PSU Magazine Spring 2005

Wen Robin Cody started talking with PSU's Ooligan Press about repub– lishing his acclaimed first novel, Ricochet River, the Oregon author had a curveball to throw. The coming-of-age novel, origi– nally written for adults in 1992 , includes two brief sex scenes and four-letter language that some might say is appropriate for the book's colorful, Oregon logging town characters. Since then, the book has become a staple in Oregon high schools. But periodically, parents object to its lan– guage and sex scenes and joust with their local school boards-as they did this past winter in North Clackamas School District. These objections have lead to pre– dictable outcomes: books banned, books banned from the classroom but approved for the school library, or, as in the recent North Clackamas ruckus, the book was kept on the reading list, 6 PSU MAGAZINE SPRING 2005 but parents are notified and an alterna– tive book is available as an option. Cody's curveball is less predictable: Working with Ooligan Press, he revised the book to make it less objectionable to parents. "All it takes is a couple of parents to call it literary pornography," says Cody. "A paragraph or two taken out of con– text and read to a school board or church group-it's devastating. l'm against censorship, but I was in a per– sonal situation where I could make this book available to more people– and I did it. " "Its very surprising to me, actually, that an author would do it without pressure from the publisher," says Joan Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship. Bertin says she is not aware of another instance where an author has voluntar– ily censored a published work. Instead, such issues are typically undertaken during editing, says Bertin. "Editors and authors discuss this all the time , especially if the work is going to be marketed to minors ," says Benin . "I have heard of authors whose books are marketed as adult literature because they have sexual content, when their intended audience is young adults. That way the publisher doesn 't worry so much. " Ricochet River's main characters are three teenagers: star athlete Wade, independent Lorna, and Jesse, a blithely spirited American Indian. These three friends struggle toward adulthood within the claustrophobic confines of Calamus, a fictional logging town modeled on Cody'.s own home– town of Estacada. The book is often compared to Catcher in the Rye, j.D. Salinger'.s classic 1951 novel of teenage angst. But where Salinger's characters come from upper– class New York, Cody's have working– class roots.