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Melinda's lab partner

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Melinda is an outcast. She has no friends, (because they all left her) her family has problems of its own, (they worry about her grades so much that they don't see the bigger picture on whats happening) her tree project is just killing her as she can't seem to get it right no matter how hard she try's, and "IT", Andy Evans, has been Melinda's biggest problem ever since that one night at the party in August

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At the beginning of the book Heather was friendly towards Melinda, inviting her over to hang out, being friendly, just some general friend things. but towards the middle of the book the ¨Marthas¨ came along and Heather finally found her ¨group¨. If Heather did what the Marthas told her to do then all was well and this caused Heather to split apart from Melinda because she was ¨too weird¨. But in the end of the book Heather came crawling back to Melinda for help, Melinda said no.

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Rachel ignores and belittles Melinda from the start, making fun of her on the first day of school, being mean to her all the time. For an ex-best friend she intends to ultimately ruin Melinda

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In the beginning of the book Ivy hangs out with ¨The Suffering Artists¨ and ¨The Thespians¨, not really acknowledging Melinda. But deeper into the book Ivy helps Melinda out with her leaves for her tree project.

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Laurie Halse Anderson's website

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The tree could symbolize planting roots and sprouting, growing upwards. Her constant failure to find a tree she liked could represent her struggling to find these roots and plant them.

The tree can also symbolize Melinda's growth throughout the novel. In the start of the novel Melinda was having trouble making her tree and ¨perfecting¨ it while in the end of the novel Melinda makes a tree that she thinks is perfect.

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Good reads interview, about more than just Speak

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Good reads interview, about more than just Speak

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She answers your questions about tackling tough issues in her books: anorexia in Wintergirls, assault in Speak, and now a parent with PTSD in the new The Impossible Knife…

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A poem, Listen, about the people who write and about Melinda.

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With the exception of the first and last stanzas, all the words in this poem come from letters or emails from Laurie's readers. You can listen to Laurie read the poem here.

Listen
Back to Speak

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Laurie Halse Anderson | Mad Woman in the Forest

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With the exception of the first and last stanzas, all the words in this poem come from letters or emails from Laurie's readers. You can listen to Laurie read the poem here. Back to Speak

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Melindas Closet allowed melinda to get away from what's going on around her and just take a break and think about what she wants to do.

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Melinda Sordino starts her first day of high school like any other teenager. She has seven new notebooks, a skirt she hates and a stomachache.

Throughout the first chapters of Laurie Halse Anderson's "Speak," Melinda seems like your average teenage girl. She struggles with her identity, family and a new school.

However, her best friends have abandoned her after an incident at a summer party. Without anyone to turn to, Melinda deems herself an outcast. She finds comfort in art class and the poet Maya Angelou.

But Melinda is holding onto a secret. A secret that threatens to destroy her and any hope for her future.

Melinda was raped.

According to The American Library Association, "Speak" was one of the Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books between 2000 and 2009. It is most frequently challenged for what is considered to be explicit sexual content.

In 2010, an associate professor at Missouri State University challenged "Speak." He deemed the discussion of rape as "soft pornography." To him, the novel was "filthy" and lacked morality.

The associate professor, Wesley Scroggins, was partially correct in his statement. Rape, or any kind of sexual abuse, is immoral. But to victims, it is a reality.

An American is sexually assaulted every 98 seconds, according to The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network. 1 out of 6 American women will become victims of rape or attempted rape.

Melinda is one of those women. Throughout the novel, she struggles to find the voice her rapist stole from her. She calls him "The Beast," and he's a senior who taunts her in the hallways. Her isolation and fear is painfully real.

The novel is incredibly effective in its use of character and voice to explore such a difficult subject. Melinda is authentic, which makes it easy for readers to connect with her. Imagery and symbolism express the intense emotions Melinda must grapple with on the way to her recovery.

I first read "Speak" when I was a freshman in high school, just like Melinda. Her interiority mirrored mine. She is hilarious, flawed and empathetic.

She is a young woman trying to navigate trauma in the only way she knows how. Melinda is a voice for thousands of victims who are trying to remember how to use their own.

Although published 19 years ago, Anderson's novel remains socially relevant. The stories of survivors continue to be heard more and more. For example, on Thursday, Sept. 27, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford recounted her experience with alleged sexual assault on the senate floor while the entire country watched.

