Fans could be forgiven for feeling as if they personally know Madeleine L’Engle. Maybe their bookshelves are lined with a trove of her non-fiction titles; maybe the voices and characters from L’Engle’s fiction books are stuck in their minds. We fans may even have read Becoming Madeleine: A Biography of the Author of a Wrinkle in Time by Her Granddaughters and A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L’Engle. “Quiz us,” we fans might say.

But a biographer — now there’s someone whose job it is to introduce us to a person in a new way. Biography is an art form, for sure, and one we’ll be talking about during the third round of breakout sessions at the Madeleine L’Engle conference, Walking on Water.

Two biographers will converse during the session (Writing a Writer’s Life: The Art of Biography): Madeleine L’Engle’s biographer Abigail Santamaria and Mary Oliver’s biographer Lindsay Whalen. Specifically, we’ll be able to hear them talk about the unique challenges of writing about artists, and why the works and lives of these two major 20th-century American women writers continue to resonate.

Before we get into that topic, though, we asked Abigail to go autobiographical for a second. Let’s get to know her better!

Abigail Santamaria

What excites you about the Madeleine L’Engle Conference?
Abigail Santamaria: Professionally, as Madeleine L’Engle’s biographer, I’m excited to meet so many people who knew her. I would love to hear stories, memories, thoughts and insights about Madeleine’s life and work from all who are willing to contribute. To those who knew her: please introduce yourselves! If there’s not time to chat during the conference weekend, I’d love to exchange contact information.

Personally, while I’m looking forward to the full menu of offerings I’m most excited about hearing Katherine Paterson, one of the hero authors of my adolescence. I vividly remember reading Bridge to Terabithia in my childhood canopy bed, tears streaming down my cheeks; I couldn’t believe I was crying over a book. For the first time, I consciously understood that books were capable of eliciting profound emotional responses. That was a foundational experience.

Do you have a Madeleine story/quote/moment that has inspired you?
Abigail Santamaria: Oh boy–choosing one means leaving out so many others! But here is one — not necessarily THE most inspirational, but this bit of dialogue from L’Engle’s Camilla has affirmed my proclivity for risk-taking, even when those risks wrought unbearable waves of insecurity:

“No such thing as security. Doesn’t exist. Only a feeling of security.”
“Then I’d like to have that feeling.”
“No, Camilla, not really. If you were secure, things wouldn’t change, would they?”
“I guess not.”
“Without change — uncertainty, fear that goes with it — we wouldn’t be.”
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“In order to be, honey, we must progress. Once we stop moving, we die. In order to progress, we must change… Life is the greatest of all arguments for insecurity.”

In what ways does a legacy like Madeleine’s inspire the way you create art for a new generation?
Abigail Santamaria: Another tough one. My answer to this changes frequently depending on what book(s) of Madeleine’s I’m reading or what particular aspect/period of her life I’m researching.

What are you working on now?
Abigail Santamaria: My big years-long current project is the first adult biography of Madeleine L’Engle, which will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The book will be a thorough, fully-sourced portrait — a prodigious task. Madeleine led a long, rich life full of friends, family, and fans with whom she corresponded at length; full of long solitary journal-writing sessions; full of lectures, sermons, interviews. And she came from a family that saved nearly everything, from letters to journals to sermon audio. Her paper-trail is more like a vast network of all terrain trails. (To give you a sense of the level of minutiae in her archive: I found a pre-Civil War grocery receipt, dated nearly 60 years before Madeleine’s birth in 1918.)

And because Madeleine is so contemporary, there are loads of people to interview. This fall I’m working on a secret special smaller Madeleine project, which I can’t talk about publicly until spring. Stay tuned! It’s a good one. In addition to my own writing projects, I co-own  (with the brilliant Kate Buford) a business called Biography by Design, which specializes in privately contracted biographies, family histories, memoirs, corporate histories, and histories of non-profits and other organizations. We also provide services including ghostwriting, manuscript editing, research and nonfiction book proposal consultations.

***

One more bonus: You can read an excerpt from her first biography, Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis.  

For more about Lindsay Whalen, check out this essay, written just after Mary Oliver’s death. Whalen’s book about Oliver is forthcoming from Penguin Press.

The two women certainly have interesting things to share about a couple of our favorite authors! Can’t wait to hear at the conference, Nov. 16 in NYC! Until then —

Tesser well,

Erin F. Wasinger for MadeleineLEngle.com.

