Conference highlights and some photos!

Dear Ones,

Well, after more than a year of planning, Walking on Water: The Madeleine L’Engle Conference is behind us. Envisioned not as a fan conference but rather a gathering of seekers looking to deepen their creative lives, about 150 attendees, 30 panelists and session leaders, and a dozen or so volunteers came together at All Angels’ Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The animating theme for the conference was taken from a quotation of Madeleine’s from Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art:

“In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars.”

 

Sarah Arthur. Photo credit: Lisa Beth Anderson

Sarah Arthur, who co-directed the conference with Brian Allain of Writing for Your Life, reminded us in her opening keynote that water is most often stormy, angels announce themselves with “Fear not!” (suggesting that our first instinct is exactly that), and that to move among the stars is not to commune with serene planets and stars suspended in the silent emptiness of space. If we do this, she said, “we do so on a kind of dare.” It’s a call to action.

We’ll be posting more about the event over the coming weeks — there was a lot of wisdom and passion in evidence over two days, and we want to spread the message far and wide — but I’m eager to share some highlights from the general sessions and other moments (there were nine other sessions, and if I tried to touch on each one, this post would be too long! You can still see the full schedule and amazing roster of speakers here).

    Barbara Braver. Photo by Brian Allain.

Barbara Braver and Sarah Arthur led a spiritual and writing retreat for a sold-out group on Friday. Barbara prepared the participants by sharing poems (a later blog post will have those resources) and reflections on what it means to live with questions. Writing prompts in the afternoon from Sarah, time to write and reflect, and then sharing in small groups and finally all together, finished the afternoon.

 

Audrey Assad in concert. Photo by The Rev. Nate Lee.

While not part of the conference itself, All Angels’ hosted conference musician-in-residence Audrey Assad for a sold out concert on Friday night. Her music is deeply moving and added so much, helping set the tone and vibrational quality to the day.

 

 

    Katherine Paterson. Photo by Lisa Beth Anderson

Katherine Paterson’s Saturday keynote revealed that she has just finished a new novel whose protagonist Birdie I cannot wait to meet! She moved all in the audience with her words, especially when she herself go choked up talking about the privilege it is to touch young people’s lives.

 

    Charlotte Jones Voiklis. Photo by Cornelia Duryée

I had the honor of closing the conference, and talked about how every single one of us is called to be creative, that we too in our creative output are, as Madeleine said in her Newbery Award acceptance speech, “capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly, being a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.” I also made myself cry at multiple points in the talk, but asked the audience to help me compose myself by taking some deep and slow breaths together.

We made an effort to try to capture the magic of the conference through video, audio, and still photography, and will be figuring out the best way to share moments so that they continue to have an impact.

If you attended the conference and took photos, please share them on social media with #LEngleConference, or send them to conference@madeleinelengle.com .

We also have a podcast in the works, and if you have a short takeaway from the day, or a response to the question “In what way does Madeleine inspire you to be creative? Why are you compelled to create the way you do?” please take a quick audio recording of your answer on your phone and send it to us. (Full disclosure: I don’t think I’ve got the question right, but if you know what I’m getting at — the “why” rather than the “how” — and have a better way of putting it, let me know!). Extra credit: we’d love different voices telling us what they think “Tesser well” means!

— Charlotte Jones Voiklis

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L’Engle biographer, conference speaker is working on a ‘thorough, fully-sourced portrait’

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.

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