A SAMPLE ESSAY

Ursula LeGuin once remarked during a censorship battle that revolved around fantasy literature that we shouldn't banish dragons from our stories because then we banish the possibility of St. George. It seems to me that, in a time when censors are raising their banners around the country in numbers greater than ever, that we should think about the importance and the power of these particular dragons.

In a book called TOUCH MAGIC I wrote that children reading about great quests, about heroes, take that cup of borrowed courage, drink it and make courage their own. Notice, I talked about courage. I did not say that the child would then think they could take a real sword and go marching off to--insert here the name of your favorite third world dictatorship. But perhaps that child might use the borrowed courage discovered in a book to battle his or her own dragons at home.

I would like to remind us that, first of all, dragons are mythical beasts. I do not mean to belittle anyone by suggesting that my readers actually believe dragons are real. But trust me, there are plenty of folk out there who do.

Further, we must remind ourselves that thinking about dragons, dreaming about them, reading about them will not--no matter how much we may want it--make dragons real.

Now you and I already know this. We wouldn't be here if we did not. However, there are people who want us to rid our literature of dragons, fearing that these story creations will somehow hurt our children, will somehow bring our children face to face with real live dragons. I have to say this flat out: such people--well meaning though they may be--are delusional. Either that or they do not think their children are very smart.

For example, there was a parent who wanted to ban Bruce Coville's JEREMY THATCHER, DRAGON HATCHER on the grounds that the dragon in the book eats liver and liver is an organ meat and organ meats are eaten by satanists which, ergo meant JEREMY THATCHER, DRAGON HATCHER was a piece of satanic literature. I contend that such a person is not too tightly wrapped. The syrup has slipped off her pancake. But--and this is the important part--the school principal actually entertained the notion of banning the book based on this kind of "evidence."

In another instance, my book DRAGON'S BLOOD was taken off the shelf before I came to visit a school, and all copies to be sold were hidden away by the librarian who felt the book's dragons were too graphically real.

Well, perhaps that is the hallmark of good writing: making the unreal--the not-real--real. When I read the dragon egg-laying scene in the second Pit Dragon book--HEART'S BLOOD--over the phone to my friend Patricia MacLachlan she said: "Oh, so that's how dragons give birth. I always thought they had live young." At which I answered, "Patty--dragons are mythical beasts!" And we both laughed. I took her comment as a compliment to my writing.

I would like to remind us that while dragons are mythical, they are also metaphoric. They stand for something beyond the page and beyond the actual story. They stand for whatever the writer would have them stand for. By this I mean that the dragon is a protean character. It can be a large pet as in JEREMY THATCHER; an enormous steed as in the Anne McCaffrey Pern books; a force of ancient wisdom as in the LeGuin EARTHSEA books; a sentient enslaved race as in my Pit Dragon trilogy; a metamorphosed human as in Gordon Dickson's THE DRAGON AND THE GEORGE; a mean-spirited and dangerous miser as in Tolkein's THE HOBBIT; a timid put-upon creature as in Nesbit's THE RELUCTANT DRAGON; a rain and fertility spirit as in many Chinese legends. And so on. And so on.

The writer writes.

And then the reader takes the story further. How far? That is up to the reader's own heart and circumstance.

We have all met dragons. Oh--not the fire breathing, scaley, snake-tailed, crocodile-headed, bat-winged wyrm. But dragons nonetheless.

My first dragon was a doberman pincher that leaped at me when I was four years old, cornering me on a bed. My second was my second grade teacher who--after a classroom plant I had gotten to take home for Christmas vacation died--screamed in front of my classmates that my mother and I were obviously horrid, sloppy, careless people. My third was a high school football player who made odd slurping noises whenever I passed him in the hall and commented loudly on the size of my breasts. My fourth was a famous poet and teacher in college who tore my work to shreds in the poetry workshop. My fifth was the Kirkus reviewer who only liked four of my first 96 books.

Dragons all. You cannot convince me otherwise.

But the doberman was someone's beloved pet, only wanting to play. And Mrs. Ashkenazie was upset because the plant was a favorite of hers. And Horace Lanute was...well he was Horace Lanute, full of testosterone and the term sexual harassment hadn't been invented in the 50s. The college teacher--Anthony Hecht--had considered me one of his very best students and that was just his way of showing it, or so I found out twenty years later. As for the Kirkus reviewer--well bad taste is still taste. Of a sort.

But for me they were dragons then; they are dragons still, down in the dark caves of my soul.

If we give the dragon experience a name--give it a metaphoric shape--we also begin to give children a way to fight their own battles in their own dark caves.

A couple of years ago, I was in the town of Klagenfurt in Austria where a wonderful dragon statue--the Lindwurm--stands in the town square. Shops surround it: bakeries and shoe stores, antique stores and cafes. Children pat the Lindwurm statue, tourists get their pictures taken by its side, the town features the statue in all its brochures and school children know its history.

What is it that makes a small Austrian town at ease with its dragon and American censors so hot about the mere mention of the mythical beast? That is the question that bothers me, the one for which I have no answer.

© 2000 by Jane Yolen, not to be reproduced without permission.