Jane Yolen's On-line Journal: An Appreciation

Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Recently I noticed that I hadn't seen anything from Jane Yolen on Facebook in quite some time. Long enough to realize that that wasn't a good thing. So I wasn't surprised when her family announced that she died yesterday. The news made People Magazine, because she was, is, and will continue to be Jane Yolen, but the Locus obituary is much better.

Once upon a time, Jane Yolen kept an on-line journal. It hasn't been available for a while now, so you'll have to take my word for it that it once exited. At the end of July, 2004 I first wrote here about it. 

"I've noticed that Jane Yolen has started an on-line journal. It doesn't seem to be a traditional blog, but a traditional journal maintained on-line. I admire what she's doing, but I don't know if I'll be reading it much because...she does too much work. Her work habits are far better than mine, and I don't want to keep reminding myself.

On the other hand, maybe this is just what I need."

In just a couple of days, I was hooked.

"I believe I owe this surge of creativity and ambition to my personal writing coach, Jane Yolen. Though we have never met--though she, actually, has never even heard of me--her online journal with its descriptions of her superhuman work habits shames my "inner Jane" and makes her work harder.

Hey, Jane, there hasn't been an update in a couple of days. I'm going to crash and burn here if I don't hear from you soon."

 By September, I was obsessed. 

"My many, many, many fans know that I am somewhat obsessed with Jane Yolen's On-line Journal, mainly because Jane is a maniac for work and I, well, I'm not. I hoped that reading Jane's journal of her work life would inspire me to make a greater effort. If anything, it's made things worse. The time I should be spending working, I'm spending reading about Jane working."

I sometimes called her my "writing coach." I sometimes called her my "spiritual advisor." I sometimes called myself her "stalker." In 2005 I was worried about her husband's health. Over time, I was more than a little freaked out that in addition to, say, knocking off a few poems, receiving some rejections,  and meeting with her agent on the same day and having multiple books published in a year, she was able to have people over to eat or meet them at restaurants or go shopping and she was able to maintain a second home in another freaking country.

My obsession continued until the beginning of April, 2007. 

"I haven't been reading Jane Yolen's journal the way I used to. In the past, I found her impressive work ethic and output inspiring. Now reading about what she's doing just makes me feel like a layabout. A lazy, disorganized, self-centered, kept woman."

And then I went on for a couple of paragraphs about what I'd just read at Jane's journal about editing. 

Gail and Jane in the Real World

I did meet her briefly in the carbon-based world a few times.

 Soon after my first book was published in 1996, she gave a talk at the University of Connecticut, and I asked her a question about how she had managed writing when she had young children. She said she had two things going for her. 1. Her husband was a professor and was available to take on parenting tasks more frequently than other fathers might be. 2. She'd started publishing before she had children and thus thought of herself as a writer before she thought of herself as a mother.  She wasn't saying she put work first but that she didn't have to create a writer mindset or identity after she had created a mother mindset or identity. It was natural for her to fit her kids into her already established work life instead of having to fit work into an already established mother life. Believe me, I totally understood what she was saying. Being a mother while being a writer or being a writer while being a mother is still not natural for me. I got started in the wrong order.

I would see her at another event at the University of Massachusetts where I attended a program she was running. She began with an apology, because her husband was ill and she had been distracted when preparing her presentation. Then she proceeded to give what I felt was a fine college-level lecture, because that was what she was capable of when she wasn't at the top of her game.

Maybe sometime in the 2000s, the early teens, I actually shook her hand at some small gathering, again at UConn. I mentioned that we'd run into each other a couple of times over the years, and she looked at me intently and said something like, "I hope I was pleasant," which I thought was just lovely.

I am certain someone took a group picture of us at the end of that event. I know I had it, but I can't find it now or remember exactly when it was taken or why we were all where we were, which would help me to look for it. I am afraid I may have deleted it because I remember thinking it made my ass look big. I suspect Jane didn't give a damn about her ass, which left her with more time for all the things she did give a damn about.

I never read a great deal of Jane's work. It was Jane, herself, who drew me, the fact that she existed. In a nod to Michel de Montaigne, if you press me to say why I was obsessed with Jane Yolen, I can say no more than because she was she, and I, sadly, was only I.