The Midnight Circus

by Jane Yolen

  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 and Fantasy Writers of America (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 PBBC 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’s 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 SFWA.

  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, although 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!

  Beloved fantasist Jane Yolen has been rightfully called the Hans Christian Andersen of America and the Aesop of the twentieth century. In 2018, she surpassed 365 publications, including adult, young adult, and children’s fiction; graphic novels; nonfiction; fantasy; science fiction; poetry; short-story collections; anthologies; novels; novellas; and books about writing. Yolen is also a teacher of writing and a book reviewer. Her best-known books are Owl Moon, the How Do Dinosaurs series, The Devil’s Arithmetic, Briar Rose, Sister Emily’s Lightship and Other Stories, and Sister Light, Sister Dark.

  Among Yolen’s many awards and honors are the Caldecott and Christopher medals; the Nebula, Mythopoeic, World Fantasy, Golden Kite, and Jewish Book awards; the World Fantasy Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award; the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award; and the Science Fiction Poetry Grand Master Award. Six colleges and universities have given her honorary doctorates.

  Yolen lives in Western Massachusetts and Mystic, Connecticut, with her fiancé, but spends long summers in St. Andrews, Scotland, a great place to write, she says, for there are nearly twenty hours of daylight and birdsong.

  Theodora Goss is the World Fantasy and Locus Award– winning author of the short story and poetry collections In the Forest of Forgetting (2006), Songs for Ophelia (2014), and Snow White Learns Witchcraft (2019), as well as novella The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017), and sequel European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (2018). The final novel in the series, The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl, was published in October 2019. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her work has been translated into twelve languages. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program. Visit her at theodoragoss.com.

  New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis is a princess, storm chaser, and geek. Author of more than 20 books and 40 short stories, Alethea is the recipient of the Jane Yolen Mid-List Author Grant, the Scribe Award, the Garden State Teen Book Award, and two-time winner of the Gelett Burgess Children’s Book Award. She has been twice nominated for both the Andre Norton Nebula and the Dragon Award. When not writing or storm chasing, Alethea narrates stories for multiple award-winning online magazines, contributes regular YA book reviews to NPR, and hosts Princess Alethea’s Traveling Sideshow every year at Dragon Con. Born in Vermont, she currently resides on the Space Coast of Florida with her teddy bear, Charlie. Find out more about Princess Alethea and her wonderful world at aletheakontis.com

  Extended Copyright

  All stories copyright © Jane Yolen unless otherwise noted.

  “The Weaver of Tomorrow” copyright © 1974. First appeared in The Girl Who Cried Flowers and Other Tales, (Crowell: New York).

  “The White Seal Maid” copyright © 1977. First appeared in The Hundredth Dove and Other Tales (Crowell: New York).

  “The Snatchers” copyright © 1993. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October–November 1993.

  “Wilding” copyright © 1995. First appeared in A Starfarer’s Dozen: Stories of Things to Come (Jane Yolen/Harcourt: New York).

  “Requiem Antarctica” copyright © 2000 by Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris. First appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, May 2000.

  “Night Wolves” copyright © 1995. First appeared in Haunted House: A Collection of Original Stories, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jane Yolen (HarperCollins: New York).

  “The House of the Seven Angels” copyright © 1996. First appeared in Here There Be Angels (Harcourt Brace: New York).

  “Great Gray” copyright © 1991. First appeared in Fires of the Past: Thirteen Contemporary Fantasies about Hometowns, edited by Anne Devereaux Jordan (St. Martin’s Press: New York).

  “Little Red” copyright © 2009 by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple. First appeared in Firebirds Soaring: An Anthology of Original Speculative Fiction, edited by Sharyn November (Firebird/Penguin: New York).

  “Winter’s King” copyright © 1991. First appeared in After the King: Stories in Honor of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Martin H. Greenberg (Tor Books: New York).

  “Inscription” copyright © 1993. First appeared in The Ultimate Witch, edited by John Gregory Betancourt and Byron Preiss (Byron Preiss Visual Publications: New York).

  “Dog Boy Remembers” copyright © 2013. First appeared in Fiction River Anthology: Unnatural Worlds, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith (WMG Publishing: Lincoln City, Oregon).

  “The Fisherman’s Wife” copyright © 1982. First appeared in Neptune Rising: Songs and Tales of the Undersea People (Philomel Books: New York).

  “Become a Warrior” copyright © 1998. First appeared in Warrior Princesses, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (DAW Books: New York).

  "An Infestation of Angels” copyright © 1985. First appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, November 1985.

  “Names” copyright © 1983. First appeared in Tales of Wonder (Schocken Books: New York).

  Poetry

  “The Wheel Spins” copyright © 2020. First appeared in David L. Harrison’s blogpost, “Wheel, Part 2,” in comments. June 4, 2017.

  “Ballad of the White Seal Maid” copyright © 1982. First appeared in Neptune Rising: Songs and Tales of the Undersea People (Philomel Books: New York).

  “Lou Leaving Home” copyright © 2012. First appeared in Ekaterinoslav: One Family’s Passage to America: A Memoir in Verse (Holy Cow! Press: Duluth, MN).

  “Deer, Dances” copyright © 2020. First appearance.

  “Vampyr” copyright © 2001. First appeared in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, edited by Stephen Jones (Carroll & Graf: New York).

  “Bad Dreams” copyright © 2013. First appeared in Silver Blade Magazine.

  “Anticipation” copyright © 2020. First appearance.

  “Great Gray” copyright © 2020. First appearance.

  “Red at Eighty-One” copyright © 2020. First appearance.

  “If Winter” copyright © 2020. First appearance.

  “Stone Ring” copyright © 2020. First appearance.

  “The Path” copyright © 2020. First appearance.

  “Undine” copyright © 1982. First appeared in Neptune Rising: Songs and Tales of the Undersea People (Philomel Books: New York).

  “The Princess Turns” copyright © 2020. First appearance.

  “Work Days” copyright © 2020. First appearance.

  “What the Oven Is Not” copyright © 2017. First appeared in Before/ The Vote/After: A Book of Poems (Levellers Press: Amherst, MA).