Be a Cactus Podcast

“Let them buy books” is not the answer Because I’m a retired high school librarian, well-meaning social media acquaintances often share a quote from Stephen King: “Hey kids! This is your old friend Steve King telling you that if they ban a book in your school, haul your ass to the nearest bookstore or library ASAP and find out what they don’t want you to read.” Their posts are followed in the comm...

Hello Friends, I’ve realized that I tend to riff in the audio version/voiceover. If you want a few sidebars about the banned books, that where they are. 😊 On the anniversary of my mother’s death If you read Be a Cactus last week, you know that it was the first anniversary of my brother's death and that today is the fourth anniversary of my mother's death. To state the obvious, the holidays have a...

John November 29, the day after Thanksgiving Day, was the first anniversary of my brother John’s death. Normally, I write my Substacks on Friday and record them on Saturday to have them ready for early Sunday morning. That was my plan, but God laughed, I suppose. All week, I’d had vivid dreams of my brother and my mother—the anniversary of her death is next Sunday. Some of the dreams were full of...

Living Dead Girl  While I normally save all the book challenge and ban news for a Part 2 each week, I want to bring forward this one news item. When I read it, I thought, “I know that book” because I had read it and book talked it to classes. It’s been a minute, so, as I often do, I went back to my School Library Lady blog to see if I’d written anything about it in the past. Here’s a link to the a...

Hello Friends! Several kind people reached out to me this past week with messages of good will. Thank you! I think the ‘endless’ headache has finally departed. I have a lot of important info this week, so if your reading time is limited, don’t forget that you can listen to the audio! Part 1 is about hybrid publishing. If you are a reader but not a writer looking to publish a book, feel free to go...

Being a person While it would be too strange to come back for the first time after the election without saying anything about it, I imagine you are a bit weary of the repetition of the same few messages. You’ve read them by now. I’m pretty sure everyone I know has shared this quote from Toni Morrison: And it’s a good one. But a thought hums in me: haven’t we been going to work on this, for nearly...

Hello friends! The Catholic Church’s  “synod on synodality”—summit on the future of the church—ended without allowing women to be deacons. (Pope Francis on CBS’s 60 Minutes in May: “Women are of great service as women, not as ministers”). Halloween is just behind us. The US presidential election is just in front of us. And I’ve been experiencing persistent, chronic anxiety. Worry about malignant n...

Hello Friends! I think this is the last post I am creating in advance so I can take a few weeks off to work on my next novel project. As my novel about a girl hoping to escape a polygamist cult ( Keep Sweet ) comes together for its launch in June 2025, I thought it would be interesting to have a look at cults and cultish behavior here on Be a Cactus . I do wonder, though, if my dive into cults, re...

Hello Friends! I mentioned in my last post that I’m scheduling a few posts early so that I can take a break for a three weeks and fully concentrate on starting a new project, a middle grade novel. So, I won’t have a lot of up-to-date book challenge news on these. My YA novel Keep Sweet is launching in June 2025. As I write this, I’m deciding on the book cover. The artist has provided five great ch...

Hello Friends, I’m scheduling some posts early so I can take a break for three weeks and fully concentrate on starting a new project (a middle grade novel—wish me luck!). I’ve realized that I am so passionate about book censorship, library issues, and small press publications getting their due that I often don’t add anything about myself. I happen to be thinking about myself just now because I am...

Hello Friends! I just realized that I skipped right over celebrating a one-year anniversary of Be a Cactus and of having more than 52 posts! That’s a lot of essays, and it’s fun to look back and see what I’ve written about (what’s important to me). However! I want to do one more essay for the closing of Banned Books Week, so the one-year celebration will have to wait. (I hope to take a little cele...

Hi Friends! It’s officially Banned Books Week. I’ve been ‘celebrating’ for several weeks now, posting on specific books that have been challenged often and over time, showing why librarians fight to have them in the collection (links at the end of this post). Today I want to discuss a more recent author—Akwaeke Emezi— and the issue of erasure through book banning. I realized as I was gathering inf...

The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth! Next week, for the official Banned Books Week, I’d like to look at a more recent author, Akwaeke Emezi, whose BIPOC...

Hi Friends, Since Banned Books Week is coming up in two weeks, I want to continue looking at books that have been banned for years and to show why librarians continue to fight to have them in the collection. Over decades, Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999) is one of the most popular of these books. Twenty years after its publication, Halse Anderson published Shout (2019) to call attention to the...

Hi Friends! This week I want to have look at a book that has been popping up on school library challenge and removal lists since it was pubIished in 2005. And yet it is still a favorite YA read and its author, John Green, has become one of the best-loved YA authors of all time. This discussion will be complete with major spoilers. I’m guessing if you are a reader and were in high school in the las...

Hi Friends: I know you can find a summary of a novel in many places, but that isn’t my overall purpose here. I want to talk about why a librarian (me, for example) has books in the library that some people—especially now—find objectionable. Why, in fact, a librarian (me, for example) would buy multiple copies of that book, and then talk to classes full of teens about that book so that they would k...

Hello Friends, I have two things I want to talk about today:  1) the Utah statewide school book ban of the series A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas and 2) Being a local author. These things may only be connected in my mind because they are on my radar in the same week, but I feel there’s more. I think my upcoming novel about a girl in a polygamist cult is the kind of thing that might be...

Hello friends! It’s been a hell of a week, hasn’t it? Two weeks, actually.  I was going to discuss how writing the same idea in two formats—a letter to the editor and an essay—works to different ‘reader goals,’ but the news upheaval this week pushed my letter to the Washington Post back from last Tuesday to today. So I’ll have a look at that idea next week. I’m going ahead with my thoughts about L...

Hello Friends! The other day I saw a quick interview Ali Velshi had with National Young Person’s Poet Laureate Elizabeth Acevedo for his Banned Book Club. It’s linked in this article from the Philadelphia Citizen : ALI VELSHI BANNED BOOK CLUB BANNING THE POET X  In The Poet X , the protagonist contends with her family’s disapproval of her self-expression. This reminded me of an experience I’d had...

I, like everyone I know, think of summer as slow and relaxing. It’s a time of gathering and connections for me—and also the scurrying around to make ready for those gatherings. It’s beautiful and the living is episodically easy. In a few days, some of my oldest friends will come to stay with me and that will be relaxing. So I’m scurrying to write and record this post early since I’ll be busy all w...

Gratitude Hi Friends! I mentioned last Sunday that my birthday was coming the following day. Thanks for the messages with well-wishes. I thought I knew what was going to happen on July 1, at least in the sphere of political news. Steve Bannon was going to jail, and I figured that would top the list. Oh boy, was I wrong! I take a Pilates mat class online from a teacher I’ve had for many years. The...

Hello friends, I had an article published in HuffPost this week and some people who read it kindly signed up for this newsletter. If that is you, welcome! And thank you.  Creating titles and CEO I’ve talked about the mystery of coming up with a good title here before . My HuffPost article has me interested in the SEO (search engine optimization) of title making. I really don’t understand SEO. I do...

Unhealthy religious callings I’m still in the deep dive of ‘exvangelicals,’ ex-Mormons, authoritative strict parenting, etc. I read this week that in San Diego, the Catholic diocese is declaring bankruptcy. That follows Baltimore and San Francisco last year. This while the Catholic bishops are set to apologize for the church’s role in Indian boarding schools. So I guess the idea is to do the wrong...