Silenced & Significant– A Conversation with Dave Pedersen on Banned and Challenged Books

 Banned, controversial, essential—Army veteran, poet, author, and owner of the independent bookstore Maze Books, Dave Pedersen joins the RPL Podcast to explore the power of these books. Stay tuned for a great conversation and hear Dave’s banned book recommendations. 

Transcript

Dave Pederson 0:00

Go away. I literally had a person I had a person come into the shop once and say they wanted Mein Kampf. And I said, I don't sell Mein Kampf. Do you know that's Hitler's book?

Lara Griffin 0:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Pederson 0:11

And they said, "Well, it's part of my heritage." That's what they said. So what do you do when you say that? You say, "There's more to your heritage than Adolf Hitler." If you go to Germany right now and if you told them that this was part of your heritage, they would punch you in the face.

Lara Griffin 0:27

Yeah.

Dave Pederson 0:27

Because it's something

Lara Griffin 0:28

In Germany, they care. They really do.

Dave Pederson 0:32

They're not, they don't want it to be part of their heritage. They don't want it, it has nothing to do with, you know, in any ways, Hitler was, you know, he's more Bavarian. And obviously wasn't a good person. [lofi music plays]

Lara Griffin 1:01

Every fall, readers, libraries, and schools across the country take part in Banned Books Week. It's more than just a celebration of stories. It's a movement to spotlight the books that have been targeted for removal and to honor the freedom to read. These challenges often target stories about race, gender, identity, and history. Voices that some would rather silence.

Lara Griffin 1:29

Joining us today is Dave Pederson, owner of Maze Books, a downtown independent bookstore. He has a collection of historically banned books, which we had on display last year. We'll talk about historically banned and challenged books, and together we'll explore what's at stake when books are banned, how censorship shapes our communities, and who is left out when books are silenced. Dave?

Dave Pederson 1:56

Yeah.

Lara Griffin 1:56

So your last name, do you how do you...

Dave Pederson 1:58

It's pronounced Pederson.

Lara Griffin 2:00

Pederson, okay.

Dave Pederson 2:01

I let everybody say it the wrong way. I don't care. [both laugh] I don't mind.

Lara Griffin 2:08

I remember I'm like, I know it's like, is it Norwegian?

Dave Pederson 2:12

It's Danish. It's not... now you're gonna get yourself in trouble.

Lara Griffin 2:15

Okay, I'm just gonna say Pederson.

Dave Pederson 2:17

Yeah, my grandfather was from Copenhagen, Denmark. My family lived in under occupation from 1940 to 1945, under fascist occupation. They lost everything they had. They had a trucking company that was decimated, all of it. So that's what kind of informs my background with fascism, and that's why I take the stance that I do, because I know that you cannot negotiate. You cannot appease them, they will take what they want. So

Lara Griffin 2:45

Wow.

Dave Pederson 2:46

Yeah.

Lara Griffin 2:46

Okay.

Dave Pederson 2:47

Yeah, my grandpa was a refugee. That's how he ended up here. Yeah.

Lara Griffin 2:50

Okay. Are you recording this already? [both laugh] Because we're gonna put that in.

Dave Pederson 2:56

Yeah, no, and that's fine. Like, yeah, my grandpa, April 1940 is when the Germans declared war on the Danes. It wasn't much of a war. They basically said, "We're gonna blow you up with our airplanes if you don't do what we want." My grandfather at the time, though, was doing what he could do as part of not, I wouldn't say resistance, but he was part of the merchant mariners, which were helping run supply lines, and he was a cook on a boat, and he and as soon as they declared war on the Danes, they sunk the ship that he was on, and then he was basically this victim of circumstance where he couldn't return back to his country because of the war.

Dave Pederson 3:33

He didn't want to go back, and so he ended up on a Dutch destroyer through passage through India, made his way somehow, I don't know, to the United States. And at that time, in 1940, you could do one year of service and you become a citizen. So he joined the United States Army and was stationed here at Camp Grant for medical training, and then actually went in 1944 to Utah Beach with the 4th Infantry, 12th Infantry Regiment, and he went all the way through as a medic through the Battle of Hurricane Forest.

