Sister Emily's Lightship (33 page)

T
HIS IS THE MOST
recent of the collections of my short stories I have compiled over the years, and one of the most complete. I made an initial cull of stories and sent them to my editor, and she then made the final choices. They were not the same choices I would have made. But I listen to my editors; they are, after all, educated readers first. That's because we come to every story with our own life luggage—the size of handbags, backpacks, suitcases, even steamer trunks—informing what we read. So an editor's choices are personal in addition to editorial. I like that.

These stories are essentially for adults, but because my work—especially the fantasy stories—tends to cross over age lines, some of the stories here began as published work for children or young adults.

Of course, since the original publication of this book, I have almost enough for another collection of stories. Hmmmm, must think about that!

Jane Yolen

I was born in New York City on February 11, 1939. Because February 11 is also Thomas Edison's birthday, my parents used to say I brought light into their world. But my parents were both writers and prone to exaggeration. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote short stories and created crossword puzzles and double acrostics. My younger brother, Steve, eventually became a newspaperman. We were a family of an awful lot of words!

We lived in the city for most of my childhood, with two brief moves: to California for a year while my father worked as a publicity agent for Warner Bros. films, and then to Newport News, Virginia, during the World War II years, when my mother moved my baby brother and me in with her parents while my father was stationed in London running the Army's secret radio.

When I was thirteen, we moved to Connecticut. After college I worked in book publishing in New York for five years, married, and after a year traveling around Europe and the Middle East with my husband in a Volkswagen camper, returned to the States. We bought a house in Massachusetts, where we lived almost happily ever after, raising three wonderful children.

I say “almost,” because in 2006, my wonderful husband of forty-four years—Professor David Stemple, the original Pa in my Caldecott Award–winning picture book,
Owl Moon
—died. I still live in the same house in Massachusetts.

And I am still writing.

I have often been called the “Hans Christian Andersen of America,” something first noted in
Newsweek
close to forty years ago because I was writing a lot of my own fairy tales at the time.

The sum of my books—including some eighty-five fairy tales in a variety of collections and anthologies—is now well over 335. Probably the most famous are
Owl Moon
,
The Devil's Arithmetic
, and
How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?
My work ranges from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, and nonfiction, to novels and story collections for young adults and adults. I've also written lyrics for folk and rock groups, scripted several animated shorts, and done voiceover work for animated short movies. And I do a monthly radio show called
Once Upon a Time
.

These days, my work includes writing books with each of my three children, now grown up and with families of their own. With Heidi, I have written mostly picture books, including
Not All Princesses Dress in Pink
and the nonfiction series Unsolved Mysteries from History. With my son Adam, I have written a series of Rock and Roll Fairy Tales for middle grades, among other fantasy novels. With my son Jason, who is an award-winning nature photographer, I have written poems to accompany his photographs for books like
Wild Wings
and
Color Me a Rhyme.

And I am still writing.

Oh—along the way, I have won a lot of awards: two Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott Medal, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic Awards, two Christopher Awards, the Jewish Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award, among many accolades. I have also won (for my full body of work) the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Grand Master Award, the Catholic Library Association's Regina Medal, the University of Minnesota's Kerlan Award, the University of Southern Mississippi and de Grummond Children's Literature Collection's Southern Miss Medallion, and the Smith College Medal. Six colleges and universities have given me honorary doctorate degrees. One of my awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set my good coat on fire when the top part of it (a large magnifying glass) caught the sunlight. So I always give this warning: Be careful with awards and put them where the sun don't shine!

Also of note—in case you find yourself in a children's book trivia contest—I lost my fencing foil in Grand Central Station during a date, fell overboard while whitewater rafting in the Colorado River, and rode in a dog sled in Alaska one March day.

And yes—I am still writing.

At a Yolen cousins reunion as a child, holding up a photograph of myself. In the photo, I am about one year old, maybe two.

Sitting on the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park in New York in 1961, when I was twenty-two. (Photo by David Stemple.)

Enjoying Dirleton Castle in Scotland in 2010.

Signing my Caldecott Medal–winning book
Owl Moon
in 2011.

Reading for an audience at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2012.

Visiting Andrew Lang's gravesite at the Cathedral of Saint Andrew in Scotland in 2011.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2000 by Jane Yolen

Cover design by Gabriel Guma

978-1-4804-2327-5

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com