You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molinsky. Book banning is all the rage in the US. The American Library Association said in 2023, the number of targeted books increased 92% from the previous year. And so far this year, book banning has continued to go up.
And for all the books that get banned, there are also books that get challenged and haven't been banned yet, where they survived the challenge and they've stayed on the shelves for now. Almost half the targeted books feature people of color or queer characters. And when I look to the books being removed from libraries, I notice that a lot of them are graphic novels or fantasy books.
Some of the banned or challenged titles include the Handmaid's Tale, Orricks and Crake and Other Works by Margaret Atwood, Works by Neil Gaiman, Like American Gods and Sandman, Graphic novels by Brian K. Vaughan, Nobles by Stephen King, Lee Bardugo, Peer's Anthony, and even Ray Bradbury. Books by George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien have been banned. The works of Sarah J. Moss have been banned over and over again.
Her novels, like a quarter of Thorns and Roses, are inspired by classic myths and fairy tales, but from a more adult perspective. The author Melinda Lowe has been following this closely, because her books have also been banned and challenged. I came across Melinda's work last year when I was researching my episode on fairy godmothers. Melinda wrote a YA novel called Ash, which reimagines Cinderella with queer characters.
Melinda has written about the attempts to ban her work, and I wanted to learn more about what she found and how she's dealing with it. First, I was curious, when did you find out that her books were being challenged? I think I learned this back in fall of 2021. That's when it really started ramping up back then, and that's when it became clear that because my books are all about LGBTQ characters, they were really going to be in the target zone, so to speak.
And tell me which books were being banned or challenged? Well, early on, there was the big law in Texas that, well, there was a letter from some Texas legislator that had a list of like 800 titles that he wanted banned, and that included my first novel, Ash, which is a lesbian retelling of Cinderella. So that was one of the first instances I heard of my books being banned. And later on, almost all of my books have been challenged or banned in some capacity.
Ash certainly has faced this more than once. The majority of the bookbans I have faced have come from my historical novel last night at the Telegraph Club. And you wrote that this doesn't make you feel like personally hurt, but it concerns and worries you. Can you tell me a bit more about that? Yeah, I think early on, a lot of the people who were concerned about bookbanging would ask authors, how does this make you feel? Are you okay?
I don't take it personally, necessarily, but it is very concerning because it is an assault on the First Amendment. And that is a fundamental element of being an American and living in this country. And it really felt very worrying to me because I am an immigrant. I came to this country as a child from China. One of the things that I have always known is that my family came here so that we could have the freedom to speak freely, which was not available to my family in China.
So to have this start to happen and to ramp up so seriously, it's quite concerning to me because this is literally the state, various states across the US saying that certain topics cannot be written about or published in books that are held in school and local libraries. And it's not just school libraries, I should say. This is expanding now to public libraries all across the country. Do you think that fantasy genres are treated differently or misunderstood?
Because I mean, I know I've seen people say this graphic novel looks like a cartoon. And even if it's shelved in the adult section or the teen section, a kid can wander over and grab it. I'm wondering, do you think that maybe even fantasy in general is being seen as like a Trojan horse that will deliver these dangerously subversive ideas to kids?
I do think that graphic novels, graphic memoirs are definitely misunderstood because of the word graphic, which has many different meanings in the English language, but really it just means illustrated. And people who do not read books but want to ban them find it easier to look at pictures.
Let me be real here, like they can just flip through a graphic novel and find a picture that they interpret as being sexually explicit, for example, when it is not in the context of the entire graphic novel or memoir. Fantasy and genre fiction sometimes I think flies under the radar because people, adults, don't take it as seriously as realistic fiction, but I don't know that that is the case with the book banning because I do know some of the most banned titles are fantasy.
My fantasy novels do not have any sexually explicit passages in them, but they do have queer characters. And a lot of times these people who want to ban books, they don't really care if there's actually sex in it. They just don't want any mention of same sex relationships or queer identity at all. They think that it catches or something like if your kid reads it, it will turn them gay. Yeah, I was wondering about that because I feel like there's a lot of fear around it.
