A Next Door Neighbor Remembers the Franklins #2

by J. Thomas Allison

The Franklin household in early 1950s also included a toddler girl and a boy on the way. Finding a time to write might have been a problem, but not for Madeleine. The old farmhouse had an ample pantry with three sides off the north wall of the old kitchen. Its shelves were now filled with heavy albums of 78rpm classical music and opera which Madeleine’s mother sent  from her own home in Jacksonville, Florida. However the shelves by the north window were kept free for her books. The wide, well-worn wooden board on which two hundred years of homemakers kneaded their breads was now her desk. On it was the dark green portable Royal typewriter her father Charles Wadsworth Camp had taken with him to Europe as correspondent in World War 1 and for several novels under the name Wadsworth Camp.

Madeleine wrote here from the time Hugh went to bed about 10 or 11 until perhaps 4 in the morning when she took her daughter for a potty and all snuggled together under the counterpane for a couple hours.

View west towards CrosswicksBetween our double windows on the south wall of the living room and the two storey back wall of their house was an expanse of two large hay fields. At night with our lights off, we could see their dining room windows and the upstairs bathroom’s ablaze.  At 2 in the morning when my mom got up for her “walk about,” she always included a detour through our front room to see if there were any deer or wild turkeys on the lawns.

At that time, the only light was from the pantry window and she knew Madeleine was at work. More than 60 years later I can remember her waking my dad and me to come down.  We’d had a severe ice storm a couple days earlier and fortunately the power did not fail. From our house up through the two meadows was like a sheet of cellophane with stalagmites of glass that had once been grass. In the darkness from their house to ours was a long yellowy path like moonlight on a millpond coming from her window.

A few stolen hours in the middle of the night, a frosty damp room and the glowing curly coils sizzling and popping on an antiquated heater may be all you can find. You have to make the most of it, I guess.

 

Tom Allison is a retired Congregational Minister living in Albany NY.  Rehabbing a house once owned by a Hudson River Steamboat Captain inspired his looking into that history culminating in “Hudson River Steamboat Catastrophes Contests and Collisions” (History Press 2013) available Barnes and Noble and Amazon.  Since 5th grade he has enjoyed offering to the public illustrated history lectures. Among the 40 plus have been American Cookbooks,  plumbing,, transatlantic steamboat travel in the golden age, Litchfield Connecticut: America’s most historic mile and  A neighbor remembers Madeleine L’Engle, (for the 100th anniversary of  her birth)  to name a few. He is pictured here at Crosswicks, with the typewriter Madeleine gave him on the occasion of his high school graduation.

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A Next Door Neighbor Remembers the Franklins #1

Goshen General Store ca 1950

by J. Thomas Allison

I grew up next door to the Franklin family from 1952 until 1978.  Hugh and Madeleine bought their house, Crosswicks, the year my parents bought acreage north of them. My parents had also looked at the 1750-ish house he Franklins ended up purchasing. They decided against it in favor of a large new Cape Cod designed by my architect uncle.

Hugh and Madeleine also bought the old General Store from a true Connecticut Yankee, Sam Porter (though granddaughter Charlotte notes that Hugh bought it while Madeleine was away: surprise!). If you’re thinking Green Acres’ Sam Drucker you have the idea. They were updating it with new clean metal shelving, a meat department behind the Post Office, and a line of Herbs and Spices beside the familiar display of  “Contented Cow Bag Balm.”  Today, you have to get it at Tractor Supply. Hugh was up six days a week at 6 to drive his old red Ford Woody Wagon 15 miles to his supplier Allied Grocers for newspapers, merchandise, fresh fruits and vegetables. A 50 pound wheel of aged cheddar “rat cheese” was frequently on the list to be sold by his butcher, Clarence Hagert.

The wheel of cheese had its place of honor on the top of the meat cabinet. However the old fashioned cracker barrel no longer held several hundred “Uneeda Biscuit.” Then you  helped yourself into one of a stack of small bags under the cover to be weighed at the counter..It was now filled with assorted colorful tempting boxes of “fancy” crackers.

