This past Thursday, June 11, the family of (astonishingly prolific) author Jane Yolen reported that she had died. The social Internet immediately flooded with remembrances and tributes to her deep, varied catalogue, her talents as writer and editor, and her life as a human. This is mine.

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I’m ten years old and on the outer cusp of my childhood mania for Holocaust narratives. I’ve read through The Diary of Anne Frank, Behind the Bedroom Wall, The Upstairs Room, Number the Stars and countless adjacent works: Summer of My German Soldier, Lily’s Crossing, Don’t You Know There’s a War On, Goodbye Glamour Girl, anything I can find. In my fifth-grade teacher’s classroom library, The Devil’s Arithmetic. An alluring title, one I shy from, being that I hate math and am discouraged from anything vaguely demonic. It’s the last one I remember reading in elementary school, the hardest to understand, the one that stays with me into adulthood.

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I’m twelve years old and my granny has recently bestowed my doom, a copy of The Once and Future King, propelling me into a lifelong obsession with the Matter of Britain. I’m reading The Dark Is Rising out of order from my middle school library, combing the public library’s shelves for titles that look likely: The Road to Camlann, The High King, The Squire’s Tales, The Lost Years of Merlin. Finally, stashed on a spinner rack outside the children’s room in what passed for the library’s nascent young-adult collection, The Wild Hunt.

Split perspective, riddled with contradictions, strange and violent and best of all, referential, sly, an invitation to certain readers. The boys in the story, Jerrold and Gerund, know about Will Stanton. I know about Will Stanton. Are you allowed to do this in a book that isn’t one of Will’s books? It seems you are.

I notice the author’s name belatedly. It’s the age in your life when it’s only reasonable that the same authors will pop up, or maybe it’s just the last glimmers of a golden age, when writers of children literature could and would do it all.

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I’m fourteen years old and a member of an apocalyptic cult, just like Marina in Armageddon Summer. I gloss our ages, not our affiliations, although my sister and I are mildly obsessed with apocalyptic cults, with anti-government militant groups, we talk Waco and Ruby Ridge at the dinner table. Cara is older, cannier; in hindsight, she knows what we are part of, while I still have the capacity to separate my life from its reflection in the pages of books. I’ve been reading a lot of Stephanie S. Tolan, A Good Courage and the Ark trilogy. I pick up Armageddon Summer first because of its cool digital-collage cover—I’ve also been drawn to Everworld and In the Forests of the Night—and then because of one of its authors, Bruce Coville. He wrote a book I love, Into the Land of the Unicorns, and I’ve recently read online that he’s BFF with my newest favorite author, Tamora Pierce.

The co-author of Armageddon Summer, Marina’s voice, is Jane Yolen.

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I’m sixteen and have been assigned to read a Holocaust narrative for AP US History. We get to pick a book ourselves, because this is AP. I pick Briar Rose because by now I’m cottoning on, I recognize her name, I have some inkling that what Yolen has to offer won’t be what I’ve encountered before (even in her previous Holocaust book). What she has to offer is a Mythopoeic winner and Nebula finalist, although those words on the book cover are meaningless. What she has to offer is mind-blowing: the real story of Chełmno and its mobile death machine, a concentration camp on wheels, these historical atrocities cut with “Sleeping Beauty.” Multiple time periods, generational trauma, an unexpected fairy tale element.

My APUSH teacher gives me an A for my book report but notes disapproval of my title selection for being fantasy, rather than serious historical fiction. Clearly she didn’t understand that the fairy tale lens isn’t frivolous, doesn’t blunt the story’s ferocious blade. Clearly I didn’t express Yolen’s power in my paper. After the fact, grumpily seeking back-up for my opinion (backed by the Mythopoeic Society, I now clock), I get my first taste of Kirkus being Kirkus.

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I’m seventeen and trying to get into science fiction after a childhood spent reading fantasy. I’ve burned through all the children’s and not-yet-YA titles the public library has to offer; I’ve eaten up Piers Anthony and Mercedes Lackey and Marion Zimmer Bradley and Stephen Lawhead and Mary Renault; I’ve ventured into the weirder, more elusive corners of the adult stacks and carried away Kushiel’s Dart, the King’s Blades trilogy, Fire Logic, Kindred, The Bone Doll’s Twin, the Sevenwaters series, a novelization of The Wicker Man; I’m now gritting my teeth through Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Jack Vance. I’ve been given to understand these are necessities, that my endless appetite for Star Wars Expanded Universe novels doesn’t count. I liked Dune, but none of the other notable sci-fi feels like Dune and the Dune cash-in novels are turgid. No one has yet mentioned Le Guin.

I’m tired. There’s another war on. I want to read something good.

