In her book Touch Magic, Jane Yolen quotes the writer Lloyd Alexander's assertion that "the muse of fantasy wears good sensible shoes." Yolen adds, "one can imagine them as a solid size eight and a half. No gold slipper or glass sling-back for Ms. Muse. She had a lot of work to do, making sure the unbelievable is believed."

Jane Yolen, herself a size nine, has been making sure the unbelievable is believed most of her adult life. As a storyteller and writer, Yolen has created worlds inhabited by porcine butlers, toads who command space ships, wild children with magical powers, and "middling bears" in "middling chairs." These and the other fantastical characters who populate her books have been deemed convincing by that toughest of audiences, children, and by more than a few grown-ups.

This pale, chill morning as the new year is struggling to its feet, Ms. Yolen has the air of a Ms. Muse about her, a sensible, even authoritative manner not belied by her short stature or silk shirt and calico jumper. In the big kitchen of her big Victorian farmhouse in Hatfield, she manages to be a presence both cordial and commanding. The cordial side is being tested today by a flock of fans from Indiana--two mothers, two daughters, a son--making a detour on their drive home from Christmas vacation in Boston to meet her. Good-humoredly, Yolen autographs their stacks of books, gives them a tour of her attic study, offers them cookies, finally, gently nudges them out the door.

As for the commanding side, there is her reputation as a writer, editor, and mentor in the world of children's book publishing. For a writer or illustrator looking to break into the business, Jane Yolen's name opens doors, secures precious appointments with editors and art directors. The writing workshops she held for years in the Hatfield library were a first step to publication for a number of writers and illustrators now well-known, including Patricia MacLachlan and Jane Dyer.

Her reputation she owes partly to her prolific output. Yolen often reads works in progress aloud in her kitchen as one test of their rightness; during the 26 years she has lived in this farmhouse, the kitchen walls have heard dozens of books. Yolen has had over 200 books published: novels, picture books, songbooks, volumes of poetry, essays, short stories, anthologies. Some she has edited; most she has written. Many are for children, others for adults. Yolen has more books out of print at any one moment than most writers have published. "It's cyclical, they go in and out of print," she says philosophically. Recently, in a spate of housecleaning, she opened a large box in her study to discover a cache of manuscripts she had put away and forgotten about.

"Your favorite book is always the one you're working on," she says. "Once it's out of my head, it's gone."

Yolen, 58, has been writing since she was a child. Her first published poem appeared in Scholastic magazine when she was in high school. Her first children's book, Pirates in Petticoats, she sold on her twenty-first birthday.

And like the Energizer bunny, she keeps going and going and going, producing on average one or two "large" books a year and several smaller ones as well. Between October first and Christmas, she worked on 11 stories. In the works are a novel, a screenplay, and a piece for a children's musical theater in Scotland. Paradoxically, the shortest books, the picture books, often take her longest to write: "months and months and months." Because there are so few words, each one must be just so.

Ultimately, she says of writing a book, "it takes as long as it takes." A book that takes a week to write down may have been taking shape, changing its shape, for years before it finally materializes. Of Letting Swift River Go, a marvellous picture book about the destruction and flooding of the Swift River Valley towns to create the Quabbin Reservoir, Yolen recalls that "that book began as a novel. What is now the closing scene was originally the opening, until I realized one day how it should be."

An active contributor to the body of children's literature, Yolen is also somewhat of an authority on the subject. Her mind is steeped in fairy tales, myths, fantasies, and folklore. As a child, she was mesmerized by the Andrew Lang fairy books. At the time she didn't realize they were "bowdlerized and blenderized" as she puts it. She loved reading "tales from all around the world, and seeing what the stories of a princess in Ireland and a princess in Timbuktu had in common, and what was different."

Yolen's investigation into folklore and children's literature.was formalized in the 1970s, when she became a graduate student at UMass. "I got the faculty wife disease," she explains with a wry smile. (Her husband David Stemple chairs the UMass computer sciences department.) Enrolled in the School of Education, she pursued an independent study of children's literature that ultimately resulted in two books, The Mermaids' Three Wisdoms and Touch Magic.

A collection of essays that grew out of position papers for her master's degree, Touch Magic is a deeply informed, erudite, and passionate apologia for fantasy, fairy tales, folklore. Yolen writes of our culture losing touch with the allegorical, the fantastic, the mythological, so that children don't know the Apollo space program takes its name from a Greek god, or that Disney's Cinderella may be the least exciting version of that ancient tale. This loss is a loss of history, cultural continuity, and access to deep truths about the human condition, Yolen believes. She quotes the poet Schiller: "Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told me in my childhood than in any truth that is taught in life."

Heady stuff, but for Yolen, it is also simple. "I'm in love with stories, with words," she says. By way of explaining the pleasures of her vocation, she points to the inscription on her tea mug: "Success is doing what you love." "I'm blessed," she goes on, "I do what I like to do, at the pace I like to work." More of a mixed blessing is the paperwork that comes with success: "The more successful you become, the more there is to do." She and her husband are building a computer data base to store publication and copyright information.

Beside paperwork, being a children's book author carries other responsibilities. Yolen acknowledges that "children's books have a didactic function--no doubt about it--the problem is to write them as if they didn't." Yolen worries a little about her books being taught in schools, citing a 25-page teacher's guide to Commander Toad in Space. Children's books should "open a child to a world within worlds within worlds. If teachers arrest the story on a certain level in order to teach," Yolen fears, "it may stop the enjoyment of the stories forever."

Although her writing can be playful and witty, Yolen takes her role of storyteller seriously. "Just as the child is born with a literal hole in its head, where the bones slowly close underneath the fragile shield of skin, so the child is born with a figurative hole in its heart," Yolen wrote in Touch Magic. "Slowly this, too is filled up. What slips in before it anneals shapes the man or woman into whch that child will grow. Story is one of the most serious intruders into the heart." Yolen, who, even as you read this, is probably writing a story, is a most serious, but also a most welcome intruder.

-Faye Wolfe