Dave Pederson 4:06

I mean, it was very intense. But then you know that informs who I am. My grandfather was proud of his service. My grandfather was proud of what he did for his family back in Denmark, and he was proud of his community. He loved Rockford and decided to stay.

Lara Griffin 4:26

Wow. That's great.

Dave Pederson 4:28

And then he was a chef at the Pink Pony. So after all that, that's what he ended up becoming a chef and cooking food.

Lara Griffin 4:33

Were you born and raised here?

Dave Pederson 4:35

I was born in a town called Rochelle.

Lara Griffin 4:38

Okay.

Dave Pederson 4:38

So outside of here, my parents are both were both union meat packers. So they worked at a processing plant. My mom was a scale girl, and my dad was the liver guy. So he cut out one liver every 12 seconds.

Lara Griffin 4:54

Oh wow.

Dave Pederson 4:55

So we never had liver at my house.

Lara Griffin 4:57

Okay.

Dave Pederson 4:58

[laughs] So we lived in a neighborhood. It was a block next to the slaughtering house.

Lara Griffin 5:03

Okay.

Dave Pederson 5:04

And everybody that lived on this block worked there.

Lara Griffin 5:07

Okay.

Dave Pederson 5:07

And then, you know, during the 80s, this was the Hormel was going through, there was like a strike.

Lara Griffin 5:12

Okay.

Dave Pederson 5:13

And they basically went from union to non-union at this plant, and my dad ended up with the laborers. But that's where I started. And we moved to the big city when that was like nine years old.

Lara Griffin 5:26

Okay.

Dave Pederson 5:26

So that's...

Lara Griffin 5:26

What's the big city?

Dave Pederson 5:28

Rockford.

Lara Griffin 5:28

Okay. I wasn't sure. Chicago. [laughs]

Dave Pederson 5:31

No, no, this was the big city. This you would come up here to see CherryVale Mall, which was the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. And then we would always hit like Old Time Buffet or old what if Old Country Buffet, which is kind of like a all-you-can-eat thing. And I remember there was a basketball team here in Rockford called the Rockford Lightning.

Lara Griffin 5:52

Uh-huh.

Dave Pederson 5:52

And they were at old, the old buffet thing when I was there. And I was so excited. I couldn't wait to tell everybody back in school that I had seen these guys, and nobody believed me. It was such a disappointment. I came back and I said, listen, the guys from the basketball team were eating at the buffet. Like, no, they weren't.

Lara Griffin 6:11

Oh.

Dave Pederson 6:12

So that's how then I said, no, they were. Like, no, we don't believe you.

Lara Griffin 6:15

So are they like how people would think of the Harlem Globetrotters? [laughs]

Dave Pederson 6:21

They were bigger than the Harlem Globetrotters for me. It was a huge thing to see Rockford... when you when you're from a smaller town, just like a working class neighborhood, Rockford was so different than everything. You know, our world was so small. And when we'd come up here, this is where my dad grew up. We just... we fell in love with it. And the work, obviously, where we were at was drying up. So we ended up here, made friends quick, and fell in love with Rockford.

Lara Griffin 6:53

So tell us about your journey into books, how you ended up having an indie bookstore here in Rockford.

Dave Pederson 7:00

Sure. So I've always been interested in books. My dad was a huge... he would always take us to the library, no matter where we were. His saying was a person should always have a book going, meaning, even if, you know, just always have some one book, at least one title going. So that informed who I was with reading and writing. I was a former, I'm a former state worker. I worked for the Veterans Affairs and the Department of Natural Resources. COVID hits, I'm working at the VA.

Dave Pederson 7:31

Get through that, it's very intense, as it was was for many other people, but this was a long-term healthcare facility I was working in. So I was pretty burned out at about a year and a half of that, and I said I needed change. So I talked with HR about going to college, taking, you know, for grad school, taking off a few months, and they wouldn't let me. And this is after I was like the Chief Steward, I was the Vice President for the union. I had been sacrificing so much, and I said, Well, I don't care, I'm going.