Hugh grew up in 1920’s Oklahoma with hitching posts and horses pulled up beside dusty open top Model Ts along the wooden sidewalks. From there he went to New York to be an actor. Madeleine lived a privileged life in a steam heated apartment. Her parents dressed for dinner in formal Evening Wear every night in case they got a last minute invitation from a society friend. Hugh and Madeleine would be the last couple you’d expect to be singing

“Green acres is the place to be
Farm livin’ is the life for me
Land spreadin’ out so far and wide
Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside”

He opened at 7:30, and Madeleine worked a shift in the store while he went to Torrington midday to do a talk program on the local radio station WTOR. He returned in time for the brisk evening trade from 3:30 to closing at 6:00.  Country wives with no cars called in last minute orders to be put up, added to their charge account and handed off to their husbands coming home from factories in Torrington. Every night, they stopped for the mail, a paper and any last minute order. Each farm family had a pad resembling the order pads in restaurants. Once a month it was tallied and paid “when the milk check came.” Customers were handed a bill on the 28th of every month with their groceries. Money was tight all around at that time, and the Franklins extended credit to the farmers, who often worked day jobs in town, when they could. To encourage the settling of accounts by the end of the year, they gave every customer with an up-to-date monthly tab a small ham on December 29th for the New Year.

 

Tom Allison is a retired Congregational Minister living in Albany NY.  Rehabbing a house once owned by a Hudson River Steamboat Captain inspired his looking into that history culminating in “Hudson River Steamboat Catastrophes Contests and Collisions” (History Press 2013) available Barnes and Noble and Amazon.  Since 5th grade he has enjoyed offering to the public illustrated history lectures. Among the 40 plus have been American Cookbooks,  plumbing,, transatlantic steamboat travel in the golden age, Litchfield Connecticut: America’s most historic mile and  A neighbor remembers Madeleine L’Engle, (for the 100th anniversary of  her birth)  to name a few. He is pictured here at Crosswicks, with the typewriter Madeleine gave him on the occasion of his high school graduation.

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L’Engle Library up for auction to benefit three organizations

Dear Ones,

Happy Spring! It’s hard to trust the feeling of hope and excitement that has been fluttering in my stomach and loosening the tightness in my throat, but I won’t deny it any longer, even if I know there will be disappointments and setbacks. It is ever thus, is it not?

I write to tell you that more of Madeleine’s library will be auctioned this month by New England Book Auctions. They did a test run with a small portion back in December, and raised nearly $10,000 distributed between PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program, Smith College (The Madeleine L’Engle Travel Research Fellowships) and The L’Engle Initiative at Image Journal.

New England Book Auctions took on a difficult task. They moved more than 250 boxes of books, sight unseen and content and condition unknown that had been sitting in a (blessedly dry!) basement for more than a decade (more on the why of this later). They sorted and evaluated and inventoried the whole thing (I had queried other auction houses, but they all said they’d be happy to help once I made an inventory myself, which was beyond my power).

I visited last week to look at a few items, pull a few books that had particular sentimental value to our family, and collect several boxes of non-book material that had gotten mixed up in that basement with the other 250 boxes. Paul, the owner, had faithfully set aside photos and letters and even datebooks and manuscripts that were not intended to be part of the charity auction.

Some memorabilia will be part of the auction, including a photo album of Madeleine Barnett Camp and Charles Wadsworth Camp (her parents) in Europe and Egypt, perhaps on their 1908 honeymoon, but certainly before the First World War. They saw a production of Aida at the pyramids on that trip, can you imagine! There are also old Christmas cards that are hand painted (don’t worry, the full master set is at Smith) that will be offered at the auction.

The books will be sold in lots on April 8, 13, 20, 22, and 27, but bidding opens early. Lots will vary in size and value.

What took so long? 1) It is a daunting thing when a loved one dies to be responsible for the accumulations of a lifetime. 2) We’re book people! Letting go of books is painful. A bookcase is a record of time spent and history and books are harder to find good homes for than one might think. 3) Her particular status as beloved author made every decision weighted.

   

I am aware that other authors’ libraries and archives have been sold for very high amounts. Our family made a decision early on that we would not do this. Selling an archive to a library only takes money out of an institution you are trusting to keep something accessible forever, money that could be better used to support students. I think the time it has taken is not only a measure of the immense emotional task but also the time it took build the relationships with the three organizations that will benefit from this sale.

