All Under One Roof: Thanksgiving, Crosswicks, and Big Family Stories

by Sarah Arthur

Extended family is on my mind this time of year. Not only is Thanksgiving around the corner, but also I recently helped co-direct the L’Engle Writing Retreat in Litchfield, CT, mere miles from Madeleine’s beloved farmhouse, Crosswicks. 

The rambling, 250-year-old building has been the private residence for many generations of Madeleine’s family since the 1940s. It plays a key role in her works: from the memoir-esque Crosswicks Journals (such as A Circle of Quiet and The Summer of the Great-Grandmother) to various fiction series for tweens and teens. Indeed, a signature theme in Madeleine’s fiction is the presence of large, multigenerational families all under one roof. 

The Murrys in A Wrinkle in Time are the best-known example, of course. A house like Crosswicks is the setting that bookends the Newbery winner, hosting no fewer than four siblings, multiple pets, classmates, neighbors, alien creatures, and even angels. One of Wrinkle’s sequels, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, depicts the family gathered at the farmhouse on Thanksgiving weekend. Meg Murry (Wrinkle’s teen protagonist) is now a young woman, married to her friend Calvin and pregnant with their first child; while her youngest brother, Charles Wallace, must time-travel across continents and cultures to fulfill a prophetic rune delivered by Meg’s mother-in-law. It’s a big family story par excellence.

An adjacent series known as The Austin Family Chronicles features a similarly large cast (minus the intergalactic beings), which grows with each successive story. In Meet the Austins, the family adds a newly-orphaned child to the household, while in A Ring of Endless Light the grandfather’s terminal illness sets the stage for the extended family’s reckoning with death and dying. Here, too, everyone is under one roof. 

This emphasis on multigenerational relationships is something I’ve always loved about Madeleine’s books. When I was a young child, my nuclear family lived with my grandparents for several years while my father was in graduate school. Their home was a busy hub, filled to the brim, especially at the holidays. Perhaps that’s why, during middle and high school, I was drawn to fictional characters like Meg Murry and Vicky Austin: because my earliest memories were shaped by a household like theirs. 

What I didn’t realize, as a young reader, is just how unusual such stories are.

For one, it’s tough to pitch multigenerational plots to a publishing industry that often segregates audiences by age–e.g., Middle Grade (MG) for ages 8-12, Young Adult (YA) for ages 13-18, etc. My own forthcoming novel Once a Queen, which releases Jan. 30, began as YA in conversations with one publisher, but then morphed into MG when the sales team questioned the target readership. YA books, as a genre, are “issues-driven,” whereas my story features a fourteen-year-old girl named Eva who must navigate generational wounds passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. Eventually my agent pitched the book to a different publisher as “Young Teen” (we coined the term, we think!), which did the trick. However, since “YT” is not an industry category, Once a Queen will release as YA. 

This insistence on pegging audiences by age was particularly frustrating to Madeleine. When asked about her proposed readership for Wrinkle, she protested, “It’s for people! Don’t people read books?” In time, she embraced the role of children’s author by claiming, “If a book will be too difficult for adults, then you write it for children”–which was her way of both affirming young people and critiquing the industry that forced her to choose.

Another challenge is that it’s hard not to engage MG/YA stories from the perspective of the adult characters. After all, as adults ourselves, the grownups are the ones to whom we relate best. And yet, they’re often unreliable participants in the child’s world, creating expectations the child can’t meet and/or vice versa. While writing Once a Queen, for instance, I had to continuously ask myself, How is Eva feeling right now? What does she need? I tried to keep in mind Madeleine’s statement, “I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be…” 

Yet another challenge to big family stories is this: The more one adds siblings, grownups, friends, neighbors, and side characters, the tougher it is to keep everyone’s unique personhood at play. This is as true in real life as in fiction! I’m currently writing the sequel to Once a Queen, featuring the four siblings of Eva’s best friend, Frankie–plus a host of local villagers and an entire cast from a magical world. The deeper I get, the harder it is to keep everyone from becoming flattened tropes and plot devices. How will I bring all these relational conflicts to a satisfying conclusion? Many of us might ask the same while sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner.