There's a lot of fear around the imagination of kids. Are adults misremembering their youth or just underestimating kids' sense of resilience and sense of self? I think that a lot of adults do misremember their youth, their childhood and especially their adolescence. I think that adults sometimes once they become adults and they become parents, their memories change over what it was like for them as a kid.
They do forget what it's like to be a kid and how magical an experience can be reading a book and how kids are really open to new things. I mean, when you're a kid, everything is new and finding the tiniest little connection to a story can be so world opening for a kid. So I think there is some fear there, but it's also misguided fear because reading about gay people is not going to make anyone gay. This is not a thing that happens.
It could give comfort and security to a kid who is already questioning their identity and it could really help them to understand who they are. But if they are not already queer at some level in their own personhood, it's not going to turn them that way. I mean, I've read so many books with straight people in them. I'm not straight. You know, I'm a lesbian. Somehow reading all of those books did not make me straight. It did give me a lot of emotional difficulty when I came out.
You know, it made me really, it was very hard to come out because there were so few representations of queer identities. Well do you think fantasy has a role in reaching younger readers in a way that's different from more realistic fiction, which I know all fiction is a form of fantasy and a form of a constructive world, but like magical fantasy? I think it depends on the kid. You know, some kids love fantasy and some kids don't. When I was a kid, I loved fantasy.
That's what I wanted to read and that's probably because it gave me some escape from my ordinary regular life and I could go on adventures and fight dragons or go into space, you know, and have adventures there. I like, I loved to escape from my ordinary life as a kid. And if I had the opportunity to read books with queer characters having these magical adventures, I think it would have been completely transformative.
I mean, that's one of the reasons I wrote Ash because it's something that I wished I had as a kid. So I loved all that magical stuff when I was a kid. I still love it. Yeah, I mean, it's funny because I did an episode on the Grim Brothers and I did an episode on Fairy Godmothers where we looked at Cinderella specifically. Is that, or did you want to pick Cinderella for that reason because it's a fairy tale that everybody knows and you can start with a structure of Cinderella?
I did think that because it had a structure that would mean that I would know what to write. That was a complete, to now turn out that way at all. I mean, writing is never as straightforward as anyone imagines. My first draft of Ash was straight. I mean, she fell in love with Prince Charming in the first draft. I had changed the Fairy Godmother to be a male fairy based on Irish folklore of the she. But she fell in love with Prince Charming.
Then I had a friend read that draft and she said, you know, Ash, the main character, it doesn't really have much chemistry with the prince. She really seemed fascinating. She really seems to like this other character and that other character was a woman and I was so stunned by this. I had not intended it at all. So I had to reread it and I reread that first draft and I realized, oh my God, I have written a lesbian subtext into my Cinderella retelling.
So then I had to decide if I was going to turn it into a lesbian retelling of Cinderella, which this is like 2005 and I had never read anything like that. I thought it was bizarre. I did not think it would be publishable. So it took me a while to really get up the courage to do it. I really was afraid it would not make the book publishable. But it was fine. I mean, people loved it. The book had multiple offers and it's really, it's still alive today and still finding new readers every year.
So I think people were really hungry for that kind of story to just have a queer character in a fairy tale having a happy ending, not having to deal with homophobia or the real world really. Or the tragic ending too. Right. I mean, you were saying before you, you know, this doesn't hurt you. You don't feel like personally hurt. But I imagine given your anxiety around publishing it, I know it's almost 20 years later.
But I mean, there must be a sense of kind of like this is kind of what you feared was going to happen in some way. It is a little bit, but I think that because now I'm so much many, many, many more years into my career, I kind of, I don't know. I'm kind of like, bring it. Let's, let's go for it. You know, I, that's why when I publisher decided to sue the state of Iowa and asked if I would be a co-plaintive in that case. I said yes.
So now I'm part of a group of people, authors, teens, teachers and librarians, I'm suing to block the Iowa state law that bands, queer books basically. So I'm hoping that'll work. Yeah. I mean, I've seen people rally around challenged books and promote them. My local library actually in Brooklyn here has a, has a, has been doing that. I said, I was going to ask you, is that happened with your books in a strange way? Is it called the tension to it in a positive way?
