Madeleine L'Engle, 1918-2007

To be filled in. The NYT obit is a good one. I'll come back and fill this in. I'm off to lunch.

I'm back, after lunch and an attempt at a nap...

I was first introduced to Madeleine L'Engle through A Wrinkle in Time, which I read on my own in fifth grade. In seventh grade, it was a part of the English/Language Arts curriculum and we had to write sentences using vocabulary words. It was seven years before I could pick up the book and read it again, the process so scarred me.

In high school, I was introduced to ML'E's essays, through her book, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, by my friend Lorelei and her mother. Lorelei's mother gave me my own copy as a graduation gift. I have read that book so many times that the words should be dull on the page. There are many notes, and underlines, and the thoughts in that book shaped how I look at art, writing, and being a Christian, and being an artist.

In college, one of the campus ministers at Bellefield, Beth, was also a ML'E aficionado and aspiring writer. I introduced her to Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones and we got together to write sometimes, dreaming of someday meeting Madeleine.

The year I returned to Pittsburgh after gaining my bachelor's in English Lit with a concentration in writing was 1993. It was also the year that I met Cynthia Voigt, Jean Craighead George, and Madeleine L'Engle. M L'E was the main speaker at the Fall Festival for Children's Books, a yearly conference run by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. I went with a friend, and got a few pictures of M L'E walking down a hall, as well as a picture with her, taken by her assistant. I'm almost but not quite completely chagrined that my jeans had a gaping hole in the knee. I'll have to uncover that picture--it is somewhere in the debris I call my valuables that I keep in my abyss of an apartment. My copy of Walking on Water is now autographed. (Hold this place for the inscription--I'm writing this from work.)

(Cynthia Voigt and Jean Craighead George were in town a different fall weekend, for the National Teachers of English Conference. I got Cynthia Voigt to autograph a few of my books, when I showed up for a book signing at the now gone Squirrel Hill Bookstore.)

To prepare for M L'E's visit to our fair city, I read as many of her books as possible. It was then that I read all the Austin books and all the sequels to the Wrinkle in Time that I had not already read.

I remember being disappointed at the talk she gave, since I was so well versed in M'Lore that I knew all the stories she shared. But the experience as a whole will stay with me always.

Bach wrote a number of "Inventions" (I can not even begin to understand the music theory of it, but M L'E loved Bach.) So the book she wrote about her marriage, the summer her husband was dying, was called Two Part Invention. It is a wonderful book of flashing back to how she met Hugh, their courtship, and their marriage, all written on the real time (1987) backdrop of her visits to the hospital, not knowing yet if he would live through the summer. It is in this book that M L'E reveals how she came to be a Christian--she and Hugh were involved in the music program at the town church and no one asked what they believed before they asked whether they could help out with the choir. And they just stayed, and eventually did believe enough to make their belief a strong part of their life. I always found comfort in this, that there are so many ways people come to faith, and not all of them look like Paul's dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus. (I couldn't believe there was a wikipedia article, but since there was, I figured I'd link it.)

Come to it, let's see if M'LE has a wikipedia page--of course she does, silly! Huh, I never knew her birthday was a day after mine. (Her's is Nov 29, mine is Nov 28.)

I'm sure there is more to write, but for now, let me just say adieu and godspeed to a woman who shaped so much the way I look at writing, the world, and everything in between.