I’m thankful that Madeleine gave us glimpses of how compelling intergenerational relationships can be. Teens aren’t just interested in contemporary “issues”: they also negotiate complex, multifaceted family relationships on a daily basis. They inhabit crowded stories in real life. Thanksgiving, in particular, is the annual backdrop for much of the stresses, challenges, and overall drama that shapes households, for better or worse. 

While we might not live in places like Crosswicks, stories that echo family realities can give all of us–young and old alike–tools for navigating those spaces with creativity and grace.

 

Sarah Arthur is the award-winning author of numerous books, including A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L’Engle. Her YA novel Once a Queen debuts Jan. 30, 2024 from Waterbrook/Penguin Random House, which is offering exclusive perks for those who preorder.  Learn how to download Ch. 1-3, plus a printable journal full of creativity prompts, quotes, and original sketches, at www.saraharthur.com.

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Guest Blog Post: Madeleine’s biographer on telling family stories

by Abigail Santamaria

“Tell me a story, Mother…” Madeleine begged many mornings of her childhood, climbing into her parents’ bed before breakfast. Goldilocks and nursery rhymes didn’t interest her—she wanted stories about the Madeleines who came before. The great-grandmother after whom she was named—Madeleine Saunders L’Engle, who died the year before her namesake was born—had danced at the Spanish royal court as a teenager in the 1840s alongside Queen Isabella II and Countess Eugenie (future Empress of France, wife of Napoleon III); later, she served waffles to Robert E. Lee in an adobe hut at Fort Mason, Texas, on the eve of the Civil War. The name “Madeleine L’Engle” was an apt inheritance for a child who would grow to think in far-flung plot lines. 

There were other stories, too, about other ancestors who anchored her to a continuum. As Madeleine’s biographer, I’ve read them all. Madeleine’s family tree flowered opulently, lush with lore and Americana, in all its triumphs and sins: Old World origin stories, one-way voyages across the Atlantic, a fateful shipwreck, colonialism, slavery, Revolutionary and Civil wars among smaller scuffles, westward pioneering, and American bootstraps prosperity.

The tales were passed down to Madeleine’s mother primarily through unpublished memoirs written to preserve the family’s history—contemporaneous accounts written by ordinary people. To name just a few: “Notes of My Family and Recollections of My Early Life, Printed for the Use of My Children Only,” by Susan L’Engle (Madeleine’s great-great grandmother), December 1887; “William Johnson L’Engle, MD, (Madeleine’s great-grandfather), by his daughter, Lina L’Engle Barnett, circa 1920; and an untitled 1914 memoir by her grandfather, Bion Hall Barnett, detailing his childhood on the Kansas prairie.  

As Madeleine grew up, these texts filling the deep well from which she drew her identity and literary inspiration. In her Reconstruction-era novel The Other Side of the Sun–dedicated to the Madeleine after whom she was named–she named characters after her great-great grandmothers, Anna and Leonis (whose full name was Marie Madeleine Leonis L’Engle). The terrible fire in Ilsa, and the scene in which characters frantically slash treasured paintings from their frames to save them from the flames, comes straight from a relative’s account of the Great Jacksonville Fire of 1901. And, of course, one of her own four memoirs, The Summer of the Great Grandmother, draws on anecdotes from forebears’ manuscripts in an effort to make sense of herself by analyzing and organizing her heritage.

In 1953, Madeleine’s mother followed suit, engaging a woman named Margaret West to write her memoir, “Young in the Eighties: Remembrances of my Childhood.” (That’s the 1880s.) Her preface reads: 

To my very dear grandchildren,

From the time your mother was old enough to want me to tell her stories other than Goldylocks [sic] and the Three Bears, her favorites were “When Mother Was a Little Girl.” I realize that my childhood was passed in an era which in its simplicity must seem almost incomprehensible to you—no automobiles, airplanes, radios, moving pictures or televisions. So now, with the help of my good friend Margaret West, without whose encouragement I would never have written these few notes, I am ‘summoning up remembrances of things past,’ hoping you will be interested in ‘When Grandma Was a Little Girl.’

