From the Princess to the Queen

In Honor of HRH Jane Yolen, the Queen of Everything 👑

When I was searching for all that poetry stuff for MK, one of the many magical things I stumbled upon was the essay I had been asked to write for the afterword of Jane Yolen’s MIDNIGHT CIRCUS (2020). Why on earth was this in my poetry Scrivener file of all places? And then I read it again and realized why. I also realized that this essay absolutely needed to be the close of this year’s National Poetry Month. I began this month with one Grand Dame; it is only fitting that I should end with a Queen.

This princess loves and misses you, Queen Jane! I hope to see you and Mama Hen again on the eighth square sometime very soon.

If you’d like to support my effort to publish more essays like this, please consider getting a Substack subscription, becoming a Patron, or tossing a buck in the tip jar that Chris and I can use it for gas money when we’re out stormchasing in May!

And be sure to leave a comment, so I know someone is out there listening. 💜

From the Princess to the Queen

Originally published in Midnight Circus by Jane Yolen

*

Heidi E. Y. Stemple loves to tell the story of the year I showed up at Phoenix Farm for the Picture Book Boot Camp (PBBC) Master Class taught by her and her mother, Jane Yolen.

“I found out one of our students wore a tiara and fancied herself a princess—can you imagine? I couldn’t wait to tell Mom. Of course, she immediately ran upstairs to fetch a crown. Because this girl might call herself a princess, but J.Y. is the Queen.”

I’m a big fan of this recollection, so I never quibble, and I never get tired of hearing it. It’s a great story, it’s 100% true, and I like the way Heidi tells it.

But I remember my meeting with Jane a little differently.

Once upon a time, a girl named Truth wanted to attend the court of the Fairy Queen. Truth was a wild girl who’d become princess of a kingdom by the sea, but the coffers were bare, and so she did not have the money to go. But she was a clever girl. She managed to con a crafty leprechaun out of his gold (several leprechauns if you must know) and made the long journey north.

Yes, my name really is the Greek word for Truth, and the day I signed onto LiveJournal as “PrincessAlethea,” the entire science fiction world picked up the nickname and ran with it. But Jane Yolen is so much more than a dread Fae Queen: she is a goddess. Jane Yolen does it all. Horror Writers Association, Science Fiction Writers Association (SFWA), Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). Poetry, short stories, kids books, song lyrics. Collections of magical tales full of snatchers and selkies, weavers and wolves, sunlight and starlight and everything in between. You name it, Jane Yolen has written it down on paper. She’s been publishing longer than I’ve been alive, and I’m not that young.

To say I have idolized her my whole life would definitely be an understatement.

It started with three of us that spring in Massachusetts—all the best fairy tales start with threes. We flew in the night before Picture Book Boot Camp started in earnest and had rooms reserved for us at the inn. Jane extended an invite to join her on her daily walk early the next morning (the Master Class didn’t officially start until later that afternoon). The two older students declined, as they were best friends and had a lot of catching up to do, but the youngest student, full of energy and enthusiasm, took Jane up on the offer.

I’d read the fairy tales. I knew. When wise fairies ask you to walk with them through the woods, you say yes.

I even wore my tiara.

I was always going to be the cuckoo in that nest of students. The goal of every PBBC attendee was to utilize Jane and Heidi’s tutelage to raise their picture book prowess to the next level. Every single one of us had published at least one picture book, but they all knew Jane exclusively through SCBWI. I was a Chemistry major who’d been raised in the publishing industry, and at Dragon Con. AlphaOops might have been the first publishing contract I signed, but by the time it was released I was a bona fide active member of the Science Fiction Writers Association.

My conversation with Jane during that first walk covered a little bit of everything: Her time as an editor at Random House, her stint as president of SFWA, Shakespeare, shoes, ships, ceiling wax, the whole kit and caboodle. By the end of that walk I had a true mentor, and Jane understood I wasn’t the kind of princess who signed away her firstborn because she didn’t take the time to read the fine print.

She knew (from one of my manuscript submissions) that my family had escaped from its own holocaust, during the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922. A different dark wood, but a dark wood from which Jane had all too much experience telling difficult tales.