I go back to the not-yet-YA spinner rack and let my hand drift. The Point Signature books are so reliable: Jackaroo, Dogwolf, Beyond the Burning Time, Justice and Her Brothers, and also small enough to fit in the spinner beside these, the Pit Dragon series. A Yolen adventure I’ve not yet taken, one I’m confused and intrigued by. The covers boast dragons, the back copy mentions a planet, two vibes I understand—courtesy of my traditional science-fiction education—to be at odds.

The first book is never checked in, the times I’ve noticed the others. Well, today’s my lucky day.

Science fantasy, it turns out, is what I like.

I’m twenty-three and in grad school, maybe the most miserable I’ve ever been up to that point. Undergrad was the happiest; graduate studies don’t suit me, although in my private heart I still imagine myself going further, becoming an academic. The truth doesn’t occur to me: that my program of study is largely unnecessary, often actually detrimental, to my future work. That if I were studying literature toward a Ph.D, I’d be miserable in fewer ways, happier in more significant ones. That I’ve set myself up for a life of the same pro/con list.

The kind of librarian I think I want to be is the only kind I’ll never end up as: a school media specialist. Most of the core classes are taught by the faculty member who also advises students on the school media track. I dislike her teaching style, dread our office hours, am really kind of afraid of her. But in the foundational children’s literature course, a picture book segment. A reason to look through a bin of books I’ve carted around from apartment to apartment, all the things I loved best in childhood.

(Most of these will be re-dispersed to actual children during Hurricane Irma.)

There aren’t a great many “classics” in the bin, no Eric Carle or Margaret Wise Brown. The body of picture-book literature is in continual expansion, morph, and fruiting; there are new classics now, books I’ve never heard of since I have no younger siblings, nieces and nephews, or friends with young kids. During an overview of kidlit heavy hitters in class, I’m struck by the book covers filling the presentation screen.

How Do Dinosaurs… by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague, more than a book a year since 2000. While I was growing up with her books for people the ages I’ve been, she was busy writing for people after me.

I find all the Dinosaurs books at the Jimmie B. Keel branch library and then her other picture books. I find some deep in myself, Owl Moon and The Bird of Time and Alphabestiary, books read or read to me, books that settled at the bottom of the pool and waited for their recognition.

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I’m twenty-eight and in Charleston, South Carolina for YALLFest. It’s a banner year, the fifth anniversary, the lineup busting at the seams with big names: Richelle Mead, Brandon Sanderson, Ann Brashares, Libba Bray. I’m there because I think I can be a young adult author—I think I want to be one—and Charleston is an easy-enough drive from Tampa, and a long-time Internet friend from Wilmington will be there, too.

Out of all the big names (Kiera Cass, Leigh Bardugo, David Levithan, E. Lockhart, R.L. Stine), I’m most excited to hear Jane Yolen. To meet her, maybe. To see whether I have something to say to this author still publishing, this writer whose fingerprints I finally begin to conceptualize as a map.

She signs my copy of The Wild Hunt, grabbed from the kids’ fantasy shelves at Mojo like I’d found gold. As it turns out, all I have to say is “thank you.”

I’m thirty the year I make my first money from writing fiction, a story for an anthology of fantastical horse tales. I read over the PDF galley to be sure there are no last-minute corrections required for “Eel and Bloom,” to ensure my surname’s correct spelling, to see whether my scant biography makes me cringe. It feels very adult, very Real Writer.

I recognize a few names in the table of contents, people whose work I’ve read in this online corner or that. Then, the very final line: “A Glory of Unicorns,” Jane Yolen.

A poem by the Jane Yolen, stacked inside a book containing one of my stories? I hadn’t expected this. I can probably hang up the whole writing thing right now.

I don’t, though.

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I’m thirty-seven in the spring of 2025, sifting a stack of incoming picture books. This is one of my favorite tasks; introducing new picture books to listeners during my library’s baby and family story times is a big responsibility. This is a good stack: there’s new Nikki Grimes and Micha Archer, a sensitively-told story about a girl whose family lives in a van, a gonzo Sasquatch adventure, an underpants story sure to be a hit… and a new Jane Yolen book, illustrated by Sally Deng.

Better yet, it’s about mermaids.

I build my next baby story time around How to Spot a Mermaid. I add another favorite mermaid book, Pearl by Molly Idle, and bring out the water-painting supplies for the play portion. We sing “Down by the Bay” and Miss Rachel’s “Bubble Bubble Pop.”

What I was hoping would happen does happen. The grandparents present remember certain Yolen titles of the 70s and 80s (The Emperor and the Kite, The Giants Go Camping, The Devil’s Arithmetic), and the people my age recall Tam Lin, Wizard’s Hall before Harry Potter launched, the picture-book version of Prince of Egypt, the Stuart Quartet. The younger parents grew up with A Plague of Unicorns and The Firebird and Unsolved Mysteries from History. The youngest, coolest mother reads a lot of YA and loved Mapping the Bones recently.

There’s a Yolen book for every age and every mood and every occasion. There is so much for a reader to look forward to.