I’ve played the role of Margaret West for many people over the past seven years. Like Madeleine’s non-famous ancestors, my clients understand that everyone’s life story—not just celebrities’—is worth telling for the sake of posterity, catharsis, and self-awareness. I wish I had my forebearers’ memoirs of life during the Civil War, but they may have assumed that their lives weren’t interesting enough. After all, everyone of their generation lived through the Civil War, just as all of us lived through the advent of cyberspace, 9/11, #MeToo. And certainly they didn’t share our 21st century understanding of self-care through self-analysis. 

The Summer of the Great Grandmother wasn’t written as a highlight reel of illustrious family history. Madeleine was grappling with how she came to be herself. The Robert E. Lee waffles story didn’t make the cut; instead, she included an anecdote about her grandfather, Bion, nearly losing his leg to gangrene as a child after a whittling accident in Kansas. She chose it because the story illustrated the “measure of courage—and stubbornness” she hoped she inherited from him. “My forebears have bequeathed to me the basic structure of my own particular pattern, both in my cells and in the underwater areas of my imagination,” she explained.

Writing your story—either on your own or “as told to” a professional like me—is an opportunity to claim agency over your rich, complex, fraught history—and to understand your present by examining your past. When your future generations climb into their parents’ beds and ask for family stories, what will your descendants tell them? 

 

Abigail Santamaria

Abigail Santamaria is co-founder of  Biography by Design, a boutique business specializing in helping individuals, families and corporations tell their stories in a variety of written formats: book-length memoirs, website narratives, coffee table books, and more. She is a professional biographer of famous subjects, but also believes that everyone has a story worth telling. With her esteemed colleague, Kate Buford, she has extended her skills of interviewing, researching and writing to the broader population. Abby and Kate have been hired to document the lives of parents and grandparents; to write histories of multi-generational family businesses for milestone anniversaries; and to work with individuals who, like Madeleine, are driven by a need to make sense of their lives. (You can find a selected list of their projects here.) Abby is the author of Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis, and has written about lives for “The New York Times,” “Vanity Fair,” “Christianity Today,” and other publications.

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Guest blog post: The Practical and Transformative Act of Making a Quilt

by J. A. Nielsen

On a cold day in winter, there is nothing I’d rather do than wrap up in a warm quilt with a good book. Maybe a cup of tea. Perhaps that is why I first connected with “Meg Murry” so strongly. In the first lines of A Wrinkle in Time, when the storm outside her windows rages on, she grabs an old quilt.

The brass bed in the attic bedroom at Crosswicks.

Never did I imagine that I would one day be piecing a quilt for “Meg’s bedroom”—or at least the attic bedroom at Crosswicks that inspired Madeleine’s beloved character.

Let’s be clear. It all started as a bit of joke during a webcast from the attic at Crosswicks. And I suggested that the room was missing a quilt! Charlotte and Lena—Madeleine’s own granddaughters, who knew Crosswicks as well as their own homes—asked if I made quilts. Up to that point, we’d only talked about our creative works within the confines of our shared interests—writing. But during the spring of 2020, I was spending much more time with my sewing machine making fabric masks than I was with my laptop. I imagined I could pull some of my collected fabrics and send them a small quilt—something simple in between the practical mask-making. What has resulted became much bigger and took much longer to deliver in person than we imagined. It has also been a great honor.

Madeleine’s dress from which the quilt was made.

Soon after that podcast, a box arrived from Connecticut, having crossed our wide continent to land at my front porch in the Pacific Northwest. Inside was a hand-sewn, vintage tunic-style dress with swirls of bright color and grand floral patterns—purple, turquoise, green, and red outlined on a background of crisp white and black. It was begging to be made into something new.

And yet I balked. Simply pulling the dress from the box felt like a sacred act. And taking a seam ripper to the collar—not to mention scissors—felt like sacrilege.

But I thought of Madeleine. And I thought of what she may have to say about making her dress into a thing to be worshipped. She had some strong words about idols. She was also a New Yorker who transplanted her family and learned how to do life in a rural farmhouse. Which meant she knew when it was time to be practical and quilts are a decidedly practical craft.

