Wizard of Washington Square (8 page)

David and Leilah looked until they could see nothing more. Then they waited silently a few minutes longer to be sure.

“Is he gone? Really gone?” asked Leilah, afraid she might have to cry.

“I guess so,” said David who was hugging D. Dog and starting to sniffle—just a little—himself.

“What about all his stuff in the warren?” asked Leilah.

“Are you kidding?” David said. “After that whirlwind, moving furniture should be a breeze!”

Leilah giggled. “That’s a pretty good joke!” she said.

They walked out of the park, D. Dog at their heels, and started toward an ice-cream man who was coming down Fifth Avenue.

“Do you believe it
really
happened?” asked David. “I mean—really?”

“Look at D. Dog,” said Leilah, pointing at the terrier, who was running ahead of them now.

“What do you mean?” asked David as he looked. D. Dog turned and started to run back toward them. He was limping slightly on his right rear paw.

“The chipped foot,” said David.

“Exactly,” said Leilah.

“Well, will we ever see the Wizard again?” David asked.

“I guess so. If we
really
need him,” Leilah answered.

“What I
really
need now is an ice cream,” said David. “My treat!”

And smiling secret smiles, the two friends ran up to the vendor to get their cones.

W
HEN I WORKED AS A
young editor in New York, I lived in Greenwich Village and loved to spend Sundays in Washington Square Park, where people sang and played guitars around the fountain and children ran in and out of the water screaming with joy.

And one day I noticed that there was a black door in the side of the great monument. It puzzled me. Why a door in a monument? I had assumed it was solid stone.

No one had an answer for me at the time. None of my friends knew. This was long before the Internet and Google. I checked in some libraries, but found nothing helpful.

So … I made up the answer. That’s what writers do. We make things up. And if we make them up really well, other people believe what we have written. At least, they believe it for the life of the story. I tell you that a wizard lives in the monument—an awkward, not-terribly-good-at-his-job wizard whose magic often goes awry. And all that follows is a story.

Jane Yolen

I was born in New York City on February 11, 1939. Because February 11 is also Thomas Edison’s birthday, my parents used to say I brought light into their world. But my parents were both writers and prone to exaggeration. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote short stories and created crossword puzzles and double acrostics. My younger brother, Steve, eventually became a newspaperman. We were a family of an awful lot of words!

We lived in the city for most of my childhood, with two brief moves: to California for a year while my father worked as a publicity agent for Warner Bros. films, and then to Newport News, Virginia, during the World War II years, when my mother moved my baby brother and me in with her parents while my father was stationed in London running the Army’s secret radio.

When I was thirteen, we moved to Connecticut. After college I worked in book publishing in New York for five years, married, and after a year traveling around Europe and the Middle East with my husband in a Volkswagen camper, returned to the States. We bought a house in Massachusetts, where we lived almost happily ever after, raising three wonderful children.

I say “almost,” because in 2006, my wonderful husband of forty-four years—Professor David Stemple, the original Pa in my Caldecott Award–winning picture book,
Owl Moon
—died. I still live in the same house in Massachusetts.

And I am still writing.

I have often been called the “Hans Christian Andersen of America,” something first noted in
Newsweek
close to forty years ago because I was writing a lot of my own fairy tales at the time.

The sum of my books—including some eighty-five fairy tales in a variety of collections and anthologies—is now well over 335. Probably the most famous are
Owl Moon
,
The Devil’s Arithmetic
, and
How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?
My work ranges from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, and nonfiction, to novels and story collections for young adults and adults. I’ve also written lyrics for folk and rock groups, scripted several animated shorts, and done voiceover work for animated short movies. And I do a monthly radio show called
Once Upon a Time
.

These days, my work includes writing books with each of my three children, now grown up and with families of their own. With Heidi, I have written mostly picture books, including
Not All Princesses Dress in Pink
and the nonfiction series Unsolved Mysteries from History. With my son Adam, I have written a series of Rock and Roll Fairy Tales for middle grades, among other fantasy novels. With my son Jason, who is an award-winning nature photographer, I have written poems to accompany his photographs for books like
Wild Wings
and
Color Me a Rhyme.

And I am still writing.

Oh—along the way, I have won a lot of awards: two Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott Medal, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic Awards, two Christopher Awards, the Jewish Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award, among many accolades. I have also won (for my full body of work) the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Grand Master Award, the Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal, the University of Minnesota’s Kerlan Award, the University of Southern Mississippi and de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection’s Southern Miss Medallion, and the Smith College Medal. Six colleges and universities have given me honorary doctorate degrees. One of my awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set my good coat on fire when the top part of it (a large magnifying glass) caught the sunlight. So I always give this warning: Be careful with awards and put them where the sun don’t shine!

Also of note—in case you find yourself in a children’s book trivia contest—I lost my fencing foil in Grand Central Station during a date, fell overboard while whitewater rafting in the Colorado River, and rode in a dog sled in Alaska one March day.

And yes—I am still writing.

At a Yolen cousins reunion as a child, holding up a photograph of myself. In the photo, I am about one year old, maybe two.

Sitting on the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park in New York in 1961, when I was twenty-two. (Photo by David Stemple.)

Enjoying Dirleton Castle in Scotland in 2010.

Signing my Caldecott Medal–winning book
Owl Moon
in 2011.

Reading for an audience at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2012.

Visiting Andrew Lang’s gravesite at the Cathedral of Saint Andrew in Scotland in 2011.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2005 by Jane Yolen

Cover design by Gabriel Guma

978-1-4804-2331-2

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com