But I didn’t tell her my whole story—that week it was my job to hear far more stories than I told. She noted that I listened with the heart of a yarnspinner, that I saw with the eyes of a talesmith, that I dreamed with the mind of a weaver. She was familiar with the nightmares whence I came, though she did not know the exact paths I had walked to get to this place. I did not tell her in so many words that she was also my Baba Yaga, allowing me to seek refuge from a past where I had been abused by men. None of that mattered at Phoenix Farm. Baba Yolen challenged me until I was confident enough to triumph on my own.

But I think maybe, deep down, she knew all this anyway. Because sometimes kindred spirits and benevolent fairies know things without having to say a word.

It was never Jane’s job to save me from anything—by the time we became friends, I had already saved myself. Nor was it her task to remind me how strong I am; once forged, it is impossible for a sword to forget it is a sword. But she reminded me in personal emails and poetry what it was to be real, to be Truth, both within fiction and without. She gave me tools so that I could better tell the hard tales. She encouraged me to investigate the wild wood that birthed me, so that I might discover animal friends in that darkness, or wings of my own, or even love. She taught me, by example, that the whirlwind inside my brain could be harnessed and even tamed, in time. She believed in me when I spread myself so thin that I forgot to believe in myself anymore.

She still believes in me. And takes great pride in telling me so, over and over and over again.

After that one morning’s walk, Jane and I were destined to be friends forever, but it was the poem that sealed the deal. We were having lunch at the Eric Carle Museum a few days later on a Master Class field trip; there were giant posters across one wall of the cafeteria featuring the subjects of past exhibits.

“I would have loved to have seen the Quentin Blake one,” I sighed. “His illustrated Ogden Nash book was one of my absolute favorites as a child. All my friends loved Shel Silverstein, but I always thought Ogden Nash was far more clever.”

Jane turned and stared at me. “If called by a panther…”

“Don’t anther,” I finished.

That’s right. Jane Yolen started a quote from an Ogden Nash poem, and I finished it. To the best of my knowledge, that sort of scene only happened in movies or television, when a teacher of great intelligence tests his or her student, and the student rises to the occasion. That thing that only played out in fiction had just played out in my actual life. With Jane Yolen.

We always dream of meeting our heroes, forging bonds and becoming the best of friends. I’m here to tell you that you’re never really prepared for when that actually happens.

It was even scarier for me on some level because Jane wasn’t just a colleague, mentor, and fairy godmother…she was me. It was as if I’d been handed a looking glass into the future. I was already a Princess Who Did Too Much, but here was the Queen of Everything, telling me there was no reason it couldn’t be done. Because she’d gone and done it. All she had to do was point the way to the eighth square and send me on my way.

I always wished I’d met someone like Jane when I was a kid—it would have helped a lot to have known that being a Queen of Everything was a legitimate Life Path. This is why I most enjoy meeting middle schoolers—I can be for them the person I didn’t have when I was twelve, a washed-up television actress in the middle of my first novel, with dozens of poems shoved in the shoebox under my bed.

But I have Jane now, better late than never. She is the goal. She is who I want to be when I never grow up. She is the reason I venture forth into this upside-down world, sad and strong and optimistic and constantly inspired, sword and head held high, unafraid because I know it is possible to do Everything. No bar has been invented that is too high for me to cross.

Except for maybe hers.

And I’m okay with that.

If Jane is the Queen and I’m the Princess, it should come as no surprise that she is Ringleader of this Midnight Circus, and I host my very own Traveling Sideshow.

Queen Jane traveled south to my kingdom once, the Chaos Realm of Dragon Con. The first thing we did (after breakfast, of course) was go for a walk. I gave her a tour. I marched behind her in a parade where they cheered for her from the streets. I escorted her to a formal dinner where the bard heckled me from the stage. I attended her reading. I brought her a crown.

I was asked to moderate the Young Adult Guest of Honor Panel that year: It was just Jane and me at the big table up on the dais, the Princess and the Queen.

“Can one of you test the microphones for me?” the sound tech yelled from the back.

I leaned forward. “’Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe…”

“All mimsy was the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe,” Jane finished into her own mic.

And so the universe maintains its balance.

Long Live Queen Jane!