Creating a quilt is a strange combination of tearing apart and piecing together. It is using and re-using fabrics, so that nothing is wasted or becomes forgotten in the back of a closet. It’s taking something old, maybe even something beloved, combining with new elements and re-fashioning it, so that the result is a new creation. And in that way, quilts are familiar. They provide warmth, both in a literal sense and from the embrace of memory interwoven into the layers.

The lessons I have learned about quilt-making—spoken and unspoken—come from generations of women in my family, many of whom had transplant experiences of their own, where they learned to do life in a new and bewildering place, often facing practical challenges themselves. And they were all whispering to me to get over myself, embrace this lovely invitation—and get to work. 

So, I started sketching. When I could go back into fabric shops in person, I took a piece of that collar with me and held it alongside dozens and dozens of fabrics, hand dyed batiks, designer makes, and novelty prints. I made a couple of masks and sent them to Charlotte.

And we waited for the world to open up.

Like crafting a novel, it took time, more time than any of us expected, and many, many hands went into the creation of the final product. I leaned on my son’s innate artistic eye when selecting fabrics to complement the dress material. My daughter is a steadfast accomplice when it comes to creating anything with textiles—sorting, ironing, and layout. And so many hands tied knots to secure the quilt—students and teachers at the middle school where I am a librarian, my husband who put his surgical skills to work, and dozens of attendees at the Circle of Quiet Writing Retreat this past fall—when we could finally all meet in person again after a two-year delay.

A quilt is not a thing that can be made in isolation. In a Circle of Quiet (1972), Madeleine said that stories “come out of a response to what is happening to us and the world in which we live.” This quilt is like that. Even in the time when I was by myself sketching and cutting and piecing, so many people and stories were there with me. I felt their presence as if they were in the room.

Barbara Braver with the quilt and a cup of tea at Crosswicks.

The quilt on the brass bed in the attic at Crosswicks.

And also, like a book, when I give a quilt away, and send it out into the world, it is with the hope that it will be loved by the people I created it for. That it—the small piece of my heart bound up in stitches—will be used and washed and reused, until the blanket itself grows soft, and the colors are muted. I hope it will provide warmth when the world rages outside, and bring comfort—perhaps so that a reader can enjoy their favorite story, even if the cover has also grown soft and pliable with age.

 

So, thank you to the hands and hearts who helped make this most unique of quilts. Thank you to Charlotte and Lena for entrusting me to lead the effort. And thank you to Madeleine who created “Meg,” the type of girl we can all relate to, who reaches for a quilt on stormy nights.

 

J. A. Neilsen is the author of the YA Fantasy, The Claiming (Fractured Kingdoms, Book 1), and winner of the 2020 Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest for Young Adult literature. She has spent most of her professional life in education—as a therapist, teacher, librarian, and administrator. When not writing, she is most likely playing with her family in the forest, on the water, or in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
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Charles Wadsworth Camp (Madeleine’s father) and World War I

Dear Ones,

Today is Madeleine and Hugh’s wedding anniversary (they were married in 1946), and it is also the pub date of a new book: Charles Wadsworth Camp and World War I: War’s Dark Frame and History of the 305th Field Artillery.

Charles was a journalist, critic, novelist, and playwright, and this new volume is a compilation of his two books on the war, one written as a journalist covering the conflict before the US entered it, and one written as a soldier. It features and introduction by historian and National Guard officer Jonathan D. Bratten and an afterword by Charlotte Jones Voiklis. Bratten’s introduction puts Charles’ journalism and history in context, and describes the formation of the National Army. Charlotte’s afterword is a personal reflection on family history and Charles’ influence on his daughter Madeleine.

This is a first effort at self-publishing, and we hope you like it! The ebook is available now from wherever you get your ebooks: Amazon has special pricing until the release of the print edition which will be April 29 (the day Charles’ battalion arrived back in New York Harbor).

 

From the introduction:

Camp visits Paris, Lorraine, the Marne, Champagne, Flanders, Arras—in short, all the places that the French and British would have liked an American journalist to see in order to inflame US sensibilities concerning the war. He visits coal miners building tunnels under No Man’s Land into the German lines and describes a heart-pounding narrative of life in the British sector, where he dodges artillery shells and then has tea with British officers. His small snapshots of the war are vivid and filled with color. In the end, he keeps bringing his readers back to the same problem: what is the United States doing about all of this?

