‘I didn’t write for the pearl clutchers.’: YA author Allayne Webster on banned books and literacy

Allayne L. Webster is an internationally published Children’s and Young Adult author. She also plays guitar, sings and sometimes she illustrates. Paper Planes (Scholastic) was a 2016 CBCA Notable, shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards, and has recently been included in the Australian Heritage Literary Project Untapped Collection. A Cardboard Palace (MidnightSun Publishing) was a 2018 CBCA Notable, published in Sweden. Our Little Secret (Scholastic) was listed for the Golden Inkys, and The Centre of My Everything (Penguin RandomHouse) was listed in the 2019 Davitt Awards and shortlisted in the 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards. Sensitive (UQP) is published in Russia and was shortlisted in the 2020 Australian Speech Pathology Awards.

That Thing I Did (Wakefield Press) – is Allayne’s ninth publication. In it, five misfits hit the road in a haunted hearse, on a madcap road-trip from their prison-bordering suburb behind the ‘Mullet-Proof Fence’ to small-town Mount Gambier. Today, Allayne L. Webster is on the blog to talk about her new novel and how censorship sometimes makes it difficult for challenging books to be put into young readers’ hands. Read on …

Allayne L. Webster

Several years ago, I was invited to run a writing workshop for Year 9/10 students at an Adelaide public high school. Prior to the gig, my host teacher was apologetic: It’s a low socio-economic area, students are disengaged, literacy low, truancy high, behavioural issues rife, particularly the boys.

Upon pulling into the carpark, my welcome mat was two teenagers going for it in the playground. Really going for it. Pashing like the world was about to end, a tangle of limbs and hot desire. It wasn’t even lunch break.

I headed for the office where I was met by my apologetic host. She took me to the classroom, all the while explaining how hard it was to engage these kids.

In a cramped and tired teaching space, I was greeted by boys slouched over desks and girls glaring me down. A mop-haired surfy kid grinned—ah, the class clown.

I opened: I’m a writer and I get it if you think that’s boring. You’ve been dragged here and told to listen. You don’t have a choice. I remember what that was like.

They stared at me like I’d broken an unwritten rule.

I told them we’d have a conversation. (No actual writing? Hell yeah! Bludge lesson!) I asked them to tell me about their favourite stories—books, film, video games. Unsurprisingly they discussed graphic horror movies and/or television and gaming with adult classification ratings. I said that when I was at school I loved Judy Blume novels because my mother hated the content. We passed Forever under the table and it was never actually checked into the library; everyone wanted to know what it was like to do the deed.

Mr Surfy Joker couldn’t hide his enthusiasm. His classmates followed suit. The questions about writing came thick and fast. When I provided examples of published kids their age and younger? Total investment.

My host teacher beamed. I’ve never seen them act like that! Later, the SA Premier’s Reading Challenge coordinator said, You put the power in their hands. My teacher-best friend said wistfully, You’re not hamstrung by parents and reporting outcomes like me.

I’ve always written with my young audience front of mind, but with my latest YA, That Thing I Did, I’ve written with the knowledge the content will raise eyebrows. That’s fine—I didn’t write for the pearl clutchers.

Not long after I published my debut Our Little Secret (Scholastic, 2007), I received an email from a renegade librarian: Your book is on an underground censorship list shared between schools. I scoured the list she’d secretly forwarded and there was my book about rape—a book I’d written years before the #MeToo movement. I’ve since visited schools and been told, Perhaps don’t discuss that one. (*Now in 2022, the government wants the curriculum to include teaching consent. I was fifteen years too early.)

In 2018, I wrote again about sexual assault in The Centre of My Everything (Penguin Random House). By then the conversation had changed and yet still a teacher told me my novel was kept in a filing cabinet/students had to request it. I’m especially grateful to that teacher. I’ve portrayed such a scenario in That Thing I Did.

‘Challenging’ books are published because they’re considered important to the kids who need them (read: kids who’ve experienced trauma). By placing them in the library, we hope they’ll make their way into the right hands. But we don’t necessarily centralise these books, study them or normalise them. It’s been suggested that it’s because teachers are often the victims of trauma and the conversation is too triggering.

That? That I understand. That I totally sympathise with. But keep a book under lock and key? Refrain from purchasing it? Exclude it from the marketing guide? How do you build empathy and understanding in kids who don’t have firsthand experience with trauma? (Sidenote: thank goodness they don’t.)

In That Thing I Did, I’ve tipped the consent narrative on its head. I’ve explored sex via a comedic lens, also broaching suicide, abusive relationships and the pressures of social media. Will this book land on an underground blacklist or be kept in a filing cabinet? In the era of wildly popular TV series like Sex Education I’d hope not, but then again that series was given an adult classification rating.

Teenagers are exposed to a plethora of content via music, movies, television and online. They’re doing it in playgrounds. Granted, not every teen wants or needs something gruelling and confronting. But some do. Some view reading as a pointless exercise unless it truly speaks to them. I know because I was one of those kids. If the goal is to improve literacy, surely whatever sparks that flame is what we should harness?

Teenage Allayne would like to thank Judy Blume, Robin Klein, V. C. Andrews, Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette—authors who spawned my lifelong love affair with the written word. I progressed to literary texts and then to writing them. I’ve written educational books like Paper Planes (Scholastic) and A Cardboard Palace (MidnightSun) and I’ve written #ownvoices like Sensitive (UQP) about chronic illness. I can wear that hat, I can wear this one. They’re not mutually exclusive.

As a teen I loved reading because I was in the driver’s seat. My rural school library served as the town’s public library. If I couldn’t check a book out, I could certainly sit there and read it. In retrospect, my parents didn’t curate what I read—and to my benefit. The problem isn’t content—it’s context, a lack of opportunity to ask questions thereafter.

I was privileged to have fantastic teachers at my little country school. I remember their smirks, their twinkling eyes, their amusement at my enthusiasm for Flowers in the Attic. I remember my teacher, Mr Vaughan, thrilled with my Year 12 exam result. How did you write like that under those conditions? Teenage Me answered arrogantly: Before the exam I rode around town on my bike and I wrote the essay in my head. Easy-as when you read as much as I do.

Almost thirty years later, that conversation and his reaction are as powerful as ever. What I didn’t say to him, and with the benefit of hindsight I should have said was: I wrote like that because I had a teacher like you who let me read exactly what turned me on. Recently when I queried a private school librarian about what she would do if That Thing I Did received complaints, she said with a wicked smile, Don’t you worry, Honey. I drown the complainant in paperwork. They quickly back down when they realise the work involved in banning a book. That librarian? She’s my hero.

—That Thing I Did by Allayne L. Webster (Wakefield Press) is out now.

That Thing I Did

by Allayne L. Webster

After Taylor Kennedy makes a fatal Facebook error and is dumped by his best friend, he's befriended by his eccentric next-door neighbour. Aspiring pornographer Chip drives a funeral hearse and talks to dead people, and he wants Taylor's help.

But mild-mannered prison escapee Jackson Rollock has other plans. They're liberating Jackson's beloved, mouthy grandmother from her nursing home and hitting the road to fulfil her dying wish - with beautiful hitchhiker Chloe on board. They'll break the rules, bare their souls ...

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