By RuthAnn Deveney

When I was a senior in high school, a friend in my English class told me, “I found something at a yard sale over the weekend, and I got it for you. You like Madeleine L’Engle, right?”

The question was more of a formality than out of necessity; in my circle of nerds, it was common knowledge that I was working my way through the Madeleine L’Engle shelf in the fiction section of my school’s library. It was common to see me reach into my over-the-shoulder messenger bag (it was the early 2000’s) and haul out a huge, library-bound copy of whatever novel I was working through.

“Yes!” I said. “She’s my favorite author.”

My friend pulled a book out of her messenger bag (they were in style then!) and presented it to me. It was a hardcover copy of A Swiftly Tilting Planet with simple, minimal cover art. I had already read and re-read the Dell Yearling editions, and I was partial to that cover art. Where was Charles Wallace’s blue anorak? Where were the people he went Within? And why would I need another copy?

At that point in my life, I had never considered having multiple copies of books. It would just take up precious bookshelf space, and at my house, that real estate was at a premium. More importantly, I felt strongly that books in a series should match. Nevertheless, it was a gift, and you never look a gift book in the mouth, or the cover, or whatever.

“Thanks! What do I owe you?”

My friend shrugged. “It was fifty cents,” she said. “You can get me an ice cream sometime if you want.”

Good deal! I started to stow it away in my bag, but my friend interrupted me, saying, “Wait! Look at this!”

She took the book back, flipped a couple of pages, and showed me what she was looking for.

A signed title page. Madeleine L’Engle had signed this book at one point, and my friend found it at a yard sale for fifty cents! And bought it for me!

I shrieked and basically tackled my friend right there in the classroom. Since then, I’ve realized that this copy was a former library copy, and there’s an old pocket in the back for due date cards. Plus, Gaudior is embossed on the cloth cover. Years later, this particular copy is one of my prized possessions, and I’ve moved it with me from bedroom to dorm room to summer housing to apartment to house. And I’ve gotten over the fact that it doesn’t match any of the other Madeleine books I own.

RuthAnn Deveney works in corporate learning and development and loves walking around her small town of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.  She lives there with her husband, dog, and a huge 

collection of Madeleine L’Engle books, including her most prized volume: a signed copy of A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which a friend gave to her in high school after finding it at a yard sale for fifty cents! You can read more Madeleine musings at RuthAnn’s blog or follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

This piece was originally published on RuthAnn’s blog. Do you have something you’d like us to share with our blog readers? We are taking submissions for guest blog posts. Email: social [at] madeleinelengle [dot] com

Eric Berryman and Charlotte Jones Voiklis read from the letters of Madeleine L’Engle and Ahmad Rahman, September 18, 20019.

Dear Ones,

Last month, PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program announced the creation of the L’Engle/Rahman Prize for Mentorship. As part of that program’s month-long reading series, the September 16th event featured the performance of the prize-winning writers’ works, and also a dramatic dialogue I arranged from the letters Madeleine exchanged with Ahmad Rahman in the 1970s and 80s. We share the remarks of Caits Meissner, Director of the the Prison and Justice Writing Program, below.

Tesser well,

Charlotte Jones Voiklis

“In 1976, beloved fantasy author Madeleine L’Engle applied her visionary seeing to the dystopian planet of American prison, embracing what others could not: that people in prison are capable of wild talent, profound contribution, and are worthy of sincere and authentic relational connection. 

How do we know this? 

Amazingly, we learned, also fairly recently, that L’Engle was one of our program’s very first mentors back in the 1970s—and to make the discovery even sweeter, her exchange with Ahmad Rahman is wonderfully illustrative of our “connective versus charitable” approach to the mentorship process. 

And if you don’t know these names, let me fill you in. Madeleine L’Engle wrote a little book called A Wrinkle in Time. Anyone heard of it? If you didn’t read it as a young person, the recent Ava DuVernay movie might ring a bell. 

Amhad Rahman is decidedly less of a household name, but an equally powerful person. Rahman was a highly intellectual incarcerated Black Panther Party leader who later, upon release, became a beloved Associate Professor at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. 

In the letters, the two writers share articles and book recommendations, debate their respective religious affiliations of Christianity and Islam, exchange work, share personal stories, and relate through a very personal humor. The letters range in date from 1976 to 1990—over a decade of friendship through long hand and stamped envelopes. 