From the afterword:

My grandmother was a storyteller, and not just in written word but also in conversation. It is how she liked to engage in dialogue with people, offering narratives that invited the listener to imagine they were part of the same story. When I was a child, she told me stories while cooking, gardening, riding the bus, and during quieter moments sitting in her lap or, when I was older, drinking tea. She told stories about her parents and grandparents, as well as more distant relatives, particularly those who settled in north Florida when it still “belonged” to Spain. She left the South for college and only went back for short visits. She always considered herself a New Yorker and always felt that she had escaped the South. While her relationship to her southern roots was full of contradictions and ambivalence, she took pleasure in the stories she chose to tell (and that had been chosen for her, for there were many that had been passed down to her). She continued to tell those stories, not just to her grandchildren, but to her readers, too, keeping their memories alive but also fixed like a doll on a shelf that could be taken down and petted but not played with too roughly. I know there are other stories, too, that are not quite so pretty or proud, more like the shards of glass in the leather box—sharp and full of pain. Not all stories about her own parents and childhood were doll-like. Some of them were alive —shimmering, shifting, escaping her deft narrative skills—and created in me a curiosity and skepticism.

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Guest blog post: The Promise of a Dark Sky

by Bill Dunford

One of the first times I traveled mentally to the stars, it was Madeleine L’Engle who took me there. I was nine years old when I discovered that her skill allowed the flat pages of A Wrinkle in Time to take on a third dimension – then a fourth and a fifth – in order to transport me to Orion’s belt and points beyond.

The universe she showed me was not a safe one. But it was intriguingly complex, in constant motion, and shimmering with unexpected beauty.

I’m privileged to spend a lot of mental time in deep space as an adult as well. I work for the public engagement team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where I help tell the stories of the robotic spacecraft that rove the surface of Mars and buzz by the moons of Jupiter.

But I also explore the sky on my own. I’m lucky enough to live near the salt flats and sagebrush seas of Utah, where the night skies are profoundly dark and brimming with stars. Not a few flecks of light like you might see in the suburbs, but a dizzying snowfall of stars. I venture deep into the desert to photograph the night sky, especially the Milky Way. Out there, you can really see it, stretching from horizon to horizon like a smoky column of vaporized diamonds. The camera sees even more, revealing a vibrant canvas of light, textures, and colors — a surprising number of colors. Electric blues, purples, reds.

Saturn, Jupiter, the Milky Way — and Earth — as seen from the Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area in Utah. Photo by Bill Dunford

I can’t get enough of the night sky. It looks peaceful, but it is not still. It reels with unceasing motion, on time scales ranging from split seconds to eons. Meteors rain down continuously, tons of them per day, usually burning up in the blink of an eye. Watch the stars for even a few minutes against the horizon, and you can see that they’re moving. During the course of a night, the entire set of stars seems to wheel about in a great circle. Over the span of weeks, the planets can be seen wandering against the background constellations. Across centuries, the stars themselves change positions. Over the ages, they flower and die and new generations take their places.

A dark night sky dispels the illusion that the universe is somehow separate from us. That’s where you can see that the Earth is a planet, and that galaxies and comets and black holes are as much a part of Nature as a sunrise – which is nothing but a planet spinning to face its local star.

I was so pleased to learn that the seed of A Wrinkle in Time came more or less directly from the stars. In A Book, Too, Can Be a Star, the Story of Madeleine L’Engle and the Making of A Wrinkle in Time, the luminous new picture book biography by Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Jennifer Adams (full disclosure: Jennifer and I are married), we learn that “in a place called the Painted Desert, with its strange shapes and colors and its big skies scattered with stars, Madeleine had an idea for a new kind of book. It was inspired by sonnets and science and her sense of belonging when she looked at the night sky and listened to the stars sing.”

One of the ideas that most excites me is that this kind of interstellar inspiration is available to anyone, no telescope or camera required.

At least it used to be.

