"Look for the Helpers"

(... they can often be found near the books)

Greetings, from a few too many news-tours in culture-war theater!

The tangle of interconnected stories and issues is vast, from war-on-woke book bans to financial gutting of already-overstressed public schools.

All are topics striking newShrink chords a little too deep, personal nerves way too tender.

There were teeth-gnashing rants on some extra-long runs this week. For the first time in three years, I was suddenly moved to add my long-loved ritual of lap-swimming miles back into the regular routine.

At center above, Emmanuel Polanco’s illustration and headline from The New Yorker speak to this state of mind. In case the paywall is an obstacle, it’s just one of many similar stories nationwide:

When the Culture Wars Come for the Public Library (The New Yorker)

A Montana county’s battle shows how faith in public learning and public space is fraying.

A key word here is public: As in libraries, schools, school libraries, where an increasingly vast range of books, teaching — the very process of learning itself — are under fire.

From the core prespectives of newShrink, reading and writing are of course as basic as it gets in such professions and practices as journalism, history and law, academic study, research and writing. They are similarly fundamental at every level of psychology as well. Starting with the enormous mental-health and clinical impacts…

Rx and Tx: Reading and mental health

Bibliotherapy has long been a fundamental tool — a very real and fairly routine prescription — in about every specialty of clinical psychotherapy and counseling for decades. In recent years that has expanded with new media, interactive workbooks and technologies matched to audio/visual/text preferences and learning styles.

Since 2020 the necessary wide adoption of virtual video-therapies during the long pandemic has continued and expanded post-pandemic. Today amid epidemic gun violence and deep political fractures there are exponential increases in demand and need for therapists. This is amid a worsening shortage of licensed, qualified practitioners — and those willing to enter or stay in the profession. Widespread cuts and defunding of the ones sorely needed in public (and often even more needed in private or charter) schools are certainly no help.

It is a particularly bad time in America for battles against books, learning and those still brave and willing to try and provide them.

To drill deeper…

Reading from petra: The soul’s perspective

From the standpoint of depth/soul-engaged psychology, reading and writing help form, nourish and fortify the core of who we are. They’re part of a psychological process and living relationship that vitally nourishes our unfolding individuation — the way we become most wholly and fully ourselves — across the entire life span. This is how and why reading to and with children long before they are verbal — even in utero — is essential.

Developmentally, from a very young age as we learn language it is how our inner life takes form: Our felt-experiences and unfolding sense of Self making meaning from them. That developing relationship with our deepest selves becomes our bedrock — our interior petra, as I’ve come to think of this. (The Greek word for bedrock both names and describes the excavated ancient city in Jordan.)

As children this forms the central core of what our moral values are and will become. It’s the solid-ground from which we are able to engage with and repond to the people and world around us throughout life.

To halt and quash this process, just as it is only beginning, is… soul crushing.

To call that morality is…???

This is the point where words and today’s helpers theme arrived, from the long-forgotten title quote above by the late Fred/Mister Rogers. (Today’s edition will close with a bit more on the iconic children’s TV nurturer-educator-psychologist-ordained minister-musician known most widely as neighbor and friend.)

About the same time mid-week, I happened to catch, with absolutely no expectations and very little familiarity, the most moving and informative thing I have watched in awhile: The Amazon Prime Video documentary Judy Blume Forever. In young adulthood I had read only a couple of her grownup novels. The timing of my own early teen-hood had just missed her; I now see clearly how sorely she’d have been needed and welcome!

From today’s vantage points (especially as psychologist) I am awed, at times moved to tears, by Blume, back then and now at 85, as phenomenal educator, mother, partner, friend. She’s one of those best depth psychologists, who aren’t.

The entire documentary is well worth the 1 1/2-hour viewing if only for scenes of Blume browsing her literally thousands of letters from — and her responses back to — young readers. Then there are interviews from several of her letter-writers as adults — female, male, trans and some of them now famous themselves. The full correspondence collection is archived at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library.

Blume describes how keenly she had felt the weight of responsibility as kids of all kinds and ages reached out to her for connection and help. It moved her to work with a therapist herself, for the sake of educating herself in order to help, not harm.