I don't think it has really had an effect in terms of like sales. If that's what you're asking about, a lot of people think that when your book gets banned, that means you're going to hit the bestseller list and that doesn't happen. I mean, when the vast majority of books that are banned and so far thousands of books are being banned, like you, you have not heard of these books. They're just quietly taken away from school libraries and removed. I mean, they're banned. They're not getting buzz.
So I, I don't think that it has really made an effect in terms of sales. And I, I know that in fact, some schools in states like Florida and Texas are buying fewer LGBTQ books because of these laws. So I, I do not think it has any, had any sort of positive effect. Have you gotten feedback from young readers who are saying, I was looking for your book, you know, in the library and it's not there anymore or your book really, you know, helped me. I'm upset about this.
I've gotten a lot of email and messages over the years from readers who say that my books have helped them to see who they are as a person, given them the confidence to come out to themselves, to come out to their families even sometimes or come out to this girl they have a crush on. You know, this is, they're really wonderful stories and it's amazing to me the power of fiction. You know, I write a book alone in my house.
It can be read by someone so far away who does not know me at all and we can still have this connection through the story and the power of the words. It's really amazing. You actually, there was one person as well you quoted where they said that they were actually kind of moved by some of the relationships and ash and they're like, they actually started to almost advocate like, this is beautiful and they're like, but we have to, we have to ban it. I mean, to tell me about that.
Yeah, there was this mom who, well, I don't, I think it was a mom who had submitted a challenge for ash in Texas and one of the reporters who's been following this from the beginning tweeted it and tagged me.
So that's the only reason I saw this challenge form and the challenge form is a review of ash in which the writer basically says they thought this book was beautifully written and the relationship between ash and the woman she falls in love with was an example of the kind of love we want our children to have, but because they're two women, she could not allow her, her children to read it. And I just thought this is so sad.
I mean, I used to think that if someone actually read my books, they would understand that they should not be banned. And yet this person had read the book and concluded, oh well, we still got a ban it. And that just shows me that, you know, literary quality has nothing to do with these book bands. It has nothing to do with this, with how powerful a novel is. I mean, it's about their agenda. Their agenda is the thing that is driving this, not the, not the books, not the stories.
They don't care what the stories are. They just want to ban the concepts that they think these books are pushing. Yeah, that's really heartbreaking actually just to think about that, you know, because you feel like as an artist or like, but, but if you read the book, you know, you'll understand. I mean, that's just like, it's kind of heartbreaking to see it. It is. I mean, that, that really was heartbreaking to see.
I felt, I felt really bad for that, that woman's children, you know, that's, that must be rough if you have a, a parent who thinks that. So are you now, I mean, is this something that you feel like, I know you wrote with one post and you're like, okay, this is my post. And then you, you were like, okay, I have to write an update. Do you feel like this is something you're really invested in now? You're just going to keep tabs as this keeps going.
I am invested in it because it's, no one is coming to tell me if my book is being banned anywhere. And I want to know, I want to know where my books are being banned. So I kind of have to track down the information, you know, I have to like read all the news articles and search for my book titles and search for the lists of books that are being challenged at school library websites. It's not, there's no one, no one's coming to tell me when things are happening.
And I want to know, I want to know what the reception is to my books being banned. And I'm going to, I'm definitely going to be here for the long haul until the books are no longer being banned. We can't, we can't stop. It's just, it's gotten so bad. So I didn't episode in 2018. It was actually called Fahrenheit 451 still burns. And at the time, I was surprised to learn that book banning still existed. I mean, that's how kind of not out of control it was six years ago.
Did you ever think about Fahrenheit 451 because you actually had an example of somebody saying they should burn your book? Yeah, no, I, I mean, that's, it's, it's rhetoric, right? Like they don't really mean it. I don't think they really mean it. I think that if someone actually burned the books, that would create such a horrible image that would immediately go viral all across social media today. I think it would not serve their cause.
But the thought behind it and the motivation behind all of these laws is certainly the beginnings of fascism. If not well into that, these are, these are not laws that should exist in a democratic society. And that's the important thing. Some information should not be publicly available. Your home address, your social security number, your financial information. Every so often, I'll get an email telling me that there was a data breach on one of the sites that I use.