Dave Pederson 8:03

And so I applied to a couple schools. I got into DePaul, and my wife said you should apply to Northwestern for their MFA in poetry and prose. I applied to that, and I got into that program. That program really reintroduced me to my love of reading, and I was reading all the time, and I just... I was back on a visit here in Rockford, and I noticed there was no bookstore downtown, and I said, "Well, I think we can build one and I think the community will support it." And that was three and a half years ago.

Lara Griffin 8:33

Okay, so how's that going?

Dave Pederson 8:34

It's going great. We've since moved. We opened on South Third Street. We now... next month it'll be two years at our new location. We're seeing people from out of town every single day. I'm selling books every single day. We're having plenty of events, so it's going, you know, in an economy where everybody's a little kind of wary or weary. We are providing something to the community that I think they're really wanting right now, which is time away from the screen and stuff that's affordable, an affordable hobby.

Lara Griffin 9:08

Yeah, and you have like lots of events like the chess club, like ways to bring the community together, which is awesome.

Dave Pederson 9:14

Yeah.

Lara Griffin 9:15

And my introduction to you was through poetry. So that's how I learned about you, and you're an author, you have books.

Dave Pederson 9:25

Yeah.

Lara Griffin 9:25

And so that was really cool, and you helped guide me into poetry. So I got really into that, thank you.

Dave Pederson 9:34

No, of course.

Lara Griffin 9:34

And that was awesome. And then I found out about how you have a collection of banned books.

Dave Pederson 9:41

Yes.

Lara Griffin 9:42

Historically banned. So can you help our audience understand what banned and challenged books are?

Dave Pederson 9:51

Sure. So any book can be challenged by, say, a member of the community via, you know, the library or from school. And then if there's enough cause and the board finds it just, they will then ban the book. That's how it used to be. It happened right at with a book called Genderqueer. And I say just to them, it doesn't mean that it's just as a fact. That book should have never been banned.

Dave Pederson 10:21

In Illinois, though, we're lucky enough that we had some house bills pass that we are no longer... before banning a book, they have to look at the American Library Association's Bill of Rights and make sure that it's not being banned because of hate, because people may not agree with someone's ... they would call it a lifestyle, but I would say it's who they are. They don't agree with them speaking out about who they are.

Dave Pederson 10:46

So we're lucky in Illinois that that's been that that's been challenged in its own. But everywhere, you if somebody takes issue with a book or something in a book, you know, let's say like Mein Kampf, let's say we don't want Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf being taught in school, well, we could challenge that, and it's possible that they could ban it. But in recent years and even going back to like Catcher in the Rye stuff before, or Alan Ginsburg's work, it's being used as a more of a political tool than actually looking at what's inside of the inside of the title, what's inside of the material, or what it's talking about.

Dave Pederson 11:26

So basically if a book is good, it has been banned, and most books have been challenged. It's not hard to everybody takes issue with every book that's been written, it seems like.

Lara Griffin 11:37

Yeah. And this year's theme is about censors... it's called... for Banned Books Week. It's called Censorship is so 1984.

Dave Pederson 11:48

Oh, hey. That's right.

Lara Griffin 11:51

So it's a connection to Orwell's book.

Dave Pederson 11:56

Right.

Lara Griffin 11:56

And so can you tell us about that book? And I know you have a copy of it.

Dave Pederson 12:01

I do. I don't have a I don't have a first edition. I have a really cool, it's a giant bantham edition with amazing art on the cover. I had close to a first edition, but was actually a library book that I sold, and it had the original checkout card and had never been checked out. So that was kind of a neat piece. The book itself, though, is by George Orwell. Many would say that it's anti-communist and they would be wrong. In America, they would say it's pro-communist. That's why it was banned in Florida in 1981.

Dave Pederson 12:34

It was banned for being pro-communist. Well, the book is anti-Stalinist and anti-authoritarian and anti-dictator. So the book looks at through the protagonist's job is to disintegrate words, is to remove words from our language. But so much on top of that is about government control of how we how we even think, down to... you could be convicted of a thought crime for thinking things that are against the state.