Survivors like Melinda are beginning to realize the impact they can make by speaking up. And, finally, people are starting to listen.

"Speak" is a book that not only has the power to change lives, but to save them. Banning this book means silencing victims and their stories. If we truly want to help survivors of sexual abuse, then books like this one must be embraced.

You never know whose life it might change.
Savannah Winkler is a senior in English. The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Collegian. Please send comments to opinion@kstatecollegian.com.

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Banned Book Highlight: "Speak" by Laurie Halse Anderson

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Melinda Sordino starts her first day of high school like any other teenager. She has seven new notebooks, a skirt she hates and a stomachache. Throughout the first chapters of Laurie Halse Anderson's "Speak," Melinda seems like your average teenage girl. She struggles with her identity, family and a new school.

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Tell Laurie Halse Anderson that her 1999 young adult novel Speak changed your life, and she'll respond with a warm, heartfelt "thank you!" Sure, she gets this sort of thing all the time - but as Anderson will say, with a friendly chortle, "I've never gotten it from you before."

Speak tells the story of 14-year-old Melinda Sordino, an ostracized high school freshman with a terrible secret. (If you'd rather not know what that secret is, you may want to stop reading right about here.) Its choppy, nonlinear narrative gradually reveals that shortly before the first day of school, Melinda went to a party, where she was raped by a handsome, popular senior. The book's unflinching look at sexual assault and its aftermath - not to mention its sharp prose, keen observations of teenage life, and welcome bursts of dark humor - have won it and Anderson legions of fans, as well as a number of prestigious awards. ( Speak was a National Book Award finalist in 1999.)

Macmillan is marking the book's landmark 15th anniversary with the second annual Speak4RAINN campaign, a drive to raise funds for the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization. The publishing house will match donations of up to $15,000 to RAINN throughout April, which is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

In honor of the campaign - and Speak's birthday - we spoke to Anderson about how and why she wrote Speak, how the world has changed (or hasn't changed) since the book was first published, and whether a sequel might be in the cards someday. (Hint: Signs point to "yes.")
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So many things have changed since Speak first came out, not least of which is the YA landscape - young adult fiction is this huge business now. What has it been like to watch that change happen?
Laurie Halse Anderson: You know, it's really hard to write books. And for me, it's actually gotten harder. Because now people are watching. I have to spend so much energy on just trying to be a writer, and then on top of that to try to balance things like family, and all the publicity, and travel -I just don't have any energy left over to worry about the larger landscape. People ask me about trends, and honestly, there are other people who have a much better perspective to look at things like that. I will say that I'm super happy for my readers, and for this generation of not only adolescents, but people who are 20, 30, 40 - there are so many different writers approaching YA fiction from their own unique angle. That's cool.
How have readers' reactions to Speak changed over the past decade and a half?
You know, they haven't. It's fascinating. I worried for a while there -I guess about when Twisted came out, so that was about '07. I can remember fussing a little bit, thinking that Speak was going to fade away because it didn't have updated technology in it. There's no cell phones, and really not internet, or things like that. I don't know why that hasn't happened, but it hasn't. I think it might speak to the universal struggle of having a hard thing in their life that they don't know how to talk about. Plus, obviously, way too many people have to deal with sexual assault, so there's that.
What about readers' attitudes about sexual assault - are they different now than they were when the book was first published?
No. Sadly, no. And I fault my generation, the parents' generation. We lack the courage to talk to our children honestly about human sexuality. And yet we allow our kids to be submerged in a cesspool of sexual imagery, rape culture crap. The people who are supposed to step up to the plate, to talk to their kids, to teach their children how to be safe - to teach their children, primarily their sons, not to rape people - we don't do that. Really, what I need to write is a book for parents. I just want to grab them by the shoulders, and shake them, and tell them, "You have fallen down on the job if you raised a rapist."
And those are the same people who try to ban Speak because they say it's too dirty.
Oh, people call me a pornographer. That's always fun. What I've learned is that when people want to ban my books, it's generally because they don't know how to talk about the topic [in the book], and they're afraid. I say that if your kid is exposed to the news, online, at night, in the newspaper, then your kid gets to read these books - my books, but also the other YA authors who are handling the realities of our world.
I've read that the idea for Speak came to you in a dream - you woke up after hearing Melinda crying in your head.
That was the impetus for the beginning of the writing. With perspective, I think there's two things that were happening. One was my oldest daughter was starting middle school. So as a parent, you know, [I was] doing the parent freakout: "Oh my gosh. How do I be a mom to somebody going through this?" But also, I had been sexually assaulted a month before ninth grade started. And my family had been in utter chaos because of my dad's PTSD and alcoholism at that point. So I didn't tell anybody for 25 years. And I think what happened was that as my own child was beginning to get close to the age where I was raped, that was making me think - and then my subconscious mind, which is the smart part of me, found a way to work through my story in fiction. Speak is not what happened to me, but having that secret and not knowing how to talk about it, that was my struggle. And writing the book was incredibly healing for me. It finally led me to go and get counseling, and then that completely changed my life.
I also read for the first time today that "Sordino" is a musical term that means "mute." It totally blew my mind.
[laughs] Nice, thank you. That falls under the official category of "sneaky author trick." It's really fun to do that.
Are there any other Easter Eggs in Speak that most people don't know about?
The one that seems to surprise audiences, even audiences of English teachers, is [in] the Thanksgiving Day scene. The dad makes the [turkey] soup, and the soup has to get buried in the backyard because it's so awful. And Melinda tells us, the reader, that her dad buries the soup next to the grave of her dead dog. And she tells us the dog's name was Ariel. And Ariel, of course, is the story of The Little Mermaid, who was a character who gave up her voice for a boy.
Going back and looking at Speak, is there anything about it you wish you could change?
I don't go back and look at it. [laughs] I don't reread my books after they're published, because it's agony. I mean, there's a couple of sections that I'm pretty proud of, but I always see things that I want to fix. I would edit the life out of that book right now if I could. What was easier about it than my other books, is that when you write that first book, you're writing really blessed, in a sense, because no one's watching. I really never thought the book would be published.
Really?
Completely seriously. And it got rejected [by] the first publisher I sent it to. The book was mostly written between 4 and 6 in the morning, and then I'd get my kids up. I was a freelance journalist, I have two kids. Life was busy. But it was a good puzzle to work on, and I learned so much in terms of the craft - I learned so much about voice. And then I had all this voice, but I had to go in and find a plot. The first feedback I got from the editorial board was that they liked it, but they wanted me to turn it into kind of a traditional narrative format. And so my editor at the time had me write a letter to them explaining why I made the artistic choices that I did, and to their everlasting credit, they were really supportive of that.
What did you say?
Well, I talked about the need for people of their age to think about the other kinds of cultural influences that that generation of readers had. If you grew up in the '60s, you were exposed to text in long blocks - chapters that each had chapter titles, and were ten pages long. But if you grew up watching quick-cut edits on Sesame Street, which then 20 years later led to quick cut edits in music videos - there's a dissertation waiting to be written about that connection - there was something to be said about using shorter bursts of text, using white space on the page. I was trying to make the form and function marry each other, if I could, and they let me do it.
Was the title your idea?
Yeah, that was one of my few titles that was there from the beginning. Sometimes things just fall out of your head on the paper, and if you're smart, you learn not to touch them.
I also feel like Speak doesn't get enough credit for being as funny as it is.
Thank you! This is part of why I'm really drawn to write adolescent characters - I've stopped saying "writing for teens," because the YA audience is now everybody, teens and adults. But to write adolescent characters, you have this amazing secret weapon, and it's that teenagers are super funny. They've just figured out that the world is a stinking ball of hypocrisy, and that's why they are so lovely and sarcastic. They use humor as a wonderful weapon, and it's a source of strength.
You've written a lot of different sorts of books - historical fiction, contemporary YA, books for younger readers. Do you ever want to write something that's just kind of lighter and funnier?
You know, I don't know if you're familiar with my book Prom.
Oh yeah, I read Prom. I really liked it for being the sort of book that hardly ever gets written these days, just about regular kids doing regular things.
Exactly. And I really loved writing that book, by the way. I had so much fun with it. That's a light, funny book, and it's still in print - thank goodness - but I think that it's challenging for publishers and booksellers when an author steps outside what they're known for. And for readers too. If I'm lucky, I've got another 40, 50 years to write, and there are some other kinds of stories I'd like to tell. I think maybe I might have to do what some other authors do, which is do a variation on my name, just to send readers the message that "yep, this is me, but this is a different part of me. So brace yourself."
I read also that you're working on a graphic novel version of Speak.
[gasps] How exciting is that?! I've been asking for it for a while. I'm actually working on the script, the text version, now. [My collaborator is] a young woman artist from Vancouver Canada, I believe. Emily Carroll. And I had a hand in choosing her. I mean, Melinda finds her voice and expresses her pain in her art. So how perfect is this? I am just beyond crazy about this idea.
So you must have to reread the book if you're adapting it.
Yeah, I'm being forced to. [laughs] It's fascinating. And it's kind of helpful, I think, that I've written a bunch of picture books. Because as the writer, you have to respect your partner, the artist, and recognize that their talents carry all the visual information. So my job is really to create the stage upon which Emily can create her magic.
When I read Speak for the first time as a pre-teen, I was shocked when I finally figured out what had happened to Melinda over the summer. But the book is so well-known now that I'm assuming the kids who read it today know what it's about even before they get to the big reveal. How do you think your experience of reading Speak changes if you know the whole time that she was raped?
It's really interesting, because young readers who are in 8th, 9th, 10th grade, who often come across it in English class now - they still don't know, believe it or not, a lot of them. It's really interesting to listen to readers tell me when they figured out what had happened. Generally, girls figure it out way before boys, which talks a lot about what our girls know and our boys don't. Maybe what it does is, if the reader does know going in that this is about the aftermath of a sexual assault, it might give readers the luxury of reading a bit more slowly. From my own experience, if I'm like, "What happened?" I'm flying through the pages of the book. And if you know what the big reveal is, then it becomes a question of "How did she handle it?" Then you can read it with more care.
I'm sure you get this question constantly, but have you considered writing a sequel?
Yeah. [laughs] My favorite request came from a 9th grade guy in Buffalo: "Miss, miss! Please write a sequel, and you can call it Spoke!" [laughs] I'd love to write a sequel. I know my publisher sure would love me to write a sequel. But to write a sequel for a sequel's sake is, I think, to disrespect the muse. So I'm open to whatever magic there is in the universe that leads us to write. I'm open always to the moment when that story idea might pop up in my head. But it hasn't yet. It might never pop up. If it does, I'll write it, but I know I won't force it.
Without giving the whole sequel treatment, do you have a sense for what happens to Melinda after the end of the book?
Well, the next YA novel I wrote after Speak was Catalyst, which I set in the same high school.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that - there's a scene that shows her as a sophomore, right?
Exactly. Melinda shows up I think on a page and a half, and you see her through the eyes of a very different character. But I put her in there so readers would know she's doing okay. She's doing okay! Given - I met a lot of people on the most recent book tour who read Speak at your age, who are now real adults with lives and jobs, and still rereading it. And that made me think about how old Melinda would be now. Like I said, I'll still wait for the idea to come. But it might be super interesting to write about her as an adult. Because we know who she is as an adolescent. And it would be really interesting to see what parts of that time of her life are still informing her character as a young woman. So stay tuned; I'll let you know.

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'Speak' turns 15: A chat with author Laurie Halse Anderson

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Tell Laurie Halse Anderson that her 1999 young adult novel Speak changed your life, and she'll respond with a warm, heartfelt "thank you!" Sure, she gets this sort of thing all the time - but as Anderson will say, with a friendly chortle, "I've never gotten it from you before."

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She talks about her childhood, her high school experience. 

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She talks about her childhood, her high school experience. 

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Because Melinda doesn't talk, it's harder for her to form connections and throughout the book we see her form judgements of people she knows very little of  - later, at the end of the story, she learns something about a cheerleader and other girls in the school that helps to change these mindsets.

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Because Melinda doesn't talk, it's harder for her to form connections and throughout the book we see her form judgements of people she knows very little of  - later, at the end of the story, she learns something about a cheerleader and other girls in the school that helps to change these mindsets.

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People aren't black and white - a theme!

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(Andy Evans) This book was written in 1999. The book IT by Steven King was published in 1986 and the first movie came out in 1990, so it's possible calling Andy "IT" is referring to the clown who can shapeshift, putting on different faces and personas while also being someone's greatest fear, like Melinda.