Also recovered from those 180 boxes  was a triple strand pearl choker that Madeleine kept in an empty book jacket on a shelf in her nyc bedroom. We had been wringing our hands over it, thinking we had somehow lost it. Though tall, Madeleine had a very slender neck and the necklace never fit anyone in the family except her. Reader, let me tell you: I am taking that choker to a jeweler and extending the clasp so I can wear it. The rest I am letting go.

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Another Irrational Season

The secrets of the atom are not unlike Pandora’s box, and what we must look for is not the destructive power but the vision of interrelatedness that is desperately needed on this fragmented planet. We are indeed part of a universe. We belong to each other; the fall of every sparrow is noted, every tear we shed is collected in the Creator’s bottle.

— Madeleine L’Engle, The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth

by Jessica Kantrowitz

Dear Ones,

I’ve been finding it hard to find a rhythm for this season. The pandemic started last year around the Christian season of Lent, and now Lent has come back around again. In the meantime, all the other seasons, ecclesiastical and meteorological, have come and gone, and yet the days all seem the same. I have been trying to read through some of the daily prayers in Phyllis Tickle’s series, The Divine Hours, and, last fall, picked up Madeleine L’Engle’s book The Irrational Season during Advent, hoping to find there, as I often have in Madeleine’s work, meaning and resonance from her life that informs the present.

The title of that book comes from a poem Madeleine wrote entitled After Annunciation:

This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
There’d have been no room for the child.

But besides finding it hard to find a rhythm for this season, I’ve also been finding it hard to read, to concentrate on themes and ideas, when the stress and fear and grief of this time grips my mind as well as my body. As I wrote here last year, I’ve been falling back on science fiction, fantasy, and young adult novels, that let me forget the harder parts of my life and the world, and inhabit another world for a time. But with non-fiction books, I keep picking them up, reading a page or two, then putting them down again.

So, last fall, I kept trying to get into an Advent-ish frame of mind, kept trying to read, but then it was Christmas, and then Epiphany, and I still hadn’t felt present for Advent. It was autumn, and then winter, and now it’s only a few weeks till spring, and I still haven’t felt fully present for the brilliance of New England’s fall foliage, now long fallen, trees stripped bare.

Still, I keep coming back to The Irrational Season, the book, the poem, and the phrase itself. I think Madeleine used it to mean that God’s ways are wild and different than ours. It was irrational of God to become incarnate in a young, unmarried, marginalized girl, and yet that is where the beauty and power of the incarnation lie. But I keep thinking that this season, this endless pandemic, this terrifying political moment in the United States, is a different kind of irrational season. Irrational as in meaningless. Irrational as in reckless, destructive. Irrational as in evil.

It is irrational that there are clear, simple ways to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic and people refuse to do them. It is irrational that public health is a political issue at all, irrational for a government to have the resources to help its citizens and choose not to. It is irrational that the poor and starving are pitted against each other when it is the wealthy and powerful that hoard wealth and spend political capital to make themselves wealthier. It is irrational that we do not love each other, when love is the only thing that will save us.

I think of Sporos, the farandola in A Wind in the Door, who fought his deepening into community in favor of selfishness and a false freedom. Sporos ultimately realized that his own life was tied up with that of his neighbors’, and chose the path not only of self-fulfillment but of neighbor-love. Right now it feels like there are millions of Sporoses, making decisions that harm us all, including themselves. And, like Meg, I feel helpless to convince them that all our lives hang in the balance. In the book, Sporos finally understands, finally deepens. But that is fiction. I can escape there, but when I return to reality, to the present moment, what can I do in the face of such continued irrationality? I really don’t know.

I’ve been trying to find a rhythm to this irrational season, but maybe there isn’t one. Maybe it’s outside of the ecclesiastical seasons, outside of summer, winter, fall, and spring. Maybe these really are unprecedented times, and time itself has somehow lost its rhythm. Or maybe it’s something we will only be able to understand in hindsight. Maybe it is something that we have to live through first, and understand later.

