Soon All We Will Have Are the Stories

 

On June 11, 2026, Jane Yolen died at her home in Hatfield, Massachusetts. She was 87 years old. Her daughter, Heidi Stemple, shared the news: Yolen had passed gently, with no pain or stress, her family beside her. They were reading one of her books to her at the end.

There were more than 400 of her books to choose from.

On July 14 of this year, eight days from today, her 450th and final book will be published. Terror Birds is a posthumous release. Jane Yolen died writing. She died with a book still coming.

She was known as the Hans Christian Andersen of America. Folk tales, fairy tales, picture books, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, poetry — she wrote in every form available to a writer for young people. Her picture book Owl Moon won the 1988 Caldecott Medal. In 2018, she published her 365th and 366th books on the same day.

Her friend and neighbor, the author Richard Michelson, wrote of her: “Jane created classics as if it were as easy as breathing.”

But it was not always easy. When her editor suggested she write a Jewish children’s book about the Holocaust, Yolen hesitated. She was Jewish, yes. But she had not grown up in a religiously observant family. She said she didn’t know enough about Judaism to take on the project. She resisted.

Finally, she relented. She drew on a spark of an idea about a Holocaust time-travel fantasy. She turned in the first draft. “I thought, OK, I’m going to try this,” she said.

The book was The Devil’s Arithmetic, published in 1988. It won immediate acclaim and garnered multiple awards. It became her signature book. It is still in print. In 2025, a Texas school district used artificial intelligence to flag it for removal from school shelves as “DEI content.”

Yolen had said, years earlier: “Whenever we think of the Holocaust, we think of remembering. We think of never forgetting. Soon all we will have are the stories.”

She spent eighty-seven years making sure there would be stories.

Elie Wiesel survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He was liberated in 1945. He was fifteen years old when he arrived at Auschwitz. When the war ended, he was silent for ten years.

He was afraid of speaking too soon. He was not ready. The experience was too large and too close and he did not yet know how to put it into words without distorting it.

But he grew more afraid of remaining silent.

In 1960, he published Night — a memoir of his experience in the camps, written first in Yiddish, then translated into French, then into English. It became one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Millions of readers who were not alive during the Holocaust have read it and understood something true about human beings and what they are capable of doing to one another.

In 1986, Wiesel accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech, he said: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”

He was not a writer by training. He was a survivor with something to say. He waited until he could say it without distorting it. Then he said it and kept saying it for the rest of his life.

Yolen was not a survivor. She was a Jewish American woman who said she didn’t know enough. She tried anyway. The book she was afraid to write became the book a generation of children read to understand the Holocaust.

Wiesel waited ten years and then wrote for six decades. Yolen hesitated and then wrote 450 books. Both understood the same thing about stories.

Stories are not entertainment. They are memory’s last defense. When the witnesses are gone — when the survivors have died, when the people who were there can no longer speak — all we will have are the stories. If the stories were not written, the memory disappears with the witnesses.

The Power of Authors teaches: writing from genuine purpose means writing for the reader you cannot see yet. The child who will need this story in ten years, in twenty years, in fifty. Yolen wrote The Devil’s Arithmetic not because she felt qualified. She wrote it because the story needed to exist and she was the one who could write it.

You may have a story you believe you are not qualified to tell. The subject seems too large. The community is not quite yours. You don’t know enough. You’re afraid of getting it wrong.

Yolen said she didn’t know enough. She tried anyway. She wrote the book the children needed.

Her family read it to her as she died.

Write the book. Write it for the child who will need it when you are no longer here to tell them yourself.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.