Due to the unceasing rise of light pollution, increasingly few places remain where city lights don’t dim the magnificence of the Milky Way. This map of artificial illumination, based on data from NASA and NOAA satellites, shows just how rare a dark sky has become.


Credit: Falchi et al., Sci. Adv., Jakob Grothe/NPS contractor, Matthew Price/CIRES. More information at https://cires.colorado.edu/artificial-sky

Too much artificial light wastes energy and money, has negative effects on wildlife, and even impacts human health. And while it’s harder to quantify, there’s also the inspiration deficit factor. Too many people have never seen the Milky Way, their own galactic home, with their own eyes, or felt that connection to the natural world that sustains us.

There is good news: the spread of light pollution can be slowed, even rolled back. Doing so does not require draconian lifestyle changes. Steps as simple as replacing blaring, wasteful light fixtures with sensible, cost-saving lighting on homes and business can have a real impact on light levels in a community.

One example is Sun Valley, Idaho. Thanks to simple measures (notice the lamp directs the light down where it’s needed rather than into the sky) people can enjoy a sky that looks like this, near the center of town…in a parking lot.

 

A parking lot not far from the town center in Sun Valley, Idaho. Look at all those stars! Reddish Mars makes an appearance just above the trees as well. Photo by Bill Dunford

 

A good place to learn about light pollution, and how effective its countermeasures can be, is darksky.org

We face bigger environmental challenges than light pollution, of course. Healing climate change and global poverty will require all the bravery, intelligence, anger, and love we can muster. But maybe starting with a directly solvable problem like restoring the night sky will show more and more people that protecting the natural world is necessary…and possible.

Bill Dunford (and Jennifer Adams)

Bill Dunford writes about space and takes pictures of the night sky near his home in Salt Lake City, Utah.  You can see his photos at https://flickr.com/photos/bill_d/
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Madeleine’s Birthday Guest Blog Post: How I Learned to Tesser Well

by Catherine Hand

The following is adapted from Becoming a Warrior by the author and is used with permission.

Madeleine would have been 104 today, and she loved celebrating her birthday! I can’t think of a better birthday gift than to share stories with others about the profound influence A Wrinkle in Time had on my life. From the first time I met Madeleine at the restaurant high atop the World Trade Center in 1979 to the last time I saw her shortly before she died in 2007, we carried on a 25-year long conversation about her beloved book. My hope is that my memoir, Becoming a Warrior: My Journey to Bring A Wrinkle in Time to the Screen, will inspire others to do as Madeleine did and taught me to do — light candles in the darkness. 

The first time I saw her in March 1979 she was standing near the elevator in the lobby of the North Tower at the World Trade Center in New York City. She was taller than I expected and wore flowing layers of colorful clothing. As we headed up to the restaurant Windows on the World, I practically had an out-of-body experience being in the same elevator with her. It was the first time I had ever met with anyone about a possible film option for anything, and I wanted so desperately to succeed in getting her to trust me as the champion for the film. In truth, not just me but Norman Lear as well, one of the most successful producers in Hollywood at the time—and my boss. 

The restaurant had a marvelous view of the Manhattan skyline, but it was so high up! As the maître d’ led us to a table next to a window I asked if we could sit a few feet away since I have a fear of heights, which made Madeleine laugh. As we settled in, she leaned across the table and said with such certainty, “You know, there really is such a thing as a tesseract.” I didn’t know what to say. She sounded so much like Mrs Whatsit, one of the three otherworldly spirits that guide the central characters on their cosmic journey. I never considered that a tesseract—a way to travel in the fifth dimension—existed. It took me four decades to learn that it does, although not in the way I originally thought she meant. 

Of all the conversations we had, one of the most moving took place the day we sat in her workplace at her home in Connecticut, The Tower. She spoke of the rejections she endured trying to get A Wrinkle in Time published. As she paced about the small room her voice became intense, angry, and vulnerable all at once. “Twenty-six times I heard the word no. I wanted to give up and thought I’d never write again. Then I realized I had to write and I took the cover off the typewriter and started a new book.” 

As I watched her, it hit me hard that this woman who had known such success also knew such self-doubt and despair. I swore to myself in that moment that if she could endure that kind of rejection to get the book published, I could do the same to get the movie made. No one knew better than she how difficult it was going to be. 