In the meantime, dear ones, take care of yourselves, and take care of each other. Be gentle with yourselves, and be gentle with each other. We might not be able to convince others to save us, but we can love each other, as best we can. We can keep vigil for each other as best we can. We can stay present, for ourselves and each other, as best we can. And maybe we will find that we have created a new season, of love, of perseverance, of interrelatedness. A season of a better kind of irrationality than the one we were given.

Tesser well,
Jessica

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Poetry, Science, and the Imagination: The Inaugural L’Engle Seminar at Image

 

by Jessica Kantrowitz

Dear Ones,

We’re excited to share that registration is now open for Poetry, Science, and the Imagination, the inaugural L’Engle Seminar, hosted by Image Journal, the first in a series of events that will explore the interplay between art and science. This five-part seminar will be held via Zoom at 1pm ET each Wednesday in March. The series was originally planned to launch in New York City last year and then travel across North America in the following years, but of course the pandemic intervened. Instead, the inaugural seminar will be online, allowing access from anywhere in the world!

The L’Engle Seminars are inspired by Madeleine L’Engle’s fascination with the common mysteries that art, faith, and science share. They will explore three aspects of her life and work:

  • -Attention to the generative interplay between faith, art, and science
  • -Recognition that all art is incarnational and that science enlarges our understanding of creation
  • -Generous engagement with diverse faith traditions, including diverse Christian communities.

The inaugural seminar will be hosted by Brian Volck, a pediatrician and poet, and will include talks by Tom McLeish, physicist and author of The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art; poet and mathematician Mary Peelen; poet, priest, and Coleridge scholar Malcom Guite; poet and YA author Marilyn Nelson; and poet and educator Robert Cording.

“Poetry and the sciences are connected in deep and surprising ways. Both the poet and the scientist engage reality through the imagination. And in this five-part online seminar, you are invited to explore imagination as a way of knowing within the two disciplines. Each hour-long session will have a distinct focus and feature the insight of a wide array of poets, scientists, philosophers, and theologians.”

To learn more and to register, click here. https://imagejournal.org/lengle/

Tesser well,

Jessica

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PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program Names The L’Engle/Rahman Prize for Mentorship Winners

by Jessica Kantrowitz

IT’S THIS WAY

by Nazim Hikmet

I stand in the advancing light,
my hands hungry, the world beautiful.

My eyes can’t get enough of the trees—
they’re so hopeful, so green.

A sunny road runs through the mulberries,
I’m at the window of the prison infirmary.

I can’t smell the medicines—
carnations must be blooming nearby.

It’s this way:
being captured is beside the point,
the point is not to surrender.

Dear Ones,

In 1968, Ahmad Rahman, a member of the Black Panther Party, was set up in an FBI sting and falsely accused and convicted of murder. He spent twenty-two years in prison. During that time he came into a deep Islamic faith, and earned not only an undergraduate degree, but a PhD as well. He also corresponded with our beloved Madeleine L’Engle.

 

L’Engle and Rahman were one of the first mentor/mentee pairs through PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing mentorship program which aims to “provide incarcerated writers with access to a wider literary community that understands them as serious artists in their own right and welcomes their contributions.” The two wrote each other dozens of letters from 1976 to 1990.

 

 

Reading their letters (or rather listening to them in the wonderful dramatic reading below) is a fascinating experience. Here are two people from very different walks of life, yet similar in their determination, their honesty, and their fierce belief in themselves, their stories, and their writing.

There were two moments in their revealed correspondence I found especially profound, and sharply relevant all these years later. The first was when L’Engle asked Rahman what he would like her to call him.

“Would you rather have me call you by the name on the photograph? Amilcar? Names are very important to me, and I feel that our names are one of the greatest gifts we can give each other.”

“Yes. I do prefer that you call me by my real name, Ahmad Amilcar Rahman Sundiata. My friends call me Amilcar.”

“Thank you for giving me your name. I give you mine: Madeleine.”