So, Judy Blume is the first and dominant focus of today’s look at five of the great helpers past and present, in the Fred/Mister Rogers sense.

These begin clockwise from top right. As paywalls may be a limiting issue, more verbatim text than commentary is included today.

#1. ‘Margaret’ was banned from libraries. Now she’s headed to the movies. (The Washington Post)

The film adaptation of Judy Blume's oft banned "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" is being released amidst an alarming increase in book bans.

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The following excerpt captures a bit of both the documentary’s content and tone on Blume herself and this “Margaret” movie-moment:

Judy Blume’s Unfinished Endings (April 25, 2023 by Sarah Larson in The New Yorker)

Her most famous novel, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” is finally being adapted for the screen. But its mysteries remain rooted in real life.

The writer Judy Blume lives in Key West—“an exciting place to live,” Blume told me, in March, when I visited. Chickens roam free, orchids “grow like weeds,” cats wander in Hemingway’s house, and disco plays out drag-bar windows, all in DeSantis-era Florida.

Blume and her husband, George Cooper, moved to Key West thirty years ago, and have been doing their best to foster a kind of quotidian paradise, for themselves and the community. They live on the water and walk two miles every morning, with walking sticks, choosing their “A route” or “B route.” They have a favorite source of Key-lime pie and a coterie of friends.

Blume co-founded and works at an independent bookstore, Books & Books Key West; Cooper founded an independent movie theatre, the Tropic Cinema. Books & Books has a robust children’s section, with a shelf and a half of Blume’s novels—brisk sellers, which she often signs.

That week, her 1970 coming-of-age classic, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” appeared in a small display, in pink paperback, and at the Tropic a poster for its new screen adaptation, with a tastefully nostalgic seventies font, was in a coming-soon display in the lobby. It open[ed in late April]…

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(The above New Yorker interview is in one of my favorites of the magazine’s regular features Persons of Interest: Profiles of artists, thinkers and newsmakers. This link includes others of recent interest, such as journalists Maggie Haberman of The New York Times and Audie Cornish of NPR.)

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“Judy Blume Forever” Review: The Y.A Author who went there first

This overview is part of a good New York Times series of stories, columns and video,“The Judy Blume Renaissance.”

In the popular imagination, the book is mostly concerned with the changing body and the rites of puberty, and that’s what made it controversial. But Margaret’s exploration of religion — her Jewish father and Christian mother encourage her to decide for herself — also drew the ire of the religious right. The God Margaret confides in is nondenominational; as a preteen, she has agency and choice.

This 53-year-old story is landing in theaters squarely in the middle of today’s culture wars. The weightier issues it reflects, which had seemingly receded, are back at the forefront: overt antisemitism, the widespread curtailing of women’s reproductive rights, and a resurgence of book banning and censorship. “It’s worse than the ’80s,” when the author’s work was first targeted, “because of the way it’s coming from government,” Judy Blume said.

An era in which girls and women were held in an information vacuum — about their own bodies! — seems dangerously close to being resurrected. Even as children are starting puberty earlier, legislation currently advancing in the Republican-controlled House in Florida would effectively ban girls from even discussing their periods, according to the bill’s sponsor, until middle school. (The bill also limits sex education in general.)…[similar laws being passed as we speak in NC, Missouri, … see link to further ]

….Blume, 85, has been active with the National Coalition Against Censorship for decades. Recently she felt ready to step back. “But now I feel I’m going to speak out every chance I get.”

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A great PBS overview for those who prefer the video version:

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This lively By the Book interview with Blume captures for me some the amazingly wise and intentional things along these lines that my own parents got right. (This was amid the many inevitable stumbles and bigger failings they had, like all parents everywhere.) There was permission and encouragement to read any- and everything, from anywhere, at any age, that I chose… with the theoretical stipulation of open discussion of the material at any time with parents and family adults. (Of course, the latter tended never to happen, in either direction, around that most important personal-experiental stuff!)

The Best Book Judy Blume Ever Got as a Gift? ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover.’ (NYT)

Selected excerpts…

The author of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” received the D.H. Lawrence novel after her wedding in 1959: “The marriage didn’t last but the honeymoon was memorable.”

