At Jane Yolen’s house—really a sprawling bunch of old farm buildings in Hatfield, not just a “house”—the walls are pretty bare. That’s not because Yolen, 72, author of some 300 books for kids and adults, prefers austerity, but because many of her artworks are temporarily hanging in a gallery at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst. The exhibition is called Partners in Wonder.
Those artworks are often highly personal items, bearing inscriptions from the artists to Yolen. They’re the originals of pages from her many picture books, and seem all the more fragile and unusual in the gallery’s intentionally low lighting. It’s lit that way because these works, like many at the Carle, weren’t necessarily done with exhibiting in mind, explains Curator of Education Rosemary Agoglia. Instead, they were most often completed as a step toward the finished book as end result. That means they’re usually on less than archival quality paper, and in need of special care for long-term preservation.
Much of the artwork in the gallery is modest in scale. It’s presented in a relatively small space, open on each side to larger galleries, where you’ll find works by Carle and Etienne Delessert. The feel is intimate. Since the artists mostly didn’t create these works for display, some seem sketchy, as if they were merely taken from the artist’s desk or easel and without worrying about the niceties of, as the art teachers always say, “craftsmanship” in presentation. Which is not to say they are lacking; to the contrary, there is something humanizing about these well-rendered products of the book-making process, as opposed to the mute canvases on roped-off display in other museums.
It’s fascinating, too, to see single pages devoted to illuminating larger, unseen narratives. Without their usual context, it’s entertaining and a touch mysterious to try to divine the narrative that’s unfolding in these frames.
The artists in Partners in Wonder include Kathryn Brown, Tomie dePaola, Jane Dyer, Rebecca Guay, Lauren Mills, Barry Moser, Dennis Nolan and Ruth Sanderson (whose work, pictured at left, is a prominent part of the exhibition). Not only is the work extraordinary on its own terms, since Yolen has worked with leading lights of contemporary illustration it’s also an intriguing, if small, peek into the life of a local (and international) kids’ book star.
*
Yolen is a big presence among the Valley’s remarkably large number of children’s book authors and illustrators, thanks in part to her startling, and still increasing, number of books, including Owl Moon, How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? and The Devil’s Arithmetic. It can hardly hurt that she’s been dubbed “the Hans Christian Andersen of America.” Her online presence is substantial, too, a highly personal page where her bio is long and includes shots of family, and her blog offers great insights into her proclivities and creative process. It’s a bit of a goldmine for would-be kids’ book authors who want to know what the reality is like.
It was the exhibition of her personal art collection that prompted a recent interview, but speaking with Yolen offered a glimpse of just what has enabled her remarkable pace of creative output, how she collaborates with artists, and the difficulties even she has found working in an uncertain publishing climate.
Yolen isn’t necessarily a fan of the word “prolific,” though her incredibly large number of books is tough to describe any other way. “I hate the P-word,” she says. “I prefer the V-word—’versatile.'”
Being prolific, she says, opens up a writer to more negative appellations. On the other hand, she says, “If you’re versatile, you’re a treasure!”
Though it’s easy to find writers who proclaim the difficulties of crafting words, Yolen says her high book count is easily explained: “I love to write,” she says. “There are difficult moments, but the joy of creation is brilliant.”
Even so, she’s surprised by the total number, too. “It’s incredible to me, too,” she says. “The idea that they accumulate astonishes me.”
Yolen doesn’t necessarily have a favorite: “It depends on what day you ask me. I just got a royalty check yesterday, so right now that book is a big favorite!”
Yolen may be particularly well regarded in the world of children’s lit, but, she says, it’s a profession she wasn’t specifically aiming for. “It was an accident,” she says. “I was a poet.” (She still considers herself primarily a short-form writer.)
That was in her Smith College days (she graduated in 1960). She’d been recommended to an editor in search of young writers, and presented her manuscript about a kite flying champion. The editor told her that was a children’s book, and sent her to the appropriate editor. It seems to have been a good fit. She eventually sold her first book, as she recounts on her website, on her 22nd birthday. That one was called Pirates in Petticoats.
Yolen may not have known she would become well known as a writer of children’s books, but she did discover early on what kind of writer she wasn’t. Her father and brother were journalists, and she tried to follow suit.
“I turned out to be a lousy journalist,” says Yolen. “I realized I wasn’t hard enough.”
She soon became a book editor, which proved a better fit. Among the things she learned, she says, was how to improve writing on a sentence-by-sentence level. Being hard on others’ prose taught her an important skill: “I could turn around and be ruthless with my own writing.”
She also learned about the minutiae of the business side of making books. “I learned a lot about what would happen to my books,” she says. “I was armored.”
An important part of her learning is reflected in the current exhibition—how the illustrator/author relationship plays out with kids’ books. She points to very different working styles with local illustrator/collaborators, all of whom have work in the Carle show. “Ruth Sanderson and Rebecca Guay invite me into their studio [during the process],” she says. “With Barry Moser, I said, ‘When can I see?’ He said, ‘When I’m done!'”
Most often, Yolen explains, a publisher pairs author and illustrator, so a true collaboration is uncommon. For her, that has only rarely led to results she didn’t care for. “About 170 of my books are illustrated,” she says. “All in all, I’ve only been unhappy with five.”
*
As a longtime figure in children’s lit, Yolen has plenty to say about the state of her industry. She says it has come to resemble Hollywood in some unfortunate ways, with editors chasing whatever indicators of future sales they can find. Those indicators seldom prove helpful, says Yolen. “Every time, they tell you things like ‘green covers don’t sell.’ It’s common wisdom, until it’s not,” she says. If dystopian fantasy is the latest trend, “try to write one, and then it’s no longer what’s in.”
Like many writers, Yolen laments the effect of online piracy of her works. It’s easy, she says, “to find somebody who’s stealing my work and selling it.”
She finds the levelling force of online and DIY publishing problematic. “It democratizes, but the arts are not a democracy. They’re a meritocracy,” she says.
Rather than have wide availability of lesser artists, “I want the Michelangelos, the Puccinis, the Jane Austens to be there, and be paid enough.”
Yolen sees the problem as one of differentiation—”If everything looks the same, it’s only when you open it that you discover whether it’s good.”
Further, she says, when the production of books (especially e-books) is open to anyone, “We desensitize ourselves to good storytelling.”
So who should be the gatekeeper to getting published?
“Damned if I know!”, says Yolen.
For her part, Yolen is busy, even at 300 books, with creating new tales. She seems to thrive on working on many things at once, so her current list is quite long. Highlights include a new novel called The Thirteenth Fey, a new entry in the How Do Dinosaurs series, a book of sonnets, and a graphic novel (with Rebecca Guay).
Partners In Wonder: Selections from the Collection of Jane Yolen: Through May 1, Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, 125 West Bay Road, Amherst, (413) 658-1100.