And I'm like, should I be worried? How much of my information do they have? What are they going to do with it? And who are they? They are probably data brokers. They can sell your information to companies or worse cyber criminals. You have the right to protect your privacy by requesting that they delete your information, but it could take years for you to do it by yourself with every one of these data brokers. And you'd have to keep checking up on them, like a game of whack a ball.
In Cogni, it can give you peace of mind. In Cogni, we'll reach out to data brokers on your behalf and request that the information gets removed. They can deal with any objections from the other side, and they'll make sure your data stays up the market. In Cogni can also give you updates on how many requests they've made and how many successful removals they've had. Go to incogni.com slash imaginary and use the code imaginary to get an exclusive 60% off an annual incogni plan.
You can also find that link in the episode description. After my conversation with Melinda Lowe, I wondered if anyone had actually tried to burn books. I found a news report from several months ago about a candidate running for a local state office. She filmed herself using a flame thrower on two LGBTQ books, and she posted it on social media. She got backlash, but she relished in the controversy. Her supporters cheered her on using fire emojis.
Even before I found that story, I couldn't stop thinking about Fahrenheit 451, the novel by Ray Bradbury, which takes place in the future, were firemen burn books. As I mentioned earlier, I did an episode about Fahrenheit 451 back in 2018. Listening to that episode now, it resonates differently, which is eerie because I certainly didn't feel like 2018 was a time of innocence. So I put together a condensed version of that episode, which I'm going to play for you now.
We started the episode by talking with a pretty famous author, whose work is currently being banned or challenged across America. Yeah, can I wear levels again? This is me. This is me talking. This is me still talking. Peter Piper picked the pick of pick of Peppers. That is the voice of Neil Gaiman, master of modern fantasy. But he did not come to the studio to talk about the stuff he's best known for like American gods or Coraline.
The reason he agreed to come into talk with me is because he is a huge fan of Ray Bradbury. I was asked to write the introduction to the 60th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury and I had known each other at that point for I think over 20 years. And he had a vivid memory of discovering Fahrenheit 451 when he was a kid. And he says he was particularly fascinated by the main character. He was a fireman. He burned down houses of people with books.
And that seemed a cool, science-fiction idea in itself because I lived in a world in which fireman came and saved you and they put out fires. And I didn't really understand things like his marriage falling apart. Huge swatches of the plot. I missed. But that's fine because when you're nine years old, you know that you're going to read the book later and you'll take from it what is there for you. Fahrenheit 451 is the kind of novel that a lot of kids are assigned to read at some point in school.
I was actually never assigned to read it just by weird coincidence. So I never got around to it. But after the 2016 election, this old literary classic jumped to the top of bestseller lists. Along with other dystopian novels like 1984, an animal farm. So I finally read it. I couldn't believe how much the story written 65 years ago feels so relevant today. And I think that each of the characters in Fahrenheit 451 represents a challenge to the reader. If you lived in this world, what would you do?
Who would you be? Rich Orlow has thought about that a lot. I do have the ability to pat yourself on the back, but to sort of morph myself and do other characters. For the last decade, he's been performing a one man show of Fahrenheit 451 using a script that was approved by Ray Bradbury before Bradbury died in 2012. Now Rich does all the voices in the show.
But the character he says he identifies with the most is Guy Montagg, the main character, the fireman who starts to question why he's burning books. He goes from someone who is kind of destructive. He thinks he knows it all. He's kind of angry, but there's a core of in him that tells him that there's something more than this. And that's kind of how I was when I was young. I was kind of a not the happiest kid. That's for sure. I was very angry. I grew up in not the best circumstances per se.
And he doesn't know anything. Eventually at the end of the book, he says, I was an idiot the whole way. I can identify with that. So here's Rich performing a scene where Montagg reveals for the first time to his wife, Millie, that he's unhappy with his work. When I wake up, I have chills in a fever. Oh, you can't be sick. You are all right last night. Millie, do you know what happened last night? We burned a thousand books. We burnt a woman. Well, well, you should have seen her, Millie.
