A lot of people want change. Very few want the habits that create it 📚👀 #readertoreader #readtolead

Thanks to everyone who donated to this year’s #BookHero book drive! We sent 170 new children’s books to Elizabeth Baldwin Elementary School. Thank you for showing up for these kids 🩷@nchurnin @ReaderToReader #kidlit #literacy #writingcommunity #schoollibrary

Kidlit community: We’d love for you to be a part of Elizabeth Baldwin Elementary’s library story. Please reach out to me with any questions! @ReaderToReader @nchurnin #literacy #schoollibrary #bookdrive #kidlit

If you need a trigger warning to read a book, sometimes the issue is the book and sometimes the issue is somewhere else. I want to talk carefully about that distinction because it matters more than the loudness of the current debate suggests. Let me start by saying clearly what I think trigger warnings do well, because the topic is loaded and skipping over the legitimate cases would be dishonest. Combat veterans with diagnosed PTSD should not have to walk into a Vietnam novel without knowing what the chapters contain. Survivors of specific traumatic violence should not be ambushed by detailed scenes of that exact violence in the middle of a book that gave no signal. Those are legitimate uses of the warning. Specific. Bounded. Functional. They serve real people with real medical conditions. I support them without reservation. Anyone who pretends otherwise is not paying attention to actual trauma. That is not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about the broader cultural drift, which is something else. We have moved over the last decade from warnings that protect specific medical conditions to warnings that protect against any emotional discomfort. We now see warnings for grief, for breakups, for death of fictional characters, for unhappy endings, for any moment in a story that might make a reader feel something other than affirmation. The category quietly expanded from clinical to comfort, and most of us did not notice the shift while it was happening because each individual addition seemed reasonable at the time. I lived this myself in a small way that I want to share. Two years ago I taught a one-week writing workshop at a small literary program. I assigned a short story by a Polish writer about a man losing his daughter. The story was harrowing in the way good literature about grief is harrowing. Three of my eight students filed complaints because I had not warned them adequately. They were not survivors of child loss themselves. They had simply found the experience of reading the story too difficult and felt that difficulty had been inflicted on them without consent. I sat with those complaints for a long time. I did not dismiss them. The students were earnest. They were not bad people. They genuinely believed they had been harmed by encountering a difficult story without preparation. But I also could not agree that what had happened was harm in the way the word usually means. They had been moved. They had been disturbed. They had been forced to think about something terrible. Those are exactly the things literature has done to readers for three thousand years. The Greek tragedies are not pleasant. The Russian novels are not comforting. The Bible is full of scenes that would require warnings if applied today. If we extend the protective framework so far that the encounter with serious literature itself becomes the harm, we are saying something significant about what we want literature to be. We are saying we want it to confirm us rather than challenge us. We are saying we want it to feel like home rather than like travel. That is a legitimate desire. Comfort literature exists and it serves real human needs. But if it becomes the default expectation, the entire form loses something important. Books are one of the few remaining places where a stranger can put a thought into your head that you would not have generated yourself. That capacity depends on the book being able to disturb you without asking permission first. I want to be careful about the next part because this is where the conversation usually gets heated. I am not saying readers should toughen up. I am not saying sensitivity is weakness. I am not saying any of the things that are usually said in essays like this one and that polarize the debate without resolving anything. What I am saying is more modest. Different readers genuinely need different things at different points in their lives. Some readers, in some seasons of life, need comfort and should pursue comfort literature without apology. Other readers, in other seasons, need to be challenged and should pursue difficult literature without expecting it to soften itself for them. Both are legitimate. Both are part of what reading is for. The mistake I think we are making collectively is collapsing those two needs into one. We are training a generation of readers to expect that all literature should serve the comfort function and that any book that does not is failing them. That trains the nervous system to register difficulty as danger across the board, when actually difficulty in a controlled fictional setting is one of the safer ways humans have ever developed to practice handling difficulty. I want my own children, if I had them, to have access to both. Comfort literature when they need it. Difficult literature when they are ready for it. And the wisdom to know which they need on which day. That second category, the difficult kind, only stays available if we keep the cultural space open for books to disturb us. So here is what I would say to readers struggling with this question. Pay attention to which kind of book you actually need today. Do not confuse a season of needing comfort with a permanent dietary restriction against difficulty. Do not let the current cultural moment convince you that being moved is the same as being harmed. They overlap sometimes. They are not the same thing. Preserving the difference is part of how you stay a serious reader over a lifetime. And if you are going through a genuinely hard moment in your life, give yourself permission to read easy books for a while without guilt. Comfort is real. Comfort matters. The challenging books will still be there when you are ready for them again. Both can be true at the same time. That is most of what good cultural conversation requires. Holding two true things at once without forcing one to defeat the other. I do not have a perfect answer to where we draw the line. I do not think anyone does honestly. But I think we are better served by talking about it openly than by either dismissing the warning culture as foolish or treating any pushback as cruelty. The book is not always the problem. Neither is the reader. Sometimes it is just that we have stopped having the patience to figure out which is which on a case by case basis. We can do better than that. We have time to figure it out together. #NoahDaren #TriggerWarnings #3AMThoughts #QueensNY #WritingLife #ThoseWhoCameFromTheCode #BothCanBeTrue #ReaderToReader #WhatLiteratureIsFor #SeasonsOfReading

