Jason lives in Colorado where it snows a lot. So he has taken a lot of stunning pictures of snow over the years. I culled these, chose about fifteen for writing poems about, and then other photos that I loved but couldn’t
Here There Be Ghosts
Short stories and poems, all written by me, having to do with ghosts. As I had written very few ghost stories up to that point, most of them are new. Included are “Mandy” about a ghost dog based on the dog I owned when I was a teenager and
Once Upon a Bedtime Story
This collection is entirely retold folk tales for the youngest listeners: “The Three Bears,” “The Three Little Pigs,” “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” “The Little Red Hen,” “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” etc. There is a storytelling CD/tape narrated by me, with musical interludes by my son Adam Stemple.
Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast
welve of my stories, several of them brand new, all with a fantasy or science fictional basis. “Lost Girls,” the story that closes the volume, won the 1998 Nebula award for best novelette of the year. I believe that was the first time a children’s story won that coveted award.
Originals, The
This book was actually Ted Lewin’s idea. We had done two books of poetry already–“Bird Watch” and “Sea Watch”–and he wanted to do a book about the earliest ancestors of farmyard animals. He convinced Pat Gauch at Philomel to do the book and then they contacted me.
Mother Earth/Father Sky
This collection, subtitled “Poems of Our Planet,” is a sweeping anthology of forty ecologically sensitive poems from such poets as C. S. Lewis, Carl Sandberg, Joseph Langland, Ogden Nash, W. S. Merwin, N. Scott Momaday, Denise Levertov and others.
Sacred Places
I was asked to write a book of poems about the sacred places around the world. Frankly, I didn’t think it would work, but I couldn’t help trying. It meant reading about twenty different religions and finding a particular sacred place to represent each
O Jerusalem
A young editor at Scholastic, knowing that the 3,000th anniversary of Jerusalem was at hand (how do editors know these things????) asked me to write a book of poems about the City of Peace. I had visited it only once, way back in 1966,
Here There Be Angels
Short stories and poems all written by me, having to do with angels. A few–like “Angelica” had been published before. But a number are brand new to the book, like “Fallen Angel,” a story about an angel whose wings have been burned up when he falls
Water Music
Though technically Jason’s second book, after “A Letter from Phoenix Farm,” it’s his first book of the heart. He and I found a number of water images he’d already shot in the Colorado mountains, and he then took off across country to California to