Nancy Willard, Prolific Children’s Book Author, Dies at 80

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/books/nancy-willard-dead-author.html

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Nancy Willard, a prolific author whose 70 books of poems and fiction enchanted children and adults alike with a lyrical blend of fanciful illusion and stark reality, died on Feb. 19 at her home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. She was 80.

The cause was coronary and pulmonary arrest, her husband, the photographer Eric Lindbloom, said.

Ms. Willard’s 1982 picture book, “A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers,” was the first volume of poetry to receive the Newbery Medal, the country’s highest honor for children’s writing. Illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen, it also received a Caldecott Honor as one of the best illustrated books of the year. It was the first time a Newbery winner was also named a Caldecott book.

Ms. Willard traced her weaving of fancy and realism to her upbringing. Her father was a chemistry professor who perfected a method of rustproofing; her mother, she said, was a romantic who read to her daughters during summer boating idylls.

“I grew up aware of two ways of looking at the world that are opposed to each other and yet can exist side by side in the same person,” Ms. Willard wrote in an essay in Writer magazine. “One is the scientific view. The other is the magic view.”

In “William Blake’s Inn,” she transformed the English poet and printmaker into a hotelier who keeps an inn for a host of imaginary guests.

“Nancy Willard’s imagination — in verse or prose, for children or adults — builds castles stranger than any mad King of Bavaria ever built,” the poet Donald Hall wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1981. “She imagines with a wonderful concreteness. But also, she takes real language and by literal-mindedness turns it into the structure of dream.”

He continued: “If you know children virtuous in imagination, give them this book in which ‘The Wise Cow Enjoys a Cloud’:

While she was best known for her children’s books, Ms. Willard also wrote novels for adults. In 1993 the Times critic Michiko Kakutani described her second, “Sister Water,” as “a luminous, lyrical novel about familial love and loss, a novel that almost literally hums with the power of her language.”

Nancy Margaret Willard was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., on June 26, 1936, the daughter of Hobart Willard, who taught at the University of Michigan, and the former Margaret Shepard.

The first texts she read, she said, were the labels on canned goods in her kitchen. (“They gave me an eclectic vocabulary: ‘spinach,’ ‘green beans,’ ‘registered trademark,’ ‘net weight.’ ”) She published her first poem when she was 7, she said.

Ms. Willard, an English major, graduated from the University of Michigan in 1958 and went on to earn a master’s at Stanford, with a thesis on medieval folk songs, and a doctorate at the University of Michigan. She taught creative writing at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie from 1965 until she retired in 2013.

Her first children’s book, “Sailing to Cythera: And Other Anatole Stories,” was published in 1974 after her son, James Lindbloom, was born. In addition to her husband, he survives her. (She published other “Anatole” stories, and James became a model for a character in several other books.)

Ms. Willard had no illusions about her young audience.

“Writing a book of poems for children is like sending a package to a child at camp: The cookies are fed to the fish, the books are fly swatters and the baseball cards are traded,” she once observed. “You never know the use to which your gift — or your poems — will be put. if you’re lucky, children a hundred years hence will be skipping rope to them or muttering them over the graves of dead cats.”

While her style evolved, one ingredient remained integral.

“Most of us grow up and put magic away with other childish things,” she explained in Writer magazine. “But I think we can all remember a time when magic was as real to us as science, and the things we couldn’t see were as important as the things we could.”

She added: “I believe that all small children and some adults hold this view together with the scientific ones. I also believe that the great books for children come from those writers who hold both.”