Dave Pederson 13:06

Very important book, very much similar to Animal Farm, which is also by George Orwell, which is a historically challenged and banned book, which uses animals taking over a farm from a farmer, but then looks at kind of what happens when you have groups of resistance. Obviously, there's usually a demigod that pops up and that's who they follow. So great stuff if you're into political takeovers. But also you want to understand censorship and kind of how it does permeate the political platform we're living in now, even.

Lara Griffin 13:41

I know Howl is one of the poems that was banned and challenged and censored. Can you share that story?

Dave Pederson 13:51

Sure. So that was written or that was first published in 1955, Alan Ginsburg's Howl with City Lights by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It's the first paperback book store in America. In 1957, it was a group of custom agents or one that challenged it or arrested the publisher Furlingetti and even the manager Shig, who was selling the book to agents of the customs... I guess it's kind of weird thinking about customs now.

Dave Pederson 14:20

In any case, they went to court and they found that they basically just wanted to remove one word. And the question was then, is it still complete if you remove one word? And the answer is no, it's incomplete to what the artist wants. And it was... we won. That's how you got Henry Miller's stuff published. So the Hollobsinity trial is a very interesting trial because, if you go back and look at the transcripts, it's talking about art versus government. And how does a customs agent know more than a poet about what their poems are supposed to say or what's good for America?

Dave Pederson 14:56

So it's a slippery slope, though, because it seems like this pops up all the time now. It's like, well, just because you can challenge something doesn't mean you should ever like overstep into telling someone you can't include one word.

Lara Griffin 15:13

Right.

Dave Pederson 15:13

And it's always, even from the time that bands or challenges first popped up, it's always been this kind of dance around what's real. And I mean, the real point is what they were really trying to do was limit a man who was identifying his sexual preference and speaking about it openly. He was gay. And he was talking about his intimate moments, as all poets do. So they could say that it was obscene, but what they're essentially saying is, you know, we don't agree with who Alan Ginsburg is as a person.

Dave Pederson 15:48

And that's always that's how it always is. They're always dancing around what they want to say, which is usually that they're a bigot.

Lara Griffin 15:55

Yeah.

Dave Pederson 15:56

You know, I hate to put it that way, but that's you can try to say it a a million different ways. I'm I'm almost censoring myself trying to think of a different word, but it's because of who they are, it's because of this this hate or anger that they have inside of them that they can't just allow a piece of art to work and they don't even have to read it. You know, that's the other part.

Lara Griffin 16:17

Yeah, like people have a choice.

Dave Pederson 16:19

They do.

Lara Griffin 16:20

And so I think that's one of the things that we don't think about. It's like, oh, you have a choice to read it or not to read it.

Dave Pederson 16:29

Correct. And I think there's this misinterpretation or this idea that this stuff is being crammed into kids' minds or down people's throats, and it's not. It's part of a curriculum, and you should challenge yourself to be uncomfortable. That's the entire point of reading, something that you're not... that you're going to learn something. And that is the scary part, is like maybe what they're really implying is they don't want people to learn. Maybe what they're implying is they don't want people to be to step outside of the zone of what they want to tell them. And that's censorship and that's authoritarianism, and that's absolutely everything that is against the First Amendment.

Lara Griffin 17:14

Right. And so, like, I'm even thinking back to my high school and the books that were required reading. So, like there was Grapes of Wrath.

Dave Pederson 17:25

Banned in Kern County, California.

Lara Griffin 17:27

Catcher.

Dave Pederson 17:27

Yeah.

Lara Griffin 17:28

Catcher in the Rye.

Dave Pederson 17:30

The most challenged book in American history.

Lara Griffin 17:32

Yeah. And so it's just like an Animal Farm. Or no, or was it the Jungle?

Dave Pederson 17:37

Jungle, 1902, Upton Sinclair was burned by the Nazis in 1933 because of the socialist ideologies that Upton Sinclair had, him and Sinclair Lewis both. Sinclair Lewis famously wrote another band book, It Can't Happen Here, 1935 also. So at the same time, you know, right after the Nazis are burning, and and you know, Upton or Sinclair Lewis is talking about this in the book of what would happen in America. It's strikingly accurate, scary.

Lara Griffin 18:10

Yeah, for sure. So is there a time where a ban or a challenge is helpful or...