This Naming felt especially powerful to me, not only because it connected reality to fantasy, evoking Meg’s Naming of Mr. Jenkins in A Wind in the Door, but also because Rahman had changed his name when he converted to Islam. In affirming it, L’Engle also affirmed his faith as an integral part of his identity. I don’t know whether L’Engle ever knew transgender or nonbinary folks, who chose a name for themselves more true than the one they were given, but this exchange makes me think she would have wanted to know their true, chosen name, and would have taken that name, also, as a gift.

Another moment, for me, that speaks across the years is when Rahman critiques parts of L’Engle’s book, The Other Side of the Sun, specifically her depiction of Black characters in a book set in the American South in the early 1900s. After explaining the parts he doesn’t like, Rahman adds,

“But you mean well. That’s what gets me. I mean you mean so well. And all the condescending passages are unintentional. You just didn’t know how to express what you wanted, and what definitely needed to be expressed. If there’s one thing I deeply want you to gain from my friendship, it is the ability to express your ideas and feelings about this swirl of racial conflicts in a fashion that puts to use your considerable gifts for the good you strive to do.”

L’Engle responds simply, with gratitude and without defensiveness.

“Well, you’re teaching me a lot. I don’t think I want to ‘mean well.’ The road to hell is paved with good intentions…Don’t ever hesitate to push me into wider and deeper thinking.”

As a writer myself, and also a white woman, I can say that my writing and my striving to not be racist are probably the two subjects most difficult to receive critique on with equanimity. But how often in the last few years have we seen the damage that can be done when white women handle critique poorly, using their tears to gain sympathy, and insisting that they meant well and that intention matters more than the effect of their words and actions?

But L’Engle doesn’t react defensively – or if she does, she deals with it on her own and doesn’t ask Rahman to pamper her. She wants to be a better writer, and she wants to be a better person, so she welcomes Rahman’s critique, and thanks him. What a great example for us in 2020 of allowing ourselves to be “called in” to anti-racism work, rather than feeling “called out” by honest critique.

***

In September, 2020, Pen America announced the first class of the L’Engle/Rahman Prize for Mentorship, named in honor of their friendship and underwritten by L’Engle’s family. The prize honors four mentor/mentee pairs in PEN America’s longstanding prison writing mentorship program, which links established writers with those currently incarcerated. Hundreds of mentor/mentee pairs participate in the program every year, and these four have been chosen as modeling the ideal of the program. Those chosen,

“…exhibit the spirit of the L’Engle-Rahman exchange—committed and consistent communication, feedback that honors the writer’s intention and unique voice while being open and honest in rigorous critique, and a demonstrated dialogue between both writers on craft and intellectual ideas.”

You can read the fascinating essays of the four pairs of winners here.

As I read them, I was struck by how different all eight individuals were, and how different each pair’s chemistry as partners. Benjamin Frandsen and Noelia Cerna offered each other intellectual camaraderie and emotional grounding. Elizabeth Hawes and Jeffrey James Keyes dug into the nuts and bolts of writing and producing a play. Derek Trumbo and Agustín Lopez created space for frightening words to be fearlessly shaped into stories. Seth Wittner and Katrinka (Kei) Moore united in their belief of the power of writing, both in poetry and in prose.

But one theme that was common in each of their stories was that the mentors learned as much from the mentees as the other way around. These are creative, constructive relationships between individuals who are all imperfect, but all striving to create something worthwhile, something beautiful and true, out of their experiences and their lives, to push forward through the past and the present, and to create the future with their own pens.

As the Turkish poet and political prisoner, Nazim Hikmet, wrote,

“It’s this way:
being captured is beside the point,
the point is not to surrender.”

Tesser well,
Jessica

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L’Engle Library Auction Begins

Dear Ones,

2020, apart from the collective traumas of covid-19 and the election, also marked the 13th anniversary of Madeleine’s death and the 102nd anniversary of her birth. She loved celebrating her birthday, November 29, and often bemoaned its coming too close to Thanksgiving. I have intense, impressionistic memories of Thanksgiving as a child: crowded tables, the clanging of silver and china, adult laughter and conversation, being allowed to light and snuff the candles, and staying up late. Sometimes we gathered as a family and assorted friends in New York at my grandparents’ apartment near the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; sometimes at their home in Northwestern Connecticut, Crosswicks. This year our gathering was tiny compared to years’ past, only the five of us that make up our current quarantine pod, but it was at Crosswicks, and we are grateful.