God, there's got to be things in books. Things that you can't imagine to make a woman stay in a burning house. You wouldn't stay for nothing. She was as rational as you and I, and we burnt her. Have you ever seen a burning house? It's smolders for days. I've been trying to put it out in my mind. I'm crazy with trying. And I'm sick. And it's not just the woman that died. I'm thinking about all the kerosene that I have used in the past ten years. And I am thinking about those books.
And for the first time, I realized that there was a man behind each one of those books. A man had to think them up. A man had to put them down on paper. It may have taken some man a lifetime to put his thoughts down on paper and then along I come in two minutes and boom, it's all over. Now leave me alone. I didn't do anything to you. Wow, that was chill. Thank you. So wow, it's so interesting to hear Millie. When I think of Millie, I mean, Millie is, she self-medicates the whole book.
She's kind of, you know, she's half out of it. Her character never really confronts the really underlying cause of all these things. And she distracts herself with television. And that's her life. She even calls them our TV family. Now the opposite of Millie, which is kind of goes along with the program, is Montag's next-door neighbor, Clarice McClellan. She only appears in the beginning of the book, but she plays a pivotal role. She awakens Montag's conscience.
You know, I'm not afraid of you at all. So many people are. They're afraid of firemen, but you are just a man after all. How long have you worked at being a fireman? Since I was 20, 10 years ago. Do you ever read any of the books that you burn? No. That's against the law. Oh, yes, of course. Hey, it's fine work. Monday you burn Edna Millie. Wednesday, Walt Whitman, Friday, Faulkner. You burn them to ashes, and then you burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.
Is it true that a long time ago, firemen used to put out fires instead of going to start them? No. That's strange because I heard that houses used to burn by accident, and they needed firemen to stop the flames. Now, the fourth major character in the book is Montag's boss, the anti-intellectual Captain Beaty. We must all be alike. Not everybody born free and equal like the Constitution says, but everybody made equal. Which man the image of every other? For then, all are happy.
For there are no mountains to judge yourself against or to make your coward. So a book is a loaded weapon in the house next door. Burn it. Burn it. Who knows who maybe the target of a will-read man? Now that is actually a very important moment because Beaty reveals something to Montag, which may be surprising to some readers. It was actually surprising to me the first time I read the book. This whole book-burning business did not come from the government, at least not at first.
It came from the people. Every book contains something that somebody found offensive. So firemen began burning the most offensive books, the people cheered, and they kept going. When the houses were finally fire-proofed completely, there was no longer a need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given a new job as the custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our rightful dread of being inferior, official censors, judges, and executioners. That is you, Montag. And that's me.
Jonathan Eller is the director for the center of Ray Bradbury's studies at Indiana University. And he says book-burning was very much on Bradbury's mind when he wrote Fahrenheit 451 in the early 1950s on the eve of the McCarthy hearings. Ray Bradbury felt that the ban on books or the censorship of books would probably start with supernatural literature and fantasy.
And so he started to write a series of about a half a dozen stories in the late 40s that touched on the issue of the banning of supernatural fiction or the burning of supernatural fiction. Did I read that he was descended from Mary Bradbury, who's one of the people in the Salah West trials? Oh, yes. Mary Bradbury was his direct ancestor. She was tried, of course, in the early 1690s, found guilty of taking on spectral forms. I think it was the form of a wild boar, someone accused her of.
She was found guilty in sentence to die. But over time, the colonial government changed and she was spared. But Ray Bradbury's initial spark of inspiration for Fahrenheit 451 came from a personal experience. One night, he was walking with a friend in Los Angeles and a policeman stopped and questioned them because apparently it was strange to just be walking at night in Los Angeles. Bradbury was so annoyed.
He wrote a short story called The Bedestrian, which took place in a totalitarian future where people were so distracted by technology that they didn't even bother going out of their houses and take a walk. In that short story, eventually evolved into the world of Fahrenheit 451, where technology is so all-consuming and distracting, people don't even read books anymore.
