You’ve heard, of course, the oddities, like the dictionary and the Bible, but what made the news this week was that Pen America, who tallies such things, reported that more books were banned here in the second half of last year (2023) than in the entire year before, twice that number in fact. Among the states in the running, Florida holds a commanding lead, which should surprise no one since their governor’s failed bid for the Presidency made cleaning up the shelves a campaign issue. By the way, Escambia County, Florida, not to be out scrubbed, presently has the lead–1600 and counting–by including not just one dictionary, but, count ’em, five!

These days, Florida is, I’m sure, a much better place to raise kids, having swept a grand total of 3,135 books off its squeaky-clean shelves. 

Here’s my story.

A gang of guys are playing cards in the dorm. I’m among ’em. The jabbering makes the game secondary. Mostly they’re just talking, getting to know each other–first semester.

It’s fall, 1966, and I’m a freshman at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa, far from home. But friends aren’t hard to come by when they all have similarly unreadable last names like Vande Zandeschulp and could sing more than one verse of “The Ninety-and-Nine” a capella. Like I said, we’re playing Rook when some local guy mentions a name I’d never heard, “Feikema,” but it sounds pretty much like everyone else’s.

“He’s a writer,” some other local kid says, “big guy–huge–writes dirty books.” There’s nothing doleful about the way he says it. He was marketing.

“Naah,” I say,  or something similar. “Gi’mee a break. Guy writes dirty books, and he’s from here?”

“Not right here–Doon,” somebody says. I had no idea what a Doon was. And his name wasn’t Feikema, somone said, because he’d changed it–“‘Manfred'” or something.”

Some weeks later, I’m in a bookstore in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where I spot a paperback with the name that came up that night in the dorm, “Frederick Manfred.” If I hadn’t had 75 cents along, I would have walked out of the store with the skinny thing jammed in my pants. This was the local guy, the one who writes books, dirty ones.

I read The Secret Place cover-to-cover (175 pp), a rarity. I wasn’t a reader, never was; and, sure, the story had more than its share of sexual hijinks. The kid at the heart of the novel gets two girls pregnant, both out of wedlock, and this Manfred/Feikema guy brings us out into the country to watch.

But something else happens, something strange. I get lost in the story, especially when the kid in the novel gets brought before the consistory–something in that scene smells familiar. This guy is writing on my ground somehow. Something I’d never, ever imagined happened before–I recognized the characters, recognized the world of The Secret Place (1965). I thought you had to be from New York to write books.

In point of fact, I am so moved by what I only vaguely understand–finding myself in what some call the “felt life” of the novel–that I go to my English prof to ask her if I can write my Freshman English term paper on a novel by this guy, Frederick Manfred. I had to tread lightly, I knew, because those guys playing cards had said–and they seemed to know what they were saying–that somehow that the fiesty little college president had seen to it that no one could check out Feike Feikema’s books from the college library, unless they had some kind of special permission.

She knew that, so I told her I owned my own copy of The Secret Place. Maybe something of a lib, she said yes, so I did, wrote my freshman term paper, English 101, on Frederick Manfred’s The Secret Place. That excursion into strange, felt life made me think most anybody could write, could tell stories. That little contraband novel set me off on a lifelong commitment to watching newly formed letters march over a page or screen. I’ve been at it pretty much ever since, devotionals for kids, novels, short stories, denominational books, family albums for the Back to God Hour, the CRC, and Rehoboth Christian Schools, innumerable personal essays, and now, radio productions.

In truth, it wasn’t just The Secret Place that set me off on a journey, but when I look back at a half-century of sitting here at the desk as I am doing right now–early, first light just now opening the land from a sky full of pink lemonade–this morning, like always, trying to get the words to come out right, to create something worth my time and yours, when I look back the first book I remember is a skinny one, by a local novelist, a dirty book, I guess, banned back then in the college library.