Our program recognizes the Mentee-Mentor exchange as a connective experience, rather than a charitable one, where reciprocal learning occurs. As much as we rely on a mentor’s expertise to help deepen the self-expression and literary skills of imprisoned writers, we also believe in the positive, often transformative, impact of this process for the Mentor.

And as we sometimes see, and hope to keep cultivating more of, delightfully, our more accomplished writers often offer strong feedback to the writing of their assigned mentors as well, flipping the very dichotomy of mentor/mentee on its head. The truth is, many of our writers are already phenomenal talents, and looking for connection, rather than a teacher. We see the letters of Madeleine and Ahmad as an instructional tool for our incoming mentors, illustrating what an equitable, successful and sustainable connection through writing can look like—and across great difference, at that. 

I want to share more about the letters, but I think it best for you to hear them yourself. Madeleine’s granddaughter, Charlotte, has weaved together excerpts from the archived letters, performed here tonight. It is with this performance, that we are so very proud to announce that The PEN America/L’Engle-Rahman Prize for Mentorship, underwritten by Madeleine L’Engle’s family, will launch in 2020, honoring exceptional mentorships in our program. I invite you to stay connected through our mailing list to learn more about the awards when presented next season. Tonight, please join us in celebrating this extraordinary history, staged by Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Eric Berryman.”

Caits Meissner
Director, Prison and Justice Writing
PEN America

For many of her readers, Madeleine’s exploration of the inner life both fed their understanding of different traditions and prompted deeper self-reflection. It’s why when some of us read her work, we’re often underlining long passages, nodding, yes, I feel that, too. We’re creating space for more of those yes, I feel that, too moments at the first Madeleine L’Engle-Walking on Water Conference. Workshops on Saturday talk about contemplation, meditation, and “feeding the lake,” and you’re welcome to participate:

Meditation on Contemplation: Madeleine L’Engle and Buddhism in Conversation

This workshop will cover the distinction between meditation in the Buddhist sense and Christian contemplation. Madeleine’s devotion to Christianity was so confident as to allow the influences of many different spiritual traditions into her thinking, including that of Buddhism, which she referenced many times, notably in Walking on Water.

In this morning workshop, psychoanalyst-in-training Edward Jones will talk about meditation and contemplation, as well as how they intersect and where they might differ, with an eye toward reconciling any perceived tension between them. Some time will be devoted to exploring Buddhist meditation techniques including some actual practice together, and putting Buddhist philosophy into a 21st century context. Jones is in training at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies. He’s energized by the intersection of yoga philosophy, Buddhism, and psychology and seeks to draw from these three deep and potent sources for the benefit of his students and clients. He is also Madeleine L’Engle’s grandson.

“Feeding the Lake: A Journaling Workshop”

After lunch that day, author Sophfronia Scott will provide insights and prompts for the regular habit of journaling, which Madeleine herself practiced. (Madeleine’s advice to unpublished writers was to write anyway because all of it helps “feed the lake,” to quote Jean Rhys). Scott, author of the novel Unforgivable Love, has also published a spiritual memoir, This Child of Faith: Raising a Spiritual Child in a Secular World, co-written with her son Tain; and an essay collection, Love’s Long Line.

“Walking on Water: The Gallery Tour”

Later Saturday afternoon, artist Albert Pedulla will lead participants on a tour of a L’Engle installation, which is a collaboration between All Angels’ Church and CIVA (Christians in the Visual Arts), featuring a number of artists and works inspired by Madeleine. The tour features a number of artists and works inspired by Madeleine. Pedulla is an artist, and occasional writer, and curator. He designed and built Madeleine’s bedroom furniture and writing desk that she used for many years. He also served on the Board of Directors of Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA) for 16 years.

** Last call! **

Registration prices increase after Sept. 15 from $169 to $199, so reserve your spot today! Registration for the Friday retreat is $79, and can be completed here, too.

The Walking on Water Conference is Saturday, Nov. 16, at All Angels’ Church, 251 W. 80th St., NY, NY, with a smaller pre-conference retreat on Friday, Nov. 15. Headline speaker for the conference will be acclaimed children’s author Katherine Paterson (Bridge to Terabithia, The Great Gilly Hopkins), with award-winning singer-songwriter Audrey Assad as Musician-in-Residence (Evergreen).

Watch here for more info about the conference — we’re getting SO excited!

Tesser well,

~Erin F. Wasinger, for MadeleineLEngle.com.