And one of the most endearing details about Fahrenheit 451 is that Bradbury wrote the novel on a coin-operated typewriter at his local library. When it was done, he called the fire department to ask what temperature a book would burn. They told him 451 degrees, and that's how he got the title. When it was finally published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 was considered a success critically and commercially. But it was not seen as an instant classic.
For a long time, other Ray Bradbury books, like the Martian Chronicles, were much more popular. But by the 80s and 90s, as we're dealing with these technological marvels, and we have the challenge of preserving unmediated literature and great ideas, people began to see that to remind us all that literacy is important, then Fahrenheit began to become a staple in school.
But according to the American Library Association, every year there are parents lobbying them to remove Fahrenheit 451 from the shells of school libraries, because they claim and has offensive language, like hell or damn, which is a little strange because there are other books with hell and damn that are not constantly the target of such anxiety among parents.
In fact, for a while, there was an edited version of Fahrenheit 451 that was circulated in schools that had words like hell and damn removed. And when Bradbury himself found out, he was furious. He got the original text reinstated and wrote a new Coda that's an every copy of the book. It's a Coda in which he says, at the end, I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted to become a non book. And here is Ray Bradbury himself.
I get letters from teachers all the time saying my books have been banned temporarily. I said, don't worry about it. Put them back on the shelves. When they come in and find them on the shelves again, and you say, gee, how did they get back on there? And you keep putting them back and they keep taking them off. And you finally win. But be very quiet about it and don't ask for my help.
Because if I come to your town to help you out of a big frog in a small puddle, they're going to hate all of them, all the people. So you can't ask me to interfere. You do the job. You're the library. You're the teacher. You can confirm and you'll win. And they always do. Now part of what helped Fahrenheit 451 in Door was the way that it got adapted. It's been turned into a graphic novel, movies, play. Now don't maybe use this.
There have been radio drama adaptations on both sides of the Atlantic. I've done YouTube. Well, that's one way to get an audience at the end of a flame. Phil Nichols teaches TV in film at the University of Wilbur Hampton in the UK. His specialty are media adaptations of Ray Brabber's work. I think if all the adaptations were straightforward, faithful adaptations, I would get very tired, but they've all been so different and so playful.
And strangely enough, the first film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 did not come from Hollywood. The 1966 film was directed by Francois Truffaut. It's a very strange film. It's a combination of French new way filmmaking and an American story. And it was shot in England and it was directed by a director who didn't speak a word of English, even though the film was made in English. In the actor playing Montag, he had a thick Austrian accent. We burned him to ashes and then burned the ashes.
It's our official motto. You don't like books then? Books are just so much rubbish. The writer Neil Gaiman was never a big fan of that movie. And he was particularly disturbed by the ending. Now, to some extent, the ending of the movie is similar to the book. Montag quits the fire department and he joins the resistance, where he discovers the quote, book people, who invented a really ingenious way to preserve books. Each of them chooses a book to memorize.
I think in the book, you can almost hear the trumpets as people are introduced, as you realize that yes, you can destroy a book, but you cannot destroy the content of the book. And as long as some books are people, the books are inside us and we can bring them out again. Would you like to read Plato's Republic? Yes, of course. Well I am Plato's Republic. Would you like to read Marcus Aurelius? Well, Mr. Simmons is Marcus. This fellow is Charles Darwin.
He's Schopenhauer. Others are Einstein Confucius, Buddha, Jefferson, Lincoln, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In the film, nobody is telling the content of their book to another person. And I think that is the thing that makes it seem like madness, like a waste of time, like pointless. They're all on their own, not making eye contact with each other, mumbling their stories, mumbling their books, I think, remember. It's a little bit full of horror.
The one thing that I don't think, fair and heightful, if I've worn, is about enough, which is, because why would it have done? Which is, it seems to me like the best way to lose the good books and to lose literacy and to lose all those points of view. It's not to burn them, but it's to bury them under a million bad books. And we're now at a point where more data is being produced every hour than was being produced in the previous centuries.
In the old days, you needed a guide through the desert to find the one flower growing in the desert of information, of knowledge, of story. And now we're wandering through an overgrown jungle, and we need a flame-thrower just to clear out the weeds and a map to try and find what the good stuff is.
