Jean Little, Claire Mackay, and me.

Dedications and Other Miscellanea

If you’ve read this far, you will know that my first five books were dedicated to my husband and four children. As in-laws came into the family, they got books, as have the grandchildren, including our “adopted” grandchild, Kate Greene. My terrific sisters were cited in The Same Stuff as Stars, as was my brother’s widow. My first collection of Christmas stories, Angels and Other Strangers, remembers my parents. My mother died before it was published, but I was able to tell her about the inscription, which also includes Takoma Park Presbyterian Church, where the stories were first read aloud. The second volume, A Midnight Clear, was for the two congregations that heard those stories. Husband John is also honored in The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks, which started out as an exercise for How to Use a Computer and then became an anniversary present.

Teachers and librarians have enriched my life, and my books of essays were for four of my great teachers, and Bread and Roses, Too was for Karen Lane, who is the kind of librarian every town should have. I wrote of Barbara Thompson in an earlier chapter, and if you see her name linked with Hazel Horton’s in Marvin One Too Many, it is because both of them have spent their lives as exemplary teachers of the very young. Hazel was my college roommate and also remains a dear friend. She is from the Appalachian hills and used to sing the old songs that are echoed in Come Sing, Jimmy Jo.

I dedicated Jacob Have I Loved to Gene Namovicz. I was trying to be a bit clever with it, saying I wish it were Emma (a Jane Austen we both loved). People of my generation know the famous quotation from Helen Hayes’s autobiography about the peanuts that Charles McArthur put in her hand, saying, “I wish they were emeralds.” Gene would have rather had a good book any day than emeralds.

Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom is my thanks to Virginia Buckley. No one ever had a better editor, and since the book was set in China, I thought a Chinese saying was appropriate: “A thousand thoughts; ten thousand thanks,” though ten thousand would still be far too few. Lauren Wohl, one of the great library promotion people I have worked with, has the distinction of being the dedicatee of both the authors and the illustrator for Consider the Lilies.

With the dedicatee of Come Sing, Jimmy Jo I have the longest history. Mary Watt Sorum’s mother and my mother were friends at the General Assembly’s Training School before her mother went to the Belgian Congo and my mother went to China. We can’t remember a time when we didn’t know about each other. If, as children, we whined, Mother would remind us that Georgia Watt’s children in Africa all had polio and she had TB. Whereas when the Watt children whined, their mother would tell them how Mary Goetchius’s children were running away from war and occupation. You’d think that would make Mary and me never want to meet, but meet we did when we were both teen-agers. We knew that first day that we would be friends for life and we are.

Jean Little and her dear friend and mine Claire Mackay got a book. Jean, who is often referred to as “Canada’s most beloved writer for children,” recently recalled an interviewer who asked what she wanted to be called. “Why, Jean Little,” she said, a bit surprised by the question. “No,” he said, “I mean, do you want to be called ‘visually challenged’ or—” “How about blind?” she said. “Oh, no,” said the shocked interviewer, “they don’t like to be called that.” I once went to England as Jean’s seeing-eye dog. I am proud to say that I was quite a good one and laughed louder at her stories than the actual dog or dogs ever did.

Virginia Buckley, my editor for forty years.

Ted and Alice Vial were our dearest friends from Princeton Seminary days. At nine and a half months, John Jr. took his first steps on their living room floor. Grace Greene and Nancy Graff of Jip, His Story are chief among the many friends who have made Vermont feel like my real home. In her introduction, Nancy has already told you about our weekly lunches at Wayside that continue to be more important to me than she will ever know, and Grace, the mother of our adopted grandchild, starred in chapter one.

Stephanie Tolan and I have waged peace together as well as co-written four plays, three of which we collaborated on with Steve Liebman. With few of my long-time friends have I shared more joys and grief than with Kathryn Morton, to whom I dedicated Park’s Quest. The Day of the Pelican is dedicated to the Kosovar family that inspired it and to Mark Ofila, whose knowledge and love of Kosova made it possible for me to write the story. Margaret Mahy was a writer both John and I admired extravagantly, as well a cherished friend. Steven and Helen Kellogg have brightened our lives for more than a quarter of a century. The three of them share the page in The Flint Heart, a book wonderfully illustrated by John Rocco. Mary Brigid Barrett is the incomparable President of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance, and she and her whole family are an inspiration as well as just plain fun to be with. I felt this family of artists needed a truly beautiful book, and when I saw Pamela Dalton’s exquisite paper-cut illustrations for Brother Sun, Sister Moon I knew it must be inscribed for them. Christopher Franceschelli was the publisher of that book and also much earlier at Dutton, the publisher of Parzival: The Quest of the Grail Knight, my re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic poem, which I dedicated to him.

Any of these wonderful friends is worthy of a book, but it’s like that T-shirt. She wrote a whole book and all I got was this lousy line. And some people, who have been really important to me, didn’t even get a line. I beg forgiveness of them all.