmful to them.”

Machado said books like his and Kobabe’s can often be a “lifeline” for young gay men, holding up a mirror to their experiences.

But some like Maine’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Paul LePage, takes the opposite view. LePage introduced a “Parents Bill of Rights” in which he denounces “woke” discussions of gender and sexuality in public schools, declaring them inappropriate.

Machado has said that an important function of his writing is “relationship education”. Through her work, Machado said, students might experience more subtle iterations of domestic violence — like extreme jealousy — just as they begin to think about sex and relationships. eradicate those discussions do not prevent these experiences, they can simply lead teenagers to fall on it blindly.

“Your child is in danger. All teenagers are at risk,” Machado said of the sexual violence she writes about. Denying this reality only delays it and means young people are getting this information outside of school, either online or from their peers, she said. IndeedSince the advent of the internet, banning books is a useless exercise because pParents and schools can no longer hope to exercise complete control over what young people read and learn, she said.

As it happens, all 28 copies of “Gender Queer” available in the Minerva Library catalog system (which serves more than 60 public libraries in Maine) are currently checked out or in the process of being checked out.

“That information is accessible through other means,” Machado said. “Adults can adopt these policies, but you are yourself and you can get the information you want. If that’s what you want.”

Machado will speak with Colby’s assistant professor of creative writing and novelist Sarah Braunstein at Colby’s Given Auditorium at 7 p.m. Friday. It will be broadcast live on colby.edu/livestream. The event is free but the organizers suggest RSVPing and arrive early to guarantee a seat in the auditorium, otherwise people may be asked to watch the conference from an additional room. Masks are mandatory.

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