What wishes to send off into the heavens with the person who you have known and loved for 44 years? The one, who unknown yet to me, showed up at my decrepit farmhouse doorstep all those years ago with a loaf of bread and a small bag of salt. Her housewarming present. Her welcome.
Long considered traditional gifts, these staples of bread and salt have been given for centuries because they symbolize sustenance, protection, hospitality, and prosperity. Together salt and bread embody generosity and kindness. Jane brought all that to my door, along with a friendship that would last a lifetime.
I knew salt was used as a preservative long before refrigeration, but I didn’t know it was also considered a luxury because of the difficulty of extracting it from the sea. It became the original ingredient and essential flavor of Jane and my lifelong friendship — nurtured and preserved until last week.
I knew only about a grain or two of this background when Jane showed up. But I recognized that her offering and she were special. She blessed me with 44 years of her friendship and mentoring. We spent hundreds of visits and thousands of hours talking books and publishing, sharing the latest in each of our life’s events. Jane modeled for me a professional woman with a family, carving out her place in the world. She embodied a life’s career of words and writing. She became my shero long before the term existed and set the stage for my work with authors and writers for the next almost five decades.
Jane introduced me to the world of children’s book writing and the plethora of writers in my backyard. She offered up entry to a coveted insular world of local talent, as expansively as I served up dinners for new friends. I would open my email every morning to read her “poem a day” that she put out into the universe. That was her daily writing practice to keep her creativity limber. It didn’t have to be an especially good poem, but you had to write. Every day. Each day. She taught me how to support the writing practice of my authors.
My work at the time was in promoting writers on all sorts of topics. My interest was far more vested in the storied world of adult writings. I didn’t have any kids yet, so the children’s publishing world of kid lit was a surprisingly new foray for me. Jane was 43 when I was 26 and had already surpassed her 100th published book. Idol worship was born in me. So was a deep friendship that traversed growing families, challenges, tragedies, adventures and the richest of shared experiences, all around the written word.
Books and publishing were the beginning of our common woven thread, but it was our daily lives that created the continuity of conversations. There were gaps necessitated by what life threw in our paths, but we always converged again, be it months or years later. She brought me into her writers’ meetings. I listened as careers were built around the state and status of all the books these local authors were producing. I was the pr/marketing guru, while they wove their magic stories for me and a world of children.
She often urged me to join the actual writing with her and others. I did not. The last thing I considered myself was a writer. I kept to the fringes. I was not an author, I worked with them, learned from them, revered them. But I did not lust to be a writer because I knew too much; how hard it was. I played the supporting role, and my ever-increasing publishing knowledge only increased my reverence for Jane.
The thing about Jane — she never talked down or taught down. She simply and fully shared. She mentored. She opened her home, her heart, her mind, and her love of the written word to all writers. All the time.
These last few years as Jane slowed down in body, her books continued to be born. Last count was 450 and I believe there are close to 100 being gestated in the posthumous life of Jane. I have an upstairs closet housing all my children’s books, and there are hundreds. One very long shelf is dedicated solely to Jane Yolen books. At last count I had 61. I scour thrift shops, local indie bookstores, my Free Library where she and her daughter Heidi would “plant” new titles for me to quickly steal away and add to my collection. I love the ability and the hunt to keep collecting Jane words and books, the myriad characters and plots, all culminating in the storied life of the remarkable Jane Yolen.
What Jane brought me that warm afternoon in August of 1983 was the richness of a lifelong and lifetime friendship. And books to read over and over and over again. To my two daughters and to my granddaughter. Jane Yolen, your life was a blessing, and your memory will continue to hoot loudly like the owl perched high on a tree branch, under the bright full moon.
Lisa Ekus lives in Hatfield, where she ran her eponymous PR and literary agency for almost 50 years.