A Free Press reader shares gratitude for the London Fire Department after a recent safety check of the vacant property next door. tinyurl.com/2k9vfsj7 #ldnont #ReadertoReader

Oh wow! I'm so proud to be in the Winner's Circle! Congrats to all who participated! Thank you! So honored! Thank you Lynn Street I've been informed I'm to receive a signed copy of her new book!! So chuffed! lynnstreetbooks.com/books/th… #WritingCommunity #kidlit #picturebooks Thank you to all the judges and prize donors! Wow! I enjoyed reading and commenting on many of the wonderful entries! Please consider a follow for all these wonderful prize donors and judges! @inkyelbows @HelenHWuBooks @JulieFHedlund @baptistepaul @Literally_Lynne @DowPhumiruk @viviankirkfield @KirstenWLarson @Jill_SF @FedericoErebia @ReaderToReader Karen Greenwald @Yangmommy @MariaMarshall_ GrandpasBarnBooks #SunWriteFun #kid So excited! Thanks again!

Thank you SO much for checking your local library, for letting me know this, and for reading some of my books! I'm so grateful for your support and kind words, Anne! 🥰🥳❤️

Glad you squeaked it in at the last minute! Go #kidlit #writers! #SunWriteFun

And for my last trick (lol) I’ll be creeping up to 32 Summer Fun points if I post my fav science PB! I love THE FIRE OF STARS by Kirsten W Larson! #SunWriteFun #kidlit KarenGreenbaum.com/sunwritef… @ReaderToReader @Yangmommy @SWildmanSF Karen Greenbaum

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Just entered the #sunwritefun contest! Tagging creators #karengreenwald, @Yangmommy and @SWildmanSF. This is my first time entering! Tagging other #kidlit authors @Drenderturmaud @feliz_reading @ashayhen @ShSinnett @katie_mcenaney @AnneLeBlanc2 @ReaderToReader

Today is the last day to enter #SunWriteFun ☀️ @ReaderToReader @Yangmommy @SWildmanSF KarenGreenbaum KarenGreenbaum.com/sunwritef… I’m going to tag 5 #KidLit folks below as part of my entry: @RonnaWriter @Drenderturmaud @mandyscribbles @mohan_shuba @KimALarson7

Thank you @writerjolene for donating to #sunwritefun My public library has THREE of your books. Too Much was so well written. I learned a lot from The Offrenda That We Built. #karengreenwald @Yangmommy @hfxpublib @SWildmanSF @ReadertoReader karengreenwald.com/sunwritef… #kidlit

Thank you Dow Phumiruk @EastWestLit for donating to #sunwritefun My library has 8 books of your books. I loved the illustrations in Counting on Katherine. I put the rest on hold! @hfxpublib @Yangmommy @SWildmanSF karengreenwald.com/sunwritef… #karengreenwald @ReaderToReader #kidlit

#SunWriteFun @ReaderToReader #SunWriteFun @12x12Challenge karengreenwald.com/sunwritef… @SWildmanSF @Yangmommy @JulieFHedlund @KateMessner @fangmous @JessHinrichs @artsylliu @elaine_kearns11 @CarterHiggins @KariALavelle @KaileiPew @ebonylynnmudd

Woohoo!! @12x12Challenge are so generous to donate a membership year after year. And their #kidlit community is one of the best! @KelliPanique

That’s awesome! Third year in a row is such a testament to your love for the craft, good luck with your entry!

Just submitted my entry to #SunWriteFun! It’s my third year participating. Come join the fun at karengreenwald.com/sunwritef… . Thank you for putting on such a great contest year after year! @Yangmommy @SWildmanSF #karengreenwald @ReaderToReader #WritingCommunity

Our #prize donors are simply the best!! #SunWriteFun

There are so many amazing #SunWriteFun prizes this year! Thank you, #writingcommunity donors! @baptistepaul @little_press @GnomeRoadPub @Yangmommy @SWildmanSF @AuthorHMacht @SusannaLHill @Jill_SF @Literally_Lynne @nchurnin @aj_irving @ReaderToReader karengreenwald.com/sunwritef…