(2008) Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War was removed from a classroom at Central Lafourche High School for violating the district policy on cursing.

 

 

Not because of violence, no. Not because of how shocking the story is, or the disturbing content. Nope. Cursing. 

 

My ninth grade English teacher, David Nielsen, once gave my class a writing assignment that is among the few writing assignments that I remember vividly. It had a fundamental effect on what I thought about writing, what I allowed myself to write, and what the other kids in my class (many of whom didn't have the writing bug in the same way I did) wrote. It was toward the end of the school year and we were all feeling that launching effect of knowing it was the end of junior high and the start of big-kid-ness. He gave us a completely open assignment: write a short story. He didn't care what it was about, we could pick any topic. And, he said - which had a massive effect on us - we could put in swearing, if it was justified and in character. We could include violence, if it was justified and served the story. We could do whatever we wanted. 

 

Okay, so, it was 1990. Weirdly enough, that now feels like a far more innocent age. Being told we could use violence and swearing in a story was huge. And we went off and wrote the best stories we'd written in our whole school career, some of us. (I read a lot of the other student's stories and I remember them.) I remember kids who had never really cared much about writing bringing in frightening stories about kidnappings, and gritty locker-room-y sports stories, having a literal blast romping around in battlefields telling war stories. I wrote a 10-or-more-page science fiction story about a guerilla strike by freedom-fighting aliens against the human outpost on their homeworld. Just being able to put guns and blood into the story had a freeing effect on me.

 

For once none of us were self-censoring, and we did better work because of it. And I remember that assignment, and that teacher, fondly for it. It cracked open another creative avenue for me, made the aperture my writing could come through a little wider. It allowed me access to the dark tones as well as the light and midtones, essentially, and it goes in my mental list of moments that helped me grow as a writer. 

 

Policy on cursing. My lily white ass.