We’ve been at Crosswicks since March and have watched the seasons change and our expectations shift. I have gotten some good work done, but have also been amazed by what remains unfinished. One thing I am very happy to announce is that Madeleine’s library of approximately 10,000 books has been collected, sorted, and arranged by New England Book Auctions and will be on sale in various stages over the next several months, proceeds going The Madeleine L’Engle Travel Research Fellowships Fund at Smith College, PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program, and The L’Engle Initiative at Image Journal.

The 258 boxes of books came from Crosswicks and her home in New York, and have been in storage since her death, nearly thirteen years ago. It was a great deal of work to go through them and make decisions, and we were finally able to tackle it this summer. It was not easy finding an auction house that would take this on: because the boxes had been in storage so long, their condition and value was unknown and I did not have the capacity to do an inventory. New England Book Auctions was able to make 3 trips to pick up the boxes (thank you, Connor, who made those trips and navigated the ancient and low cellar!) and has started to go through the books and arrange them in lots for sale, the first several of which are live on their website now, and bidding ends on December 3.

Madeleine in the Tower, ca. 1958

The first lots are “shelf sale” books, and have about 100 books in each, designed to be of interest to book dealers and not necessarily individual buyers (though you’re welcome to browse and bid!). Some are signed by her, some are by her, and all come from her personal library which was acquired over her lifetime. Some of the volumes originally belonged to her mother and father and other relatives but were on her book shelves. The books currently on sale represent about ten percent of the total, so there is much more to come, including a catalog sale of higher-value volumes. Do take a look if you’re curious. I love seeing her copies of The Lonely Crowd, The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, What Is Science?, and Ship of Fools.

Dear ones, this is painful. Letting go of books always is, and these are very special, so it feels I’m letting go of her, too. Along with the pain of letting go also comes a sense of relief and freedom. It’s intense though, and I’m taking deep breaths. I hope you are, too, in the midst of all the changes all around us these days.

Charlotte

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The Madeleine L’Engle Conference a year later

Reposted from Sarah Arthur‘s facebook page, with permission.

Dear ones,

One year ago today I was wrapping up a glorious weekend co-directing 2019 Walking on Water: The Madeleine L’Engle Conference held at All Angels’ Church in NYC. A truly fantastic team of authors, musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, theatre educators, writing teachers, editors, booksellers, creatives, and nearly the entire church staff…everyone made it an unforgettable weekend–which is all the more poignant in retrospect, knowing now what we didn’t know then.

Madeleine L’Engle’s granddaughter, Charlotte Jones Voiklis, you are still pure magic (also sending virtual hugs to YOU, Léna Roy!), while M’s dear friend Barbara Braver has become one of those wise women I didn’t know I needed in my life. Katherine Paterson’s keynote “The Water is Wide” still rings in my ears, as does Audrey Assad’s music (“The Irrational Season,” anyone?). Madeleine’s new short story collection, “The Moment of Tenderness,” lovingly compiled by Charlotte and released in April, comforted us in those early dark days of the pandemic, while the new edition of M’s collected poems, “The Ordering of Love,” (with a foreword by yours truly) graced us too. If anything, these voices have grown more resonant.

There have been difficult changes along the way. NYC is a vastly different city now. Our nation is reeling from ongoing political destabilization–a situation that Madeleine understood all too well during the McCarthy era. Some of us are unemployed or underemployed or simply too overwhelmed to create much of anything right now (*raises hand*). Others have taken care of–or lost–loved ones during this dreadful pandemic, and/or fought the disease themselves. To our NYC friends, especially, and others who’ve had to move or change jobs: we send all our love and prayers.

There’s also much to celebrate! Sophfronia Scott is now the director of the first-ever Alma College MFA in Creative Writing (congratulations!), while the phenomenal team from We Need Diverse Books continues to add to our stack of nightstand reading (Sayantani DasGupta, you’re a total rockstar!). So many of these creatives have released new titles/films/stage-plays/music/events in the past year (Karina Yan Glaser’s new Vanderbeekers book and Peter Royston’s stage adaptation of M’s “A Wind in the Door” are both delightful); and several have marked major milestones (Joyce Yu-Jean Lee got married, y’all!). Without these things our world would be a darker place.