Dave Pederson 18:19

It's hard because a lot of the times you'll hear challenges from extremely right-wing groups that say stuff like the Turner Diaries, which is a racist manifesto about it's about a race war, or like stuff like the Mar quis de Sade, you know, very explicit stuff. And my thought is that if we can learn from it, then there are certain books that we should always, I mean, we should always carry every book as long as, you know, not a criminal book.

Dave Pederson 18:54

But, you know, I don't think everybody should, you know... I think it's better to have them on, you know, accessible than be inaccessible. It's a slippery slope sometimes with certain materials, but at the end of the day, I would rather people have those materials and have access to those materials than try to guess what's in them.

Lara Griffin 19:15

Right.

Dave Pederson 19:15

Or try to in, you know, somebody online telling them, well, this is what you need to know about this book. I think we're we have to be very careful now because we have to have source material. Everybody has an opinion now. Everyone online has an opinion and they're parroting other opinions. And you know, I don't know why we have moved away from sourcing quotes or sourcing where we're getting stats from, but it doesn't seem to to matter in the heat of the moment, I guess.

Lara Griffin 19:46

Yeah. And so I think it's interesting too. It's like I know for even school librarians and librarians here, they're looking through it, and we grab books and we put them in places where they are age appropriate.

Dave Pederson 20:01

Correct.

Lara Griffin 20:02

And so we're not saying anything like, oh, you have to read this book if it's not mature. I think as a parent, you would know what your child can and is able to understand and mature enough to know.

Dave Pederson 20:19

Right. But it's hard because people want to believe the most negative thing. They want some sort of conspiracy, they want there to be something that's bigger than it is. And if you look at a book, most of them, especially for kids' book, will tell you what the age range is. It's right there on the book. So it's not saying, you know, your toddler needs to read How by Alan Ginsburg.

Dave Pederson 20:48

I don't think anybody is would ever say that there's some poems in there that maybe, you know... But what we're saying is that, and what anybody who's a proponent of freedom of speech is that people should have access to it. I t's part of your tax dollars, you know, it's part of public funding. It's technically the possession of all of us. So when people take it away just because they can, we should be a little outraged by that because essentially they're removing something they from your ownership, from public ownership.

Lara Griffin 21:25

So what would be a few banned books that you have come across that you would recommend or are your...

Dave Pederson 21:33

I've got some notes here. Let's see. Well, we just read It Can't Happen here, Sinclair Lewis, 1935. It's a fantastic read because in the book, the main character's name is Dormas Jessup, and he's a hard centrist, meaning he's not a Republican, he's not a Democrat, he runs a newspaper business, and he prints, you know. The facts. But what do you do when the facts become blurred? What do you do when you're not sure about the information you're getting? What do you do when there's an authoritarian threat that is changing the landscape of your own country?

Dave Pederson 22:13

He talks about Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and kind of the rise of fascism in Europe. And I don't want to give the ending away, but it gets really dark. I mean, it but it's very similar to what actually happened in Germany, you know, with concentration camps. It's a piece of fiction.

Lara Griffin 22:31

Okay.

Dave Pederson 22:32

Yeah. So it basically imagines what would happen if we had a dictator and a massive private army to take over our country and limit the rights that we take, our even our human rights to exist. What would happen? What would our country look like? And a lot of stuff was surprisingly accurate, you know, some of the stuff they wanted to ban. So that's a great one to read. It's a little... it's a slow burn, but once it picks up... Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is a mandatory, mandatory reading, especially if you love books. It's one of those books that I rarely, as a bookseller, find in the wild because nobody wants to get rid of that book.

Lara Griffin 23:25

I have it.

Dave Pederson 23:26

You'll have it forever because it's such an important book. Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. I think it's a great book about trauma. It's a historically challenged and banned book. Kurt Vonnegut survived the bombing of Dresden, and 150,000 people were killed. It was estimated by gel diesel fire on purpose. They burnt Dresden down. And while that was happening, he was in a bunker in a old slaughtering house, and survived the bombing. And then he says when he went up there, this is a true story, but it's a piece of fiction. He said when he went up, got out of the bunker, he said that Dresden looked like the surface of the moon.

