Jane Yolen Guest of Honor Speech

Original transcript by Laura Quilter -- please fill in, correct, amend as needed

Jane Yolen

As you can see she's great at winging things, but not me ...

I want to begin by telling you all how honored & delighted i am to be here as your guest of honor ... alongside culture hereo ... and speaking of culture heroes, the name of the past guests of honors, made me faint with delight, like some victorian gentlewoman whose stays are too tight, orwho had to go around with an instrument that her very proper victorian doctor ... something we now call vibrator.

but for some of us history is only an excuse to read; for others it's an excuse to write.

you may have heard that wiscon is the only conference i didn't cancel this year when my beloved husband David Stempel of 44 years was dying ... we were playing a kind of game of hope, of praying that a miracle would happen. but alas it did not and david died on march 22nd, with such grace and such dignity, surrounded by music and love, that i insisted i come to wiscon ... because david would have wanted it; after all he was always the most ardent feminist in our family ...

when david & i were first together, and soon after we were first married ... i was a good girl in the late 1950s and he had read too much european philosophy, he was a great believer in my talent before i was ... he encouraged me to take chances, and cursed the early editors who rejected early efforts as fools, but looking back at early mss i see that he was speaking out of love and not out of critical acuity.

every artist is either nurtured or a nurturer, only a rare few are both.

men artists tend to be nurtured.

women writers with a few great exceptions like virginia woolf tend to do the... fetching themselves ... typical is holly ... she used to get up at 430 in the morning ... i think women writers know this better than men that there is no such thing as a time fairy ... how lucky i was. i had a husband hwo was a professor at university of mass. ... eager to take the children off on little three hour tripschance diapers etc, and long before such house husbandry was chic. you have talent he said. such genius is not to be ignored.

he may have been right on talent stuff, he was wrong on genius stuff, but he loved me ...

full of tradeoffs

a bleventh means one and a half units in a one-unit container. i give you that word with a great deal of love. there have been times in my love when ...david & i had 3 babies in rapid succession after we decided to have children ... or rather ... vw bug ... heidi, adam, jason ... and sometimes i saw my children as wonderful muses, other times, incredible distractions, and still other times as brilliant anarchic people of their own, and now ... i know them as colleagues and friends ... so david was there at the very beginning, and i'm truly and horribly sorry that he will not be with me for the next years of my life. because he was myvery best reader ... taskmaster ... and sometime muse.

now i'm going to tell you about muses, just in case ... the writer's muse wears sensible shoes ... birkenstock sandals b/c of all the nasty muddy places she has to go to find ideas ... never acknowledged or given a book dedication ... she'd love a bit of chocolate but is loath to ask ...

on the other hand there is imagination and he is an untamable creature ... sits down on his haunches .. defecates on carpet ... sharpens his sidearm on chippendale sideboard. he farts before the queen. but as feral as he is everyone praises him. ...

and the time fairy. the time fairy does not exist. how could you believe otherwise. if there was soch a creature as the time fairy wouldn't we all have discrete packets beside our pillows ... editors would have loads of time to return our phone calls. we ALL want such creatures, they would make the writers life easy. ... however ... imagination to lay his head with its knot of dark elfknots on her breast ... be my guest.

i on the other hand am a professional writer. someone who makes a livingn writing. so i do what professional writesr always do. i don't wait for inspiration but run right into perspiration mode. i sit down with my fingers on the keybaord and i write b/c writers writ,e it's definitioanl. if it sounds too simple, i'm sorry , there it is, writers write. and the punchline is that once a writer writes who do you suppose takes up residence, the birkenstock muse and that bad boy. and the time fairy too? i told you. there is no such thing. if there were such a creature, people like me would be writing hundreds of books in a lifetime. [wild applause]

i knew that would happen, i wrote it down right here, "now you life" ... and then you wonder, slightly giggly, if i remember all those things i wrote ... so i'll tell you, no i could not list all books without a major cribsheet and thank god for all websites ... but i could tell you something about the books and in fact at my website i've done just that, www.janeyolen.com ... don't trust computers completely so i have notes pasted ... poems are green, stories are gravel, writing is an adventure. and don't we all remember ... with a certain dollop of exaggeration. but i suspect that the last ... is a writer. never ask what it means. i get letters and email sfrom people every day asking what does it mean. damned if i know.

