AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Jane Yolen published an astonishing number of books in her lifetime - more than 450. She was best known for children's books like "Owl Moon" and her series called "How Do Dinosaurs...?" Yolen died last week at her home in Hatfield, Massachusetts. She was 87. NPR's Chloee Weiner has this remembrance.
CHLOEE WEINER, BYLINE: Heidi Stemple says her mom, Jane Yolen, had a favorite saying.
HEIDI STEMPLE: Which was touch magic. Pass it on.
WEINER: By the time Stemple and Yolen collaborated on their first short story in the '90s, Yolen had already published dozens of projects with her two sons.
STEMPLE: I was the last to join what we affectionately called the family business.
WEINER: Yolen was born in Manhattan in 1939 and spent much of her adult life in Western Massachusetts. Her home there anchored a career in which Yolen wrote picture books, like the hugely popular "How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?" but also young adult fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, nonfiction, poetry. Newsweek once called her the Hans Christian Andersen of America, and The New York Times called her a modern equivalent of Aesop.
STEMPLE: What she used to remind people was - and we all joke about this - that she was not the Hans Christian Andersen of America. She was the Hans Jewish Andersen of America (laughter).
PATRICK NIELSEN HAYDEN: I never read anything by her that isn't fundamentally humane.
WEINER: Patrick Nielsen Hayden is an editor who shepherded the publication of "Briar Rose," one of a handful of Yolen's books about the Holocaust. She also authored "The Devil's Arithmetic," about a Jewish American girl who's transported back in time and sent to a concentration camp.
HAYDEN: It helps that, like many great children's writers and educators and librarians, she regarded children as simply human beings who simply aren't as big and experienced as us.
WEINER: In her kids books, Yolen also didn't shy away from language that might stretch children's vocabularies, like when she refused an editor's request to swap the word lavalier for a more kid-friendly synonym in her book "Piggins."
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JANE YOLEN: Well, the editor first said, I think we can - better just say necklace. I think lavalier is too big a word for kids this age. But we held the fort. We said, yes, absolutely. It's going to be lavalier.
WEINER: That's Yolen on NPR's Weekend Edition in 2010.
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YOLEN: And when Jane Dyer, the illustrator, and I went on a book tour together, every school we went to, the kids had voted that lavalier was their favorite new word.
WEINER: In 1988, Yolen's book "Owl Moon" won a Caldecott Medal. It was illustrated by John Schoenherr. The story is about a father who, one winter night, takes his young daughter into the snowy woods searching for an owl. Yolen's daughter, Heidi Stemple, calls it her forever favorite.
STEMPLE: My dad is Pa and I am the little girl, though my brothers will argue that he took all of us owling, which is very true. But my mom made it a little girl and told me it was me, so I'm sticking with that.
WEINER: Stemple kept the book close in the last weeks of her mom's life.
STEMPLE: I'd just climb into bed with her, and we were reading. And I read "Owl Moon" to her every day.
WEINER: The last page makes Stemple emotional.
STEMPLE: (Reading) When you go owling, you don't need words or warm or anything but hope. That's what Pa says. The kind of hope that flies on silent wings under a shining owl moon.
WEINER: Yolen's 454th book will be out in July. Chloee Weiner, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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