Jane Yolen appreciation and 4th Street 2026 report

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

This past week has been quite a roller coaster. First I received news that Jane Yolen, who has been a friend and role model since the very beginning of my writing career, passed away on June 11. She was amazing in so many different areas of her life. Some I saw demonstrated in person—writer, editor, singer, poet, mother—and some I only heard about, like her academic prowess. From what I have heard, she was just as amazing in those areas.

Jane wrote over four hundred books, ranging from picture books through easy-readers, middle school, YA, all the way to adult. She also produced short stories, poems, songs, articles, and speeches, all while raising three children and, at the height of things, keeping up with a schedule of school visits and appearances that kept her on the road for months every year.

I have no idea how she did it. I learned a lot from her: about writing, about politely but firmly standing one’s ground, about keeping one’s sense of proportion, about commitment to one’s work and to one’s people.

Jane was, I think, the most joyful person I have ever met, and I am not the only one who will miss her greatly for a long, long time.

The other thing that happened this last week was the 2026 Fourth Street Fantasy Convention. For those who don’t know, Fourth Street (the con, not the actual, physical street) is a small convention held in the Twin Cities that focuses on books: writing them, reading them, and talking about them. Lots of talking about them. The convention has been described, repeatedly, as being “about the conversation,” which starts at Opening Ceremonies and continues pretty much non-stop until closing on Sunday afternoon.

The panels do their best to dig deeper into their subject matter than happens at most science fiction conventions I’ve been at, and there’s only one track of programming. Somehow, this leads to a lot of continuity throughout the weekend. Even when panel topics seem as if they ought to have nothing to do with each other, someone on a panel about killing off characters or getting military strategy right will frequently say, “…and this is exactly what so-and-so was saying yesterday morning in that panel on clothes and high fashion.” And they’ll be right.

This year, I missed a large chunk of the convention due to fighting off a migraine for most of it, so some of this is a bit disconnected. Opening Ceremonies began with the con chair (Scott Lynch) reading Part i of Ursula le Guin’s “Poem Written in 1991” (https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/130-poem-written-in-1991 ) before going on to introducing the con staff and giving all the basic con information, like where the consuite is, why there’s only one track of programming, emergency procedures, and so on.

Then the panels started. This year, the topics leaned toward the abstract, even when they had titles like “Heisenberg’s Monster: Uncertainty in Stories” and “Get Your Original Sin Outta My ‘Cursed’ Artifact: Sources of Power in the Fantastic.” Most of the panels I attended got very philosophical at times, which I found surprisingly enjoyable and even useful at times.

The first panel was “Tell me About a Complicated Man.” It also opened with a poetry reading, this time the opening lines of The Odyssey from the Emily Wilson translation, which led me to order a copy from Amazon the minute I got home. It was supposed to be a panel about lies and liars in fiction (Odysseus being one of the more famous examples). The discussion dipped into the function of lying in narrative, digressed briefly into whether all fiction counts as lying, came back to questions of who the characters are lying to (themselves, other characters, the reader) and how that works, and then wandered off into the fascinating maze that is the Trickster archetype and various fictional examples thereof. I’m still digesting, but frankly, this would have been worth the price of admission even if the only thing I got out of it was the recommendation of the Wilson translation.

The after-dinner panel on Friday was “Lords of Misrule (UNMASK! UNMASK!): Masquerades, Carnivals, and Masking.” This one went from talking about actual physical masks and costumes to talking about the intangible masks that are the way people/characters present themselves to hide morally or socially unacceptable part of who they are. This is when the migraine started kicking in, so I left early. I also, most unfortunately, missed the Jane Yolen Memorial Pie Party (Jane was one of the first Guests of Honor at Fourth Street, back at the very beginning when they were still doing GoHs).

Saturday morning’s panels (“Get Your Original Sin Outta My ‘Cursed’ Artifact…” and “Heisenberg’s Monster: Uncertainty in Stories”) were each excellent and well worth listening to. They also moved very quickly from talking about specifics like cursed swords and fantastical monsters to talking about who decides why a spell or a curse is forbidden and the power of leaving some decisions up to the reader.

I had to leave at the lunch break (migraine again), and reluctantly missed the rest of Saturday’s panels, which I had been really looking forward to. I fully intend to catch up on them with the discord transcriptions, but that’s never quite the same experience.

Sleeping under my cats from 1 p.m. Saturday til 7 a.m. Sunday took care of the migraine for the time being, which was fortunate because I was on the first Sunday panel (“And All the Pieces Matter” about worldbuilding). I had enormous fun, and I hope the other panelists and the audience did, too. “Don’t Feign the Reaper: How To (Fictionally) Cheat Death)” came next. It was partly about handling the reappearance of a character who has been killed off (or who has faked their own death for good reasons), but mostly about when it works, when it doesn’t, and when it is a really, really bad idea. Lots of the examples (good and bad) were from comics, movies, or TV shows. Just sayin’…..

Last was The Different Panel, which is both a Fourth Street tradition from way back and an interesting way of getting panels back on track when they start down too much of an irrelevant rabbit hole. Basically, whenever a panel moderator tells the panelists, “…but that’s a different panel,” somebody writes it down, and over lunch on Sunday, the con committee (or some subset) gets together and picks one of the topics. Then they chase down some panelists, and have The Different Panel.

This year’s was “You Can’t Keep Getting Away With This—When and How the Bill Comes Due” and it was a fun and interesting look at the things writers do when a rogue or Trickster character wins, retires, or just gets caught and can’t wander around conning people anymore. A lot of the issues raised also apply to aging action heroes who have to retire, but they didn’t get into that as much.

For me, Fourth Street is successful when I come back with a head full of ideas, a notebook full of recommended reading (both fiction and non), and a bunch of memories of stimulating encounters/conversations. (Sometimes, I reach this point by 10 p.m. on the first half-day of the convention.) This year felt better paced—I was always taking in interesting ideas, but never so fast that I felt as if my head were going to explode.