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What book should nobody read until the age of 40?

“I don’t believe in restricting books but sometimes, what you read at 13 is entirely different when you approach it at 40. This can be a good thing.

By the time I was 12 or 13 I was choosing books from my parents’ bookshelves. No books were off limits. My mother, who had many fears, was not afraid of what books I chose to read. Reading was a good thing at our house.”

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One of the most important things she got from books?

“Everything I always wanted to know about sex.”

Noted is some school-age reading experience she still values. It’s much like my own, with my very Southern junior high teachers having us read and report on The Strange Career of Jim Crow, The Mind of the South and much literature pro and con about the Vietnam War. From Blume:

My sixth-grade civics teacher read “Animal Farm” aloud to our class. I still think of that and how I looked forward to her readings. How quaint that I had a civics teacher in sixth grade in public school in Elizabeth, N.J.

This comment came to mind again this week, with an NPR All Things Considered story on latest “National Report Card” data showing dramatic drops in U.S. 8 graders’ knowledge of U.S. history and basic civics. While other measures, reading, math and science, have shown predictable drops from the Covid pandemic, the history and civics decline was already decades-long and steeply dropped between 2010 and 2019.

This visual summarizes Blume’s past and current vocal part in the public dialogue about censorship. Covers from two of her many popular titles about and for young boys are separate in the top two corners; only her books for girls and those confronting such life challenges as death, divorce, and teen sex from the hetereosexual girl’s perspective were taboo and long on banned lists. Pictured shelves of current — increasingly popular! — banned books are from today’s bookstores nationwide.

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This introduction to Blume brought to mind other great helpers. This next one (shown at bottom right in the lede illustration above) is from a generation slightly earlier than Blume, with some personal associations closer to home.

#2. Dr. Jonnie McLeod (1923-2011)

The late Charlotte pediatrician, professor, physician’s wife and mother of five was an activist pioneer in sex-education in this mid-century Southern city even a bit before Judy Blume was taking on that challenge. She’s also remembered widely today in the area for her seminal work as founder of what are now the region’s McLeod Wellbeing Centers for substance-abuse counseling and treatment.

Dr. McLeod was also a devout active church-member Baptist — like my family, one of the social-justice-liberal variety. (This was back in the decades when those weren’t rare; some were revered or even got elected President.) A member of another church, for some reason McLeod spent a lot of time at ours too, meeting and teaching with both parents and youth groups together and separately about… sex!

I recall youth-group friends’ parents who stayed away and with many others ranted in disapproval. I’m glad to recall how my parents liked and admired her, supporting her work with pre-teens and teens. From the daughter-role there, I must add that at least part of their high regard for McLeod was surely relief and gratitude for her expertise and ability to do the heavy-lifting in direct communication and personal questions on the topic!

For many of us humans for many reasons, it was back then, as it generally is now — and even in the safest of contained psychotherapy settings. Talking across the parent-child generations in either direction, at any age, about the more intimate, felt-experiential aspects of sexuality — not the outside-in, basic factual or “medical” — is simply… difficult? Yikes? Ick/cringeworthy?

That’s perhaps because genuine open discussion flows in both directions, presumes and requires profound self-awareness and candor of both. For parent and child, going-there by either is potentially disruptive of much else in their lives together and relationships. Many adults both partnered and single are unwilling or unable to do so with or about their own relationships and sexual lives.

Meanwhile, parents/other adults presenting “open” discussion, with their own experience held safely off-limits, simply aren’t trusted, believed or seriously regarded on the subject. And justifiably so.

This is why we all need helpers! Including the ones in books, and those no longer with us. Called-on to scale back some of her activities Dr. McLeod once listed her priorities:

To help the needy, the lonely, empty rich, those who do not know how to use their own talents, change policies or laws, influence people in power for the good of the majority, or simply perhaps elevate us into more God-like humanity.'

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All of which brought to mind a favorite contemporary subject of an early newShrink edition (pictured at bottom left in the lede illustration above.)

#3. Elizabeth Banks: My Body, My Podcast

The comedian and actress well-known in popular movies, now at 49 also brings vital, fresh and psychologically savvy new how-to on “the sex-ed talks (starting with us adults). The excerpt below is from Friday 11.5.21 Bullfrog Cuisine, Our Bodies/Our Psyche... and Bands Full of Angels?.

