This week we celebrate Jane Yolen’s birthday. A science fiction author, poet and children’s book author Yolen’s expertise is greater than her massive body of work (she authored or edited over 280 books). What’s most impressive is her feminism and the joy she brings to what she does.
Yolen’s work on my reading list:
- Lost Girls (a feminist Peter Pan story)
- Bad Girls: Sirens, Jezebels, Murderesses, Thieves, and Other Female Villains
- The Devil’s Arithmetic (a Holocaust historical fiction novella)
A writer has many successes:
Each new word captured.
Each completed sentence.
Each rounded paragraph leading into the next.
Each idea that sustains and then develops.
Each character who, like a wayward adolescent, leaves home and finds a life.
Each new metaphor that, like the exact error it is, some how works.
Each new book that ends–and so begins.Selling the piece is only an exclamation point, a spot of punctuation.
With Jane Yolen as one of our many feminist speculative fiction teachers, we have the tools to keep writing and, above all, write with joy. Thank you, Jane Yolen, and happy birthday.