Jane Yolen
Author Jane Yolen has made literacy her number one priority and she does her part by writing the best books she can and speaking with parents and educators about the issue.
Yolen has written more than 200 books in her 40-year career, including the Caldecott Medal-winner, "Owl Moon," and the acclaimed young adult novel, "Devil's Arithmetic." The first piece of writing she ever sold was an article about kites, which ran in Popular Mechanics. Currently, Yolen writes the successful "How Do Dinosaurs" series.
As Yolen sees it, literacy is in a state of crisis and it is a particular frustration that this message is difficult to pass on beyond the parents whose kids are reading anyhow.
"I'm always preaching to the choir," said Yolen. "These days, people who are involved in reading literature are an endangered species, Harry Potter notwithstanding — which is a phenomenon that has nothing to do with the long run what's going to happen to literature. I mean, it's a mammoth blip, but a blip nonetheless and we can't count on Harry Potter readers to go on to be other kinds of readers."
It's no surprise to Yolen that series books have boomed with young readers — not only Harry Potter, but others like Lemony Snicket and Spiderwick. To Yolen, these represent a kind of comfort literature that, once started, makes it easier for kids to step up the reading, at least in terms of quantity.
"They don't necessarily challenge you in any way," said Yolen, "but it's comfortable because you are revisiting old friends over and over again. Just like we watch the same television shows over and over again. We like series. We don't want the same plot, perhaps, but what we do want is 'Oh, I know these characters and I can count on them.'"
The series books are also easier to produce, especially for the author, who doesn't have to spend time establishing new scenarios and dynamics in the pages of the books, as Yolen learned first-hand working on her own series, the "How Do Dinosaurs" books.
"I don't have to, as a writer, reinvent the format," said Yolen, "because I already know it, I don't have to reinvent the rhyme scheme, because it's already in place, it takes away the invention, it starts me on a higher place, I don't have to start at the very ground level, I'm building a second story."
In many ways, book series are aping television, though the opposite movement — book to film — can serve as a modern time lapse example of the process by which myths and legends, Yolen's great passions, are modified and passed down. Films map the movement of a story from one place to the other and reveal how the specifics of the medium dictate how the story is told.
Yolen points to the movie based on her book, "Devil's Arithmetic," as a good example of using the original text as source material rather than canon for adaptation.
"It was brilliant, but it wasn't the book," said Yolen. "They dropped characters, they put characters together, the ending was slightly different, but they managed to keep the sense of the book, the thematic underpinnings were really there. I have too many friends who had movies made of their books and they've just been butchered."
Myths and legends function not only as blueprints for process, but as story source material as well. Yolen fears that today's kids are lacking a certain cultural literacy that could give these new versions of old tales a richer flavor.
"We're doing a lot of fractured fairy tales, fractured myths," said Yolen, "but if you don't know what they are to begin with, how do you understand when they are fractured? Are they funny because Eddie Murphy is a voice or are they funny because there's a background there that you are missing? You're missing half the joke."
Not only does cultural literacy involve a knowledge of the actual stories, it also means understanding how the stories have passed through time and culture and how stories can link societies.
"It's all about the cultural shorthand," said Yolen. "If you understand other people's myths you can understand who they are, they cannot be strangers to you, you can also see how much mythological and folk stories have passed through various cultures, taking on a coloration of that culture but still being at its core the same story."
A knowledge of the path of stories can reveal to the reader the roads that storytellers can take in their own minds while crafting a tale, as well as the way stories are compiled, edited, and modified, and what forms storytelling can take.
"Stories follow all kinds of routes," said Yolen. "They follow the slave route, they follow explorers, they follow trade routes, they follow marriage routes. You might get, for example, an escaped African slave who had been brought over to America and has been taken in by a Native American tribe, becomes one of them but tells his own stories, which become part of the tribal stories."
Yolen began her official writing career as a journalist intern telling a different type of story — hard news. Reporting taught her a level of immediacy, as well as the importance of concise clarity. Her first assignment, to go out and interview people on welfare, taught her more than a few lessons about looking at all the angles when telling a story.
"I tried to write this story and I was sobbing," said Yolen. "I couldn't ask the hard questions because I was so affected by the people, it was impossible for me to do the kind of job that you really need to do to be a journalist. They told me any kind of story they wanted to and I believed them because they were in such bad circumstances. So I made a lousy journalist but a great fantasy writer."
Equally, a later job as a caption writer honed her ability to compress the words she wrote without simplifying the ideas they represent — a talent that doesn't seem to come naturally to a new generation.
"With computers now, I think one of the things that kids are learning is to say things not briefly," said Yolen, "that they're just to go on and on and on and on because it's easy, it's a very plastic tool. You can just keep going with the thought perhaps that you'll fix it later, but nobody ever does."
Yolen thinks its the logical result of a medium that allows for endless pages.
"You don't have to erase it, you don't have to white out, you don't have to retype the whole thing because you made a mistake," said Yolen.
The goal for young writers is to learn the power of one word and one of the best ways to achieve this knowledge is through poetry. It's difficult to measure the magnitude of a single word in a large prose, but in context of a poem, one word can make or break it. It's a delicate exercise that Yolen believes can bring great power to the future of storytelling and literacy.
"It's taking coal and pressing it and pressing it and pressing it until you end up with a diamond," said Yolen.