Prairie Bradbury always had mixed feelings about the Truffot film, but he wrote a play in the 1970s that incorporated a lot of ideas that Truffot had invented for the film into Bradbury's new theatrical version of Fahrenheit 451. But the biggest change that Bradbury made was something brand new that did not come from the Truffot film. He took the character of Captain Beaty, who had been sort of a two-dimensional villain in the book, and made him more of an anti-hero.
Jonathan Eller says this actually came from Bradbury's own insecurities as a writer. He always worried the most about writing character. He knew that he had very interesting ideas based on basic fears and hopes, aspirations and terrors and loves of human beings. But sometimes he had to work very hard to develop characters. In all the work that Ray Bradbury did on the character of Captain Beaty, struck a cord with Julia Wilhelm.
In the spring of 2018, she was a senior at the Kinney Boyd High School outside Dallas. And when she learned that her drama teacher was going to put on the play of Fahrenheit 451. I read the script, and the character that I really wanted to play was Beaty. And because it was the most complex and contradictory character in the show, kind of like an Erin Burr, like a Judas, you know. Now I wanted to hear from these kids because I was curious how does Fahrenheit 451 hold up today?
I mean, how do kids who were born in the 21st century relate to this story? Julia Wilhelm's teacher, Jonathan Pitzer, was wondering the same thing. That's why for this play, he didn't do the usual auditions. He interviewed the kids to find out how deeply they had thought about Fahrenheit 451. And he was totally blown away when Julia came in. She came with notes, and she had like a PowerPoint, and she had drawings of the characters, and she had really put in the time for Captain Beaty.
And I told her, I said, you know, you know, that's a man, right? And she said, yeah, but it doesn't have to be. That's the part I want. And Julia's pitch for the character was really interesting. She said, what if Clarice McClallant, the idealistic girl who lives next to Montag, didn't die as a martyr, and she does in the book, or turned into a resistance fighter, and she does in the movie in the play? What if she became cynical?
What if that is the type of person that Captain Beaty used to be before she became an adult? As this world is changing, and people aren't listening to each other, she sees books, and they offer no comfort to her, no solace, no peace. That's actually one of the lines. And she doesn't see books as helping her anymore. And because she doesn't think the answer is in books, she looks to the government, or these restrictions, because books haven't fixed the terrible things that have happened to her.
She says, well, might as well burn them. Once on tag, we were a small country, but then we grew. This is Julie Wilhelm, performing as Captain Beaty. And by the millions they poured in upon us, and finally you have 300 million doctors, lawyers, baptists, block-headed Swedes, Beerfat Germans. Blacks don't like little black Sambo Burnett. White people, hate Uncle Tom's cabin, Burnett, the Jews, hate Fagan, and on the street.
And Oliver Twist, Burn, Fagan, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice Women's Lib hates that, into the furnace. More comic books, more gossip, plenty facts, but no meaning. And there you have it, Montag. Lectures over. Fahrenheit 451 has grown beyond being just a book. It's an idea. It's a living document that's taken on life of its own. It is a resilient, especially good ideas. They can be more powerful than any author, book, movie, or play. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening.
Special thanks to Melinda Lowe and everyone who appeared in my episode about Fahrenheit 451. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like the show, please give us a shout out on social media or leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or tell a friend who you think might like the show. The best way to support Imaginary Worlds is to donate on Patreon.
At different levels, you get either free Imaginary World stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has a full length interviews of every guest and every episode. You can also get access to an ad free version through Patreon or by an ad free subscription on Apple Podcasts. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at ImaginaryWorldsPodcast.org.
Welcome to a journey into the heart of the Texas Renaissance Festival, the nation's largest and rowdeist celebration of medieval fantasy. But what lurks beneath the facade of tights and turkey legs? Well, we dove deep into the empire to uncover a history marred by mystery and misconduct, murders, assaults, and other crimes that tarnish its legacy. This isn't just a fairy tale. It's a cautionary tale of power, fantasy, and the consequences that follow when they all collide.
Search for crime waves Renaissance Texas on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now.