i mean to say is not the same as ... what i mean. ... when it is my turn to read i could no more explain to them or to you what i meant when iw rote it. it's there. it means what you need it to mean. ... i go back ...

david was a greater reader ... and eventually a great critic as well. i remember when he read ... he read the whole thing, wept, and then said the ending is wrong. ... he read it a second time, he re-read, wept, and said the ending is still wrong. i rewrote again, he reread, wept, and said NOW the ending is right.

... i don't ... keep up with the new york times. i can't even keep up with my local newspaper the daily hampshire ... which seems to breed in my mailbox. ... research to do. children find that odd. can't you just make it up they ask? even fantasy has to be grounded in the real world ... not a clone of course but a wonderland mirror.

for example ... working on clearances ... an homage to robert louis stevenson's kidnapped. it takes place in scotland ... when lairds simply through kinsmen off their land to replace them with sheep because sheep would pay them more. ... only the adventure is made up.

also working on a book of poems ... son jason ... looking at a variety of shapes

daughter heidi ... bad girls

... just finished sea queens ... women pirates

... reading wildly folklore and dance books ... calling for now "big ugly guy" or BUG which is a novel about a klezmer garage band. i have a jewish kid who makes a golem in his father's pottery workshop. and we are also doing a proposal about a noir gargoyle detective in edinburgh. and that's just for the proposal. also i have just finished a picture book biography about j. m. barrie called lost boy so i have read all of his fiction, much of it is smarmy & sentimental ... so when would i have time to read for fun ... any reading i've been doing lately has been bathtub ...

teacherman by frank mccourt ... or books i've read on train to new york ... but i have to tell you that the last great book i read, the really great book, was pride and prejducie which i was deeply into two summers ago, ... suddenly the man in front of me keeled over ... he was pronounced dead. and that so successfully shattered the mood that i haven't been able to go back to austen since ... (scattered possibly surprised laughter)

so if you're thinking ... bonbons champagne lyingn on chaise lounges and making things up... i wait with fingers on keyboard and wait as eager as any reader to see what comes up ...

writing as exercise ... flabby

wrote through childbirth

when david ill wrote a sonnet a day and that exercise kept her together

with his blessing wrote it as the radiation sonnets. algonquin brought it out.

started ... new cancers hit and he was dying ... i wrote before poems and after poems. so please indulge me.

single malt.

across the field we went whiskey in hand to pour it on your grave a libation to you and the gods you did not believe in ...

of course at the same time that i'm working on these poems and you're going to think i'm schizophrenic i wrote a silly pirate picture book with my daughter and we call it ... we subtitle it in our mind pirates of the caribbean. [laughter] it's about a pirate who hates parrots. ... but he has read the waterways ... lands on pirate island, and parrots think he's just a very large big ugly parrot. and so forth ... a writer writes.

well i'm a storyteller poet and writer. that's all i know how to do. i've been called a hans christian anderson of america but i keep telling people that really it should be the hans JEWISH anderson of america.

... another word david told me and it is a scottish word. the word is tegerm ... it means to prophesy in a bull of skin while behind a waterfall. i believe a vast story is hidden there because i haven't found time to write b/c that pesky time fairy is never there when you need her. but i'm thinking of building a time fairy trap, part honey and npart [mechanical] and i'll let you know if it works, and if it does locus will have a story on it and ellen will sell a prototype next year's auction.

one final poem for all of us

listen to your body it is made up of verbs ... listen to your body talk back

[applause]