Author Jane Resh Thomas has died

8/15/36 - 6/12/23

Our mentor has passed.

I knew this day would come, just not yet. Jane Resh Thomas, the noted Minnesota author and book critic, died Monday, June 12 from natural causes. She had told me after discharge from transitional care, after hospitalization, “Theo, I am so tired, I cannot tell you. I feel hollowed out, empty.”

Because I had just fixed her phone, and friend Julie had just returned her glitching laptop, she had been cut off. I saw her Friday. Julie had seen her Sunday. I sent a staffer Monday in her assisted living center to ask her about leading writers workshop on Tuesday. She had been seen sitting in her chair reading, probably short stories for lessons on psychic distance. We had been discussing T. C. Boyle’s “Greasy Lake.” At six o’clock, they found Jane in bed, already dead.

Now who do we go to for advice?

Thomas wrote 15 books, mostly for young readers, including The Comeback Dog, Saying Goodbye to Grandma, and Lights On The River, but she also wrote a history, Behind the Mask: The Life of Queen Elizabeth I. She won the prestigious Kerlan Collection award for contributions to children’s literature. When not writing or teaching writers, Jane reviewed books for the Minneapolis Tribune, the New York Times, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Scripps Howard News Service.

We, all of us current workshop writers, supported Jane. We loved her, maybe feared her “gimlet eye,” the piercing look we were to give our own work. She was our sage of fiction, our touchstone. No one wrote or read like her. She once claimed her “copy” was clean enough to pass editors’ eyes with minimal fuss. To me, as she got older, children’s literature writing and reviewing seemed only circumstantial jobs. Her palate was expansive. She talked about Swift. I talked about Diderot. We both talked about Voltaire and Dostoevsky, and lately, everyone talked about George Saunders’ A Swim In The Pond In The Rain, the Syracuse author’s discussions of Russian short stories.

But not just literature. While Jane’s small room held mountains of fiction hardbacks, she watched podcasts across the shivering American political spectrum, and regularly sought out a minority report in all things news, a story less told. She said, “Trump is a jack-ass, but perhaps the jack-ass we need.”

With me, she aired out thoughts on wokeness and the extreme right, reactionaries of all stripes, Ted Kaczynski, Nazi marches, BLM and MeToo, ideological capture and luxury beliefs, book bans, trans rights, the CCP, Ukraine, Twitter files, blowing up the Nordstream pipeline, and the slim chance of anyone ever changing their opinion.

How did I know her? A teacher colleague told me, “Theo, there’s someone you should meet.” Jane went through the same pillory as me. She was a ruined Hamline University instructor. I was a ruined Minnesota teacher. Jane had given a 2015 lecture to the department of the Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults extolling what she called, “equanimity, kindness, and tolerance of diverse views.” Though I don’t have the script, I sense much taken out of context. Writers had been prohibited from writing outside their racial, cultural, or sexual identities. Jane had encouraged them to write simply what “haunts them,” and she refused to back down to a mob that called her a hateful, old white woman at conferences across the country. I had been excoriated across social media, and stalked from four jobs from the bottom to the top of Minnesota for alerting families to mayhem in St. Paul brought on by soft bigotry of low expectations coupled with scapegoating of white teachers. That’s why me. People in trouble find each other.

I didn’t want another workshop, another klatsch of nervous young writers who all think they’re special because they’re brimming with youth and pathos, but embarrassingly light in the defeat column. It turned out that everyone was more experienced than me, and multiply connected to publishing.

Yet none was smarter and a greater friend to the wide literary world than Jane Resh Thomas — with dispassionate exceptions. She disliked trite, cheerful, and one-dimensional illustrating in contemporary children’s books. “They all look identically happy,” she said. To the old, she had given Madeline L’Engle and Gary Paulsen bad reviews. She did not exchange an agent’s fancy lunch for a good review, despite fear she might piss off a publisher and a newspaper, and never get to write another review.