The effervescent comedic actor-director with a definite grasp of the sustainable and soulful, Banks talks with Stephen Colbert about her podcast, “My Body/My Podcast” (available only in Audible) a bit of a nostalgic nod to the boomer-era classic book, Our Bodies, Ourselves.

I highly recommend a leisurely viewing of the entire video (even, or perhaps especially, if some of the easy, open words and language feel uncomfortable.) Here are some of her comments I find psychologically relevant and that continue to move me:

“It’s a sex-ed podcast, continuing-ed for me about sex, sexuality, and all the questions that I still have as an adult — and all the answers I felt I needed as a parent of two sons who are about to go through puberty. And I’m unprepared…”

(More on her rationale for “naming and de-shaming” of things like body parts, and particularly those involved with women’s sexuality besides just reproduction):

“The more we can open up these conversations, the healthier, more intimate… my hope is, the more deep interactions my sons are going to have with other human beings.”

(On the increased risk of not talking about sex, in an age and culture where pornography is immensely accessible:)

“It’s how our young people… if you leave sex-ed up to the young people, if you don’t talk about these things, porn is their number-one teacher. And I just felt like, I’d rather they hear stuff from me, and that they have a real literacy around it. Because pornography is not reality.”

(And with Colbert, Banks doesn’t mince words about the tremendous need for men to be more engaged emotionally, conversationally, and relationally with their partners and all the women in their lives — rather than delegating by default so much of open conversation and conscious-sexuality to women.

The link: My Body, My Podcast (Listen on the Audible app for books on audiotape)
Written and narrated by Elizabeth Banks.
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Also more currently, just this month (pictured at top left in the lede illustration above)…

#4. “How this NC author writes authentic stories about race for kids and their families” (The Charlotte Observer)

Alicia D. Williams’ first book, for middle grades, tackled themes of family and Black identity, won awards and a rave in The New York Times in 2019. Her latest book came out last fall. “The Talk” covers the all-too-familiar conversation Black and brown parents have with their kids to keep them safe. It’s a book aimed at children ages 4 to 8, and also has won awards for Williams.

Whether books are non-fiction or fiction, she considers them essential sustenance to young readers and their caregiviers. She’s keenly aware that:

“People choose to ban books. These books give hope, they give answers, they give empathy, they break down fear and the walls that we build ourselves around. They are literal road maps to freedom.” ….

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And finally, after that initial title quote, much about Fred/Mister Rogers, his life and character, did not come to mind until very late in the writing week. (And days after my mysterious re-entry into the lap-swimming pool.)

#5. Fred/Mister Rogers (1928-2003)

“This 'Mister Rogers' moment broke race barriers. It's just as powerful today” (A Today Show 2020 retrospective).

The scene aired amid racial tensions in the U.S. over segregated swimming pools, and many see it as Rogers taking a stand against racism.

Especially if you, like me, somehow missed his influence as a youngster I highly recommend both the 2018 documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, and the 2019 feature film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, starring Tom Hanks. The swimming pool was of far more immediate and daily significance for Rogers than just the above article about the show.

Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister, like Judy Blume received letters by the thousands from fans and viewers. His often included prayer requests. Meanwhile, after healing from childhood asthma, over decades Rogers kept a near-daily 4-a.m. regimen of lap-swimming in a pool both near home and while traveling. His prayer ritual during the laps was simply saying the names of those who had sent their requests. In both films this had moved me enormously.

Well, no wonder I found myself back in the pool!

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And, that is all I have! Talk to you soon. (Posts these next next few hectic weeks may be oddly timed and abbreviated. Happy May in any case.)

🦋💙 tish

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… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

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Some links to news stories and commentary that provide context and sources for today’s edition are in News Notebook Sources and Context 5.7.23.

For excellent summary and connecting of the many issues here I especially recommend mid-to-late-week daily posts Letters from an American from historian Heather Cox Richardson (heathercoxrichardson.substack.com) and Today’s Edition from lawyer-political strategist Robert Hubbell (roberthubbell.substack.com.)