Dave Pederson 24:10

So it's an important book because it thinks about... in it, he's like time traveling the protagonist, but it's using trauma and these kind of like traumatic memories that we have, where we're almost propelled outside of our body where we feel like we're traveling, we've traveled somewhere else. So that's a it's a fantastic book. The intro, the foreword where he talks about being a veteran is probably one of the most spot-on things about staying up at night and thinking about the people you served with and seeing if they're still alive and stuff. It's really good writing.

Lara Griffin 24:44

Okay.

Dave Pederson 24:45

Yeah.

Lara Griffin 24:45

This is Sinclair Lewis.

Dave Pederson 24:47

That was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5.

Lara Griffin 24:50

Okay.

Dave Pederson 24:50

Yeah. Sinclair Lewis did It Can't Happen Here. Those are ones to get that I would start with. Howl is a great book of poetry. It's not just the one poem. Howl is in there, but there's a few others. And his poem about America is is phenomenal. If you can hear him reading it, the F-word is in it, but he's talking about it kind of like against nuclear war. And if you think about the fact that we're more upset about the F-word than we are the W-A-R word, that speaks to exactly what he's writing about.

Lara Griffin 25:29

Yeah, that's so interesting. So where do you think we are the temperature of ban and challenge books? I'm...

Dave Pederson 25:38

No, it's good. That's a good question. I think in Illinois, I think we're looking at, you know, it's an issue now of states' rights and how much we can protect and who's willing to bend to the knee. It's scary. It is scary to see what people think is happening, that there's some sort of underground, you know, cabal of people that are trying to change kids from who they are instead of enlighten them of maybe who they are, you know?

Dave Pederson 26:11

And when we see people who are conflicted, who are grown up, growing up in places where they're not allowed to be who they are, I think we're seeing more of that. And we all know kind of what happens with that when someone is raised in a family where they're not accepted as who they are and they're not given any material to confirm how they're feeling. It's a scary time because it's not good. Censorship is never good. Historically, when has censorship ever been good? I'm sure someone can think of one, you know, or two, but don't we want to know the truth? So it's hard because there are multiple truths out there. It's almost like people believe there's a spectrum of truth. But we're living in a strange time, and I'd say it's more important than ever to look at your sources of where you're getting your information from and understand how they came to the conclusions that they did. Research methods and applied statistics was one of the best courses I ever took in my life because it taught me to be a skeptic. It taught me to look at data, it taught me to say, "oh, this is a study that's been done." Well, what's the sample size?

Lara Griffin 27:32

Right.

Dave Pederson 27:33

Because they only have to have 30 people for, you know, them to publish a study. And then, you know, looking at statistical significance and all these things. But it's up to us as citizens to speak out when somebody has said something that is wrong or incorrect. And it doesn't matter about politeness. If somebody's trying to jam an idea that is against the truth or against even, you know, common courtesy, it's okay to say, I don't appreciate that, or it's okay to say, no, that's not true. I think it's okay to do that.

Lara Griffin 28:08

Yeah.

Dave Pederson 28:09

You know, just be careful because some people don't know how to how to take that. Some people have been ingesting propaganda for 20 to 25 years now, and their worldview is completely opposite of what's actually happening.

Lara Griffin 28:24

And I think about how books, whether fiction or nonfiction, once you're like in the story, it really helps us to like gain another point of view.

Dave Pederson 28:35

Yes.

Lara Griffin 28:36

And not just be stuck in our own bubble and just begin to like see people differently, hopefully.

Dave Pederson 28:47

Read the counter-arguments.

Lara Griffin 28:49

Yes.

Dave Pederson 28:49

You know, read the opposing side. I read Project 2025. I read it.

Lara Griffin 28:54

Okay.

Dave Pederson 28:54

You know, most people should. Read things that... see what they're seeing. You'd be very surprised, you know. And I'm saying from the opposite side too. The idea, like, the idea that some people can't be saved on opposite sides, or we can't find some kind of common ground, is ridiculous. The common ground is that we're all working hard to secure something for ourselves.