Dear Ones, though it’s been a year–and such a year–our hearts remain full. We’re in this together, and I can’t wait for the day when we’ll reconvene once again, to press forward in creativity and hope. In the meantime, as Madeleine said, “Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surround us, or we light a candle to see by.” Light all those candles and together we’ll blaze out into the universe!

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Why read fantasy and science fiction?

by Jessica Kantrowitz

Dear Ones,

I’ve all but given up reading non-fiction lately. I’m too saturated with reality, too overwhelmed with a never-ending news cycle that keeps my mind in fight-or-flight mode constantly. There are so many good writers right now grappling with questions of faith, trauma and healing, parenting, social justice, and racial justice, and I keep buying their books, but when I open them to read my mind is a fog.

The problem is, I’ve reread all the books I keep by my bedside too recently for another reread, including Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet – A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in The Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. You know how you can tell in your gut if it’s time yet or not? So a couple of months ago, when the libraries in Boston finally opened again for socially distanced pick-up, I sat down at my computer and Googled, “best young adult fiction of all time.” I needed new-to-me books that drew me in as well as my old standbys: The Arm of the Starfish, Watership Down, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Princess and the Goblin.

I felt like a kid again when I began to receive notifications about the books I’d requested. If I could have, I’d have hopped on my bike instead of in my car to zip over to the library, lingering in the nearby woods when I kept arriving before they were open. Then — what treasure! The heartwarming The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street by Karina Yan Glaser wrapped me up in the charm of New York City. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones blurred the lines between fantasy and fiction. Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri, though technically nonfiction/memoir, enthralled me with stories both ethereal and earthy. Yet in all of these books, as in Madeleine’s, the escape into fantasy was also a way to process the seemingly impossible challenges of reality.

“A child who has been denied imaginative literature is likely to have far more difficulty in understanding cellular biology or post-Newtonian physics than the child whose imagination has already been stretched by reading fantasy and science fiction.”

Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

I’m not the only one who has been leaning into fantasy lately. On October 15th, TIME Magazine published a list of the 100 best fantasy books of all time. When I saw it, I immediately opened another tab with my library’s request form. TIME asked fantasy authors Tomi Adeyemi, Cassandra Clare, Diana Gabaldon, Neil Gaiman, Marlon James, N.K. Jemisin, George R.R. Martin and Sabaa Tahir to nominate books, then rate the 250 nominees on a scale. TIME’s editors then considered elements such as “originality, ambition, artistry, critical and popular reception, and influence on the fantasy genre and literature more broadly” to come up with the final list.

“A story where myth, fantasy, fairy tale, or science fiction explore and ask questions moves beyond fragmatic dailiness to wonder. Rather than taking the child away from the real world, such stories are preparation for living in the real world with courage and expectancy.”

Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

A Wrinkle in Time is on it, of course, along with A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and a host of my other favorites. (If you haven’t read The Princess Bride, may I say that the book is even better than the movie.) The first two, The Arabian Nights and Le Morte D’Arthur, made me feel a little guilty for never finishing them. Maybe someday. But perhaps most exciting were the newer books I was less familiar with. Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older went on my “requested” list right away, as did The Wrath and The Dawn by Renée Ahdieh and Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. I can’t wait to zip over to my little library by the woods to pick them up.

And do you know what? I just got that feeling in my gut about an old favorite. It’s time to reread The Arm of the Starfish again. I’m adding it to my list.

What’s on your list?

Tesser well,
Jessica Kantrowitz

Blog debut of Jessica Kantrowitz for madeleinelengle.com. Jessica Kantrowitz writes about faith, culture, social justice, and chronic illness, including her own struggles with depression and migraines. She has worked as a storyteller for Together Rising, and her writing has been featured in places like Sojourners, Think Christian, The Good Men Project, and Our Bible App. Despite having earned a Master of Divinity, she still feels very much like an apprentice. Her first book, The Long Night: Readings and Stories to Help You through Depression is available wherever books are sold, including your local, independent bookstore.

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