Into the Canyon: Jane Dwinell and Sky Yardley

by Odile Sullivan-Tarazi

(Ed. note: Odile Sullivan-Tarazi sits on the board of Independent Publishers of New England (IPNE), a sister organization of BAIPA, where she chairs the book awards program. She’s sharing this profile of husband-wife author team on a deeply personal project.)

She lives in France now. 

Where she and Sky once spent summers.

“Sky was brilliant,” Jane says. “Perfect scores on his SATs. Early acceptance to Amherst.” She pauses. “And then he turned his back on all that.” With a rueful shake of her head, she says, “He should have been an academic. He had that kind of academic mind. But it was, you know” — she waves a hand through the air — “the hippie era.” Through the lens of her wireframe glasses, her blue-gray eyes are intent. “And in 1971, he dropped out of Amherst, with one semester to go, to explore the world.”

And then he roamed. “He lived on a commune in British Columbia. He went to Hawaiʻi for a while. He hiked the Appalachian Trail. And then moved to Vermont to join a commune,” Jane says, recounting the highlights of a journey out west and back east again. “He wanted to get out of his head and live an authentic, hands-on life.”

And hands-on it was. “He learned how to work draft horses,” she enumerates, “and make maple syrup and grow food and burn wood, and all the things of that era. I was already into all that stuff, so when we met, we clicked.”

Clicked, fully and completely. They built a life together, raising two children, living off the grid in Vermont, nurturing a hippie homestead, homeschooling the kids. Life was an adventure. Every few years, a new project, new endeavors, often a change of location. The family blossomed. Eventually, the kids grown, Sky and Jane decided to retire early, spending winters in New Orleans, where for some years they helped communities rebuild, and summers in France, floating through the countryside by canal, on a houseboat. Before it was on to the next adventure. 

In all those years, Sky was happy to have left the academic life behind. He never looked back. And in and among the host of things he’d turned his back on was writing. It was Jane who was the writer of the family. “He’d avoided that for, like, forty years,” she laughs, “because he didn’t want to fall into that world.” 

Until he was diagnosed with dementia. 

Then writing called to him. “He said, ‘I want to write about this. It helps me make sense of what is happening to me.’ And ‘We need to talk about this because there’s such a stigma around dementia,’” Jane explains. “So he started writing. We had a blog, and all his writing went on the blog. He embraced his diagnosis. He wanted to learn everything about dementia. He wanted to talk about it.” 

And talk about it they did. They crisscrossed the country for a year, speaking at different congregations on living with dementia. Until Sky couldn’t manage it anymore. 

Through it all, she marvels, he kept writing. “All that time, writing, writing, writing. He was still writing when he couldn’t dress himself or bathe himself or cook. He was still writing. It might take him three days to write four paragraphs, but he just wanted to talk about what was happening to him.”

Alzheimer’s Canyon — one way in, no way out — is Sky’s story. But after he passed in February of 2021, mercifully quick, and also, mercifully, knowing her to the end, Jane returned to the project, organizing the material, writing chapter introductions, and framing the whole with an introduction and an epilogue. 

In 2023, the book took a first in narrative nonfiction in our program, along with other awards and accolades, which is satisfying for the partner-in-life who lived the journey with him and who brought his voice, his life, their life together, to readers. “Sky wrote to help erase the stigma of dementia,” Jane says. “and knowing that his words are helping people understand the realities of this disease would please him so much. There is so much that we don’t understand about dementia, so to be able to read his intimate descriptions of his life is a privilege.” 

A privilege and an honor.