Nancy Willard; wrote children's stories, poems . By Sam Roberts New
York Times . NEW YORK - 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 Feb. 19 at her home
in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. She was 80. The cause was coronary and pulmonary
arrest, said her husband, photographer Eric Lindbloom. 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," she 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," 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': "Where did
you sleep last night, Wise Cow? Where did you lay your head? "I caught
my horns on a rolling cloud and made myself a bed, and in the morning
ate it raw on freshly buttered bread. Although 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., in 1936, the daughter of
Hobart Willard, who taught at the University of Michigan, and the
former Margaret Sheppard. 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. 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. Her style
evolved, but 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.