Dave Pederson 29:23

It's getting harder because we're being pushed in two directions, you know. But at our base, at our core, we're all just trying to have a little peace and a little peace of mind for our families and for our future. That is the common ground. So if we can agree to that, I think we can build on that.

Lara Griffin 29:45

Yeah.

Dave Pederson 29:45

But hopefully we can get to that point where we're talking about what we have in common instead of fighting all the time. But right now it's gonna be a little agitation. I don't know.

Lara Griffin 29:56

Yeah. Do you have hope?

Dave Pederson 29:58

Of course, always. Yeah. I always have hope. I think locally, you know, if we look at how many books are being banned or challenged locally, I think that's a plus. We had it happen in Harlem. The community responded. It actually, you know, when they banned Genderqueer, we had a couple people run for board.

Dave Pederson 30:19

That's how, you know, so some of these things are going to propel people into positions where they can affect change, and these are the right politicians, a right elected people to have, because that's why they want to do it. And it's not about this self-service, maybe a little bit. You gotta have a little bit of an ego to be a politician. That's just part of it. You have to have pretty decent hair and or terrible hair and then an ego.

Dave Pederson 30:46

But mostly good politicians or great politicians are there to serve the members of their community. And that's where we do have power is locally. Locally is where you have way more power than nationally. Nationally, you watch the national news, you're like, oh, I can't do anything about this, and it can be kind of devastating. Locally, you can make change almost instantly, you know.

Lara Griffin 31:12

So we're gonna conclude soon.

Dave Pederson 31:16

Okay, got it.

Lara Griffin 31:17

And so is there anything that you've... that is important that you haven't had a chance to share?

Dave Pederson 31:28

I would just I guess the importance of our local libraries and having access to material cannot be understated. You know, my family was a working family. I think we've covered that. And the library in Rochelle was my daycare.

Lara Griffin 31:51

Uh-huh.

Dave Pederson 31:51

100%.

Lara Griffin 31:52

Uh-huh.

Dave Pederson 31:53

And I had free reign to run around in there and to read and go through the catalog cards, and I learned how to operate the, it was like the film stuff where you'd watch...

Lara Griffin 32:03

the micro...

Dave Pederson 32:05

Microfilms.

Lara Griffin 32:05

Yeah, microfiche.

Dave Pederson 32:07

And you know, they would just let me do what I wanted to do, and that's just kind of how it was. And exploring books and having access to books is why I am who I am today. That's why I sell books, that's why I care about literature, and that's why institutions like the library need to be protected from censorship, from authoritarianism, and really should be a place for the public to meet, to educate themselves, to, you know, to learn, you know, something from 3D printing to, you know, how to draw... a book, pick up a book on that, whatever you want to do, that's what the institution is here, and it should be protected because as soon as it's gone, what happens to people who can't afford to buy books?

Lara Griffin 32:58

Right, right.

Dave Pederson 32:58

Where do they get their knowledge from? That is censorship.

Lara Griffin 33:04

Absolutely. Thank you, Dave.

Dave Pederson 33:06

You're welcome.

Lara Griffin 33:06

That's awesome. I love hearing from you. And if you get a chance, I hope that our audience will go in and just have a conversation with you. I always enjoy visiting you at the bookshop and just seeing where our conversations go.

Dave Pederson 33:25

Yeah. Downtown and the culture here in Rockford is... it's very interesting. The bookstore is like directing a documentary in real time. You never know who's coming through the door. And I absolutely love the customers that I have, and I love giving them a place where they feel like they can be who they are.

Lara Griffin 33:46

Yeah. So to our audience, go visit Maze Books, have a conversation with Dave, and thank you so much, Dave, for coming in. I appreciate your voice in our community. Thank you. Appreciate you guys. So, why does Banned Books Week matter? Because stories matter. They shape the way we see ourselves, each other, and the world we live in. Yet across our country, books are being banned or challenged because they dare to tell truths that make us uncomfortable. When we silence those voices, we don't just remove words from a page, we erase perspectives, histories, and futures. Because at its heart, the fight against censorship isn't only about books, it's about justice, equity, and the freedom to think critically.[lofi music plays]