Diane Lefer
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What Ray Bradbury Taught Me about Censorship and Freedom

6/15/2012

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 Thank you, Mary Ann Loesch for inviting me to be a guest blogger for All Things Writing. Here's the link, with my words also pasted below. 
 

The  master is gone. I've been thinking about Ray Bradbury all week and I'm sure you  have been too. Is there a writer or a reader anywhere who does not respond to Fahrenheit 451?

In  Bradbury's novel, not only are books burned but newspapers disappear due to public indifference. People are instead entranced with their "parlor walls," the  flat screen TV's that Bradbury imagined back in 1953 that can now represent the  internet and Wii and all the virtual worlds that have usurped the role of books.  But to me, the "walls" carried me back to the immigration detention
center where  I was a volunteer interpreter for people held for months, even years, awaiting  their hearings. Books and magazines were prohibited while TV sets blared at full  volume all day.

And  I thought about a friend who was convicted at age 16 for a stupid youthful  incident in which no human being or any living creature was injured in any way.  After being sentenced 35-years-to-life, he spent a year in solitary, supposedly for his own protection--and inmates in solitary were not allowed to have books.  A wonderful person on the outside Xeroxed entire novels and put three double-sided pages in the mail every day, in envelopes thin enough that they  would not be confiscated. Reading novels in 6-page installments was what kept my  friend sane.

I  have other true stories like this and it has always been a struggle to get any of it into print. (Talk about censorship: the media is barred from California prisons and detention centers.)

But Ray Bradbury was able to offer a scathing critique of our society and see it not  only published but a bestseller. David Ulin, Los Angeles Times book critic, suggested perhaps writing genre fiction--in Bradbury's case, science fiction--gave an author more freedom.

Yes!  I thought of my late friend, Ted Gottfried (aka Ted Mark), who wrote dirty books  from the Sixties up until around (coincidence?) 1984.  Ted believed teenage boys were gonna learn  about sex from porn and he wanted them to learn healthy attitudes, especially  respect for women. In the Man from  O.R.G.Y. series, Steve Victor travels the world solving sexual problems,  always taking the advice of his feminist girlfriend, Stephanie Greenwillow.  Along the way, Ted's books addressed every controversial issue of the day. As  long as there was arousal material on every page, the publisher didn't care if  Ted expressed his
opinions. 
 
Ted's  porn career came to an end when smut went visual: dirty movies and then the  internet. As Bradbury understood, you don't have to burn books to make them  disappear. I wish Ted could have still been writing books during the era of  AIDS. He could have saved lives by making safe sex very sexy.  

I  think Ted would have enjoyed my new novel, Nobody Wakes Up Pretty, which Edgar  Award winner Domenic Stansberry described as "A sexy, funny, tender-hearted  puzzler about a young woman sifting the ashes of America's endless class  warfare." And I realized my NYC noir--my genre novel--says more about race and  class and says it more overtly than anything else I've had  published.

 Is  genre the only way to write uncensored fiction? Maybe it's just that you can't  write a genre novel without telling a good story. And when you tell a good story  you have freedom.
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Nobody Wakes Up Pretty available in paperback now -- and I come across an old review....

5/16/2012

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So here I am, all excited that the new book is available when I come across a review of The Blessing Next to the Wound, one I'd never seen before. And what makes me so happy with it is that the blogger wouldn't ordinarily read anything like our book. I love reaching people in this unexpected way. Here's what she wrote in the blog Gloria's Mind: About Everything, Nothing and Maybe a Few
Interesting Things:

Green BooksCampaign: The Blessing Next To The Wound
 Posted on Wednesday,November 10, 2010 | 1 Comment

 This review is part of the Green Books campaign.Today 200 bloggers take a
stand to support books printed in an eco-friendlymanner by simultaneously
publishing reviews of 200 books printed on recycled orFSC-certified paper. By
turning a spotlight on books printed using eco-friendly paper, we hope to raise
the awareness of book buyers and encourageeveryone to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books.

 The campaign is organized for the second time by Eco-Libris, a green
company working to make reading more sustainable. We invite you to join the
discussionon “green” books and support books printed in an eco-friendly manner!
A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris website.

 The Review: I do not really enjoy reading books with political and historical themes. I find the text too cumbersome. I skip past it and read something that is more useful for me at the moment. So, I was surprised to see, The Blessing Next To The Wound, by Hector Aristizabal andDiane Lefer, when it arrived at my home. 

I opened the package and I was sure I didn’t order it. I emailed Raz from Eco-Libris to let them him know I was either sent the wrong book or that I ordered a wrong book. Maybe it was a subconscious mistake. Hector Aristizabal taught me mistakes can turn out to be a good thing.

When it happened: I was making dinner one night, just a few days after receiving,The Blessing Next To The Wound. The food on the stove had a few minutes to siton the stove to finish cooking. My office is right next to the kitchen (makes for poor eating habits) and so; I noticed the book sitting there on my desk unopened. It wasn’t the authors’ fault a mistake was made and it takes
a lot of work to write a book. I kept looking at the book… The picture of the man with the blindfold over his eyes and the title really peaked my curiosity. Why was this book even on the Eco-libris list?

So,I turned the page to the introduction and began to read. When the timer on the stove beeped notifying me that dinner was ready to serve I looked the corner of the page to bookmark it and I realized I was several pages into reading this book by the time the timer on the stove went off. I was hooked and I knew I was. So, when Raz from Eco-libris returned my email, I let him know it wasn’t
a problem after all. This was turning out to be a good read. It was a good read.It was a very good read. 

There is something humbling about reading about a man living through poverty,political crisis, torture, abortion of his own children, and deaths of two of his brothers that really make a book like this amazing and well worth the read.Though keeping the dates, times, and names of a few places took a lot of notetaking it was everything between the lines that I took in. This was truly and inspiring tale about taking something from the bad and using it to heal others as well as oneself. Hector did just that. He used his acting abilities and his psychotherapeutic know-how and then used it to help people heal. In the end he finally began to use these skills to help himself too. 

The Blessing Next To The Wound is printed on recycled paper




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Nobody Wakes Up Pretty available today on Kindle

5/9/2012

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paperback will follow within days. and here's the ad Lyle Perez-Tinics created.
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    Diane Lefer at Rhapsodomancy

    Author, Playwright, Troublemaker

     

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