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Jane Yolen

"I love to write. I write for the child inside me. These are all books I want to read."

Have you and your child discovered author Jane Yolen? Jane is a prolific writer, and her books for children of all ages are diverse in style and tone. Her Web site offers a wealth of information for parents, children, teachers, and writers. Jane shared some of her thoughts about reading and writing with us.

When you were a child, who were your favorite authors, and what were your favorite books?
I am--and have always been--a voracious reader. My favorite authors included Andrew Lang, Louisa May Alcott, James Thurber, and Robert Louis Stevenson. I also read all the dog and horse books I could. I especially liked the Walter Farley series. I remember my mother reading to me all the time. I remember her reading me Ferdinand by Leaf Munro, Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey, and The Pleasant Pirate by John Goodwin. When I first became an editor, I came across an old copy of The Pleasant Pirate. Just looking at that binding made childhood memories come flooding back. I remember I was living in Newport News, Virginia at the time, and we'd gotten the book out from the library for my mother to read aloud.

Your books are so diverse in terms of target age group and tone. Where do you get your inspiration for your books?
I have a low threshold of boredom! I never get writer's block. If I'm stuck, I just put something aside and begin another book. Like many people, I have two threads inside me--the pensive, poetic, brooding self you'll see in All Those Secrets of the World and the outrageous, off-the-wall, funny self you'll see in books like Commander Toad. You'll see both of those threads, but rarely in the same book. Writing in different styles and for different age groups is a way of using everything that's inside of me.

Many of your books celebrate nature in one way or another. How did you become interested in nature?
I grew up in Manhattan, across from Central Park. Birds to me were pigeons and not-pigeons. Then I married a West Virginian who grew up in the woods. He was a hunter and fisher, and now he is a birdwatcher. He is actually the character Pa in Owl Moon. When we first moved to Western Massachusetts, he took me out to look at nature, and he taught me to see. I've become aware of nature through my husband, but it's definitely something I've adopted. When we moved to the country, my friends were worried that I could not adapt to country life, but I've never looked back.

In the preface to your recent book of poems, Least Things, you wrote, "Books--even small books--take a long time." Can you tell me a little bit about the process you go through in writing.
I start with an idea, of course. I have so many ideas that the problem is that I have to bat them away to focus on one at a time. I work every day in my office with my fingers on the keyboard--probably about 360 days a year. I am focused because I love writing to find out what will happen. People--and often kids--make the mistake of thinking that once it's on the page, it's done, but that's only the beginning. I constantly reshape and revision my work. I dream it again, imagine it again--that's the exciting part of writing.

You have worked with so many different illustrators who use very different styles. How do you collaborate with the illustrator?
Most people are surprised to find out that I've never even spoken to many of my books' illustrators. In general, I write the text for a book and send it to my editor. Then my editor selects the illustrator--the editor is a marriage broker of sorts. It works well this way because it allows the two artistic visions--the writer's and the illustrator's--to remain separate.

In Least Things, you paired a haiku with a fascinating fact about each creature. Can you talk about how you got the idea for this book?
My son, Jason Stemple, is a photographer, and I am constantly looking at his nature photos. Then I stumbled across Pliny the Elder's quotation, "Nature excels in the least things," and I thought of complementing Jason's nature photographs with poetry. I started to write poems to accompany his photos, but they all seemed big and clunky, so I kept throwing them away. Then I thought of haiku as the perfect complement to his photos. My editor actually thought of the idea of including a fact about each creature. When my first granddaughter, Maddison, was born, I knew that she had to be the last "least thing." When she was learning to walk, Jason took a picture of her holding hands with her mother, and that became the photo for the last page of the book. The whole book took us about five years to create and two more years 'til it was published. Maddison is now eight years old.

What projects are you working on currently?
I am writing a book with my daughter, a retelling of six story ballets. I am also working on some picture books about the Statue of Liberty, Benjamin Franklin, Johnny Appleseed, and Emily Dickinson, and I'm working on a book with my son Jason called Fine Feathered Friends.