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 […]
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 […]
Dear Ones, We’re happy to help announce and promote BREAK OUT: a movement to (re)integrate incarcerated writers into literary community, an effort from The Poetry Project and the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program. Throughout the month of September, over two dozen local reading series in New York City—and across the country—will feature the […]
By Molly Cantrell-Kraig I blame Charlton Heston. When I was a little kid, the yearly screening of “The Ten Commandments” was anticipated in our household for a number of reasons. The first of which was its role as a rite of passage to, if not adulthood, at least big kid status, proved through the ability […]
By Judith Lindbergh “Are you sure you want to know the future?” Madeleine asked in all seriousness and waited for my response. She sat up in her four-poster bed, draped in luxuriant covers, and I sat at the edge. She was remarkably generous, inviting so many of her students into her home, nurturing and guiding […]
By RuthAnn Deveney Recently, I read Anne Bogel‘s upcoming release, I’d Rather Be Reading, which is a lovely collection of bookish essays. In the piece entitled, “A Reader’s Coming of Age,” Anne talks about the transition in her early twenties, when she had to go from having books chosen for her to needing to choose her own […]
“This question of the meaning of being, and dying and being, is behind the telling of stories around tribal fires at night; behind the drawing of animals on the walls of caves; the singing of melodies of love in spring, and of the death of green in autumn. It is part of the deepest longing […]
My youngest daughter and I read a picture book by Madeleine L’Engle the other night. We hadn’t shared The Other Dog before, so we sat smooshed in an armchair with it, each of us holding a cover. And we laughed: it’s a good book. The dog, Touché, L’Engle Franklin, is upset over a “new dog” […]
Dear Ones, This year for Earth Day, I went to Antarctica from my living room chair. Madeleine L’Engle brought me there, through the novel Troubling a Star. The book, the final in the Austin Family Chronicles, opens with a teenaged, terrified Vicky clinging to an iceberg in the ocean. Before we read about any rescue operation (or […]