The great byproduct of my effort was that in convincing others about the merit of the film adaptation I internalized all that the book offers to people at different times in their lives: the joy I felt as a young girl when I first read the book; the inspiration I experienced when I was introduced to the story through Madeleine’s eyes; and the courage I found to face down the grief of my husband’s death. 

Madeleine gave me an autographed copy of A Wrinkle in Time and signed it with “Tesser well and may you land gloriously on Uriel.” I wondered at the time what did she mean by “tesser well?” I have come to understand that tesser well is an encouragement to get in the arena—and learn how to become a warrior against the darkness. Learning from Madeleine that love isn’t what you feel it’s what you do is how I became a warrior.

 

CATHERINE HAND’s career in the entertainment business was launched working for the legendary writer/producer Norman Lear. While pursuing the film adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, Hand relocated to San Francisco where she worked as a development executive, co-owned a boutique production company, and started a family. Widowed suddenly and unexpectedly, Hand moved with her three young children to the DC area and carved out a successful career as communications consultant, including a stint as a political appointee for the Obama administration. In 2018, Catherine Hand was one of the two producers for Disney’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. 

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How IT Captured Camazotz

by Charlotte Jones Voiklis

Dear Ones,

As we approach election day, I remember going with my grandmother to vote for the very first time in New York City 1988. Details are vague, but the memory is tied to a conversation with her about women’s rights: my grandfather had died in 1986, and she had a very hard time wresting control their bank account from the Manufacturers Hanover Trust that was on the NE corner of 106th Street and Broadway (now a shuttered Walgreens).

Although political discussions with her quickly veered from concrete policy to more abstract moral questions — she was not interested in doctrine, whether political or religious — she was a passionate voter. I took her to the polls in 2000, pushing her wheelchair down Broadway.

“It is the ability to choose which makes us human,” she says in Walking on Water, and she meant this in a multitude of ways. The choices we make at the ballot box are included, and our ability to choose will be affected by the outcome of elections.

Camazotz in A Wrinkle in Time is often — and incorrectly — read as a simple allegory for soviet-style communism. While Madeleine was convinced that any *ism* leads to dehumanizing generalities, she knew that totalitarianism (and the specter of Camazotz) lurked under the surface of American democracy. In earlier drafts of A Wrinkle in Time, she included a passage about how democracies might become like Camazotz, a dystopian society, under the control of one brain. She tried to make it work in two different places in the story, but it never quite did and was cut. [you can read a Wall Street Journal article about the cut passage here.]

Meg asks her father how planets can become like Camazotz and he explains that it could be the logical outcome of two things: totalitarianism or democracy. Calvin defines totalitarianism “It’s like Russia under Kruschev. Or Germany and Hitler. Countries under dictatorships. Franco. Mussolini. Castro. Mao.”

Meg asks, “What about countries like ours, ones that aren’t under dictatorships? Democracies?” Her father’s answer: “It’s an equally logical outcome of too much prosperity. Or you could put it that it’s the result of too strong a desire for security.”

Meg balks. “What’s wrong with security? Everyone likes to be all cosy and safe.” “Yes,” he responds. “It’s a most seductive thing,” and later he calls a lust for security “the greatest evil there is.”

[An aside: I am told that in Caitlin Keegan’s “The Illuminated Tarot,” the ten of diamonds represents this choice between security and enjoyment of wealth over risk for something greater. If there are any tarot readers who would like to write about this for the blog, let me know!]

Madeleine warned against the impulse to want to feel safe in religious practice or theological thinking. Churches, she says in A Circle of Quiet, have become “buildings that are a safe place to escape the awful demands of God.” “The Word,” she reminds us is And It Was Good, “is not a pet.”

I (briefly) wrote recently about Madeleine’s experience with censorship and the current spate of book bans, curriculum changes, and historical revisionism under the guise of “parental rights” (which parents?). Two years ago I wrote (even more briefly, on twitter) about this lost passage from early drafts of Wrinkle and said: “What we’re seeing now is the powerful scared of losing their position and willing to protect white supremacy at the cost of our democracy. We really are on the knife’s edge. Take care of yourselves, dear ones, and keep fighting.” I think that’s even more true now, and add this:

“Only a fool is not afraid,” Mrs Whatsit told him. “Now go.”

Please vote!

Photo by Don Hicks.

Charlotte Jones Voiklis is Madeleine L’Engle’s granddaughter and executor of her estate. She is the co-author with Jennifer Adams of A Book, Too, Can Be a Star (October 2022), a picture book biography illustrated by Adelina Lirius; and, with her sister, Léna Roy, of Becoming Madeleine (2018), a biography for middle grade readers. Charlotte has also written and spoken of her grandmother’s work to a variety of audiences. With a PhD in Comparative Literature, Charlotte’s work experience includes teaching and grant making. She is a volunteer mediator.

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Musical Adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time in Development

by Charlotte Jones Voiklis

Dear Ones,

I’m very excited to share the news that a musical adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time is in the works! There have been numerous adaptations of the novel, including a movie, a television series, an opera, and several theatrical versions, six (!) of which are available to schools and community theaters to produce. Although Madeleine always knew she wanted to be a writer, her first professional ambition was to be a playwright, and she worked in the theater in her twenties and met and married her husband Hugh Franklin there.

I love adaptation: I think there is so much interesting challenge and learning that happens when thinking about how to translate one medium into another. Adding the layers of music and live theater to A Wrinkle in Time allows for activating a wide spectrum of emotional, intellectual, and moral responses to the story. And the theater artists (Heather Christian, Lauren Yee, and Lee Sunday Evans) who make up the creative team are innovative yet grounded and playful yet disciplined. They are a spectacular trio. You can read more about Heather Christian’s recent piece, Oratorio for Living Things, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, here, and find other streaming pieces on her site to get a sense of her beautiful music.

The production team is also impressive. Aaron Glick and Diana DiMenna/PlateSpinner Productions have a wealth of experience and producing track record, and I will also be “in the room.” A musical takes a long time to write and workshop and produce, but it is progressing well (we are in a two-week workshop with a full cast as I write this). I encourage you to sign up for updates from the development site.

You can read the full press release here.

Tesser well!

Charlotte

Photo by Don Hicks.

Charlotte Jones Voiklis is Madeleine L’Engle’s granddaughter and executor of her estate. She is the co-author with Jennifer Adams of A Book, Too, Can Be a Star (October 2022), a picture book biography illustrated by Adelina Lirius; and, with her sister, Léna Roy, of Becoming Madeleine (2018), a biography for middle grade readers. Charlotte has also written and spoken of her grandmother’s work to a variety of audiences. With a PhD in Comparative Literature, Charlotte’s work experience includes teaching and grant making. She is a volunteer mediator and serves on the board of her local domestic violence and sexual assault organization

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A brief word on Madeleine, Censorship, and White Christian Nationalism

by Charlotte Jones Voiklis

Dear Ones,

Today marks the beginning of Banned Books Week, and so it feels appropriate to share some thoughts that have been brewing about Madeleine and this topic  for some time. According to the American Library Association, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, A Wrinkle in Time was one of the most challenged books in the United States. Driven by fundamentalist Christians who reviled her less literal interpretation of the Bible and her vision of a God that welcomes questions and calls us all to love each other no matter our professed faith or categories of identity, the violence and vehemence of the book challenges shook her. Her response was to lean into what she felt was a calling to challenge those forces back. She continued speak at churches and Christian colleges where she wasn’t always welcomed with warm hospitality. (Sarah Arthur has written eloquently about what Madeleine’s message and presence meant to and did for a generation of students and seekers in those worlds in her book A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L’Engle).

Madeleine Preaching ca. 1990. Location, photographer unknown

The recent wave (tsunami, really) of organized book challenges is again driven by conservative, white Christians who are threatened by ideas and by visions of a world that includes people that don’t believe as they do. Most of the individual books challenged in 2021 and 2022 have dealt with LGBTQIA+ content, and there has been a separate but related push to censor and limit what can be taught in public schools and elsewhere about the cruel history of slavery and ongoing racism in this country.  A Wrinkle in Time is no longