But the stronger ammunition in The Sentry is reserved for “Impressions.’' The newsletter’s pages are filled with outtakes and excerpts that the PCAYC find objectionable. For example:
The poem “Midnight Wood,’' by Raymond Wilson, which they believe may frighten small children. It reads, in part:
Dark in the wood a thin wind calls: What do you hear? Frond and fern and clutching grass Snigger at you as you pass, Whispering fear.
Excerpts from the anthologies that, the group contends, ridicule traditional authority figures:
[T]he priest was a disagreeable old man with a bad cold in the head, and the lady thought that he would never stop with his praying and his chanting, and the knight looked at the blue sky through the long, thin window behind the priest’s head and wished he were out hunting in the forest.....(From “The Stained Glass Window’’ in the 5th grade text, Knock at the Door )
Excerpts from the “Impressions’’ teacher resource books, which suggest class assignments, including one in which students improvise conversations between the characters Bunya and Isabel following a reading of “Bunya The Witch.’' They would, for example, be asked to talk about their experiences as witches.
Says Sentry editor Dennis Riley, “Press coverage has been a real obstacle for us.’' But the newsletter, he believes, will help get the organization’s message across.
J.M.