After years of picking up around Jane’s south Minneapolis home, and now her twelve-by-twelve room, steadying, walking, lifting, and transferring her first by her silver, frog-headed cane, then to walker, then wheelchair, after driving her four times down to Rustic Road in Stockholm, Wisconsin, to the giant Palisade Head on Lake Superior’s north shore, and Betty’s Pies, to Subway for a BLT, or Cecil’s for a good Reuben, there is nothing else, finally, to fix or do with Jane — maybe hang onto our scribbled notes. We don’t have to worry about her lymphoma, lung and heart disease, her stomach, diabetes, or neuropathy that left her hands in pain and feet numb. No more juggling pills or wires, batteries to Pocket Talkers, or screeching feedback. No booming over her deafness. She had everything wrong with her body but nothing wrong with her mind.

Jane had one son, Jason, whose struggle with depression ended in suicide on Labor Day weekend, 2016. He was 46.

Dust settled years after Jane’s career ended in 2015. Hamline did not learn its lesson on speech codes. The same Hamline president who betrayed Jane, Fayneese Miller, forced this year’s rescission of art history instructor Erika López Prater’s contract. López Prater had shown a fourteenth century painting of the Prophet Mohammed’s face resulting in cries of Islamophobia, and it made international news.

Jane said someone told her she seemed angry about her career loss. She told me she responded, “I am angry. They took my life. I lost my son, my only child. Why shouldn’t I be angry?” I resonated with Jane. You cannot know the brutal finality of a mob attack if compounded by the speed of media incinerating your reputation. You can’t get it. People have died for less, yet despite losing her son, Jane stayed alive.

As time dribbled on, while we kissed hello and goodbye, bantered and laughed ourselves wheezy about the crazed American political scene, we kept coming back to the spark of creation, to discipline of writing each day, where words are sometimes scarce and thoughts are sad, then praising whatever comes.

I told her more times about words flushed out of me by sleep-loss drunkenness, than about being flush with words on a restful morning, the way syllables fly out before any sense comes. We spoke of echolalia and susurration, of celadon springtime, and scudding fall leaves, of ozone air, of ripe and rot.

Here are things she told us writers.

“Do you want me to edit this? Say so and I will. But if I edit it, I won’t do it as your friend. I am your friend, but — I do it as a professional, the way I edit any manuscript. My suggestions are just that: suggestions. I’m not trying to be cruel. I am doing this as a service to help you come closer to what is necessary and important.”

“What if—?” Jane often said in workshop. “What does this story have to do with ‘me’?”“Whose story is it? How do you know?” “What does she want that she cannot have, and what’s keeping her from getting it?”

“Where is the trouble? You need more trouble.”

“Writing is having the faith to step out an open window believing you will not fall.”

“What is the intimacy, or psychic distance?”

“Some writers are so married to their drafts, they cannot edit them. Set it aside for a year. Write something else and come back.” “Don’t let a Tar Baby stick to you. The more you fight it, the more stuck you will be.”

“Map your story .. draw threads .. yes, know your over-story (plot) but help your reader out; remind him often of your under-story (character arc).”

When I began this a week ago, I could not find the lead to Jane, the road to Jane. I still don’t really have it. How do you capture the life of a loved one with these marks and letters? You can’t, really. I came at this piece broadside. I talked to some of Jane’s friends, all of whom have known her longer than my six years: Marsha, Leykn, Kouraleen, Julie, Laurie, Shari, Katy, Joy, Jane H., Bruce, Nolan, Jonathan, Dan, Alice, MaryAnn, Kristin, Mark, and to my wife, Karen, who loved Jane every bit as much as I did. Between Karen’s and Jane’s searching and raptor-like memories, no visit was ever short on devastating tales, fury, sex, tragedy, and laughter that could leave me wheezing and looking for my albuterol.

We are made of words. Jane asked me this year if she was losing it upstairs. No, I said. She wasn’t. She didn’t always need words. We could just sit and be quiet. She could give a half-smile and slight shake of her head, and say, “We get each other.” She got the flash before thunder, the no-need-to speak.

And then Jane would take a deep breath, and say, “Theo, I need to go to bed.”

Teenage Jane, author photo, our living room, Rustic Road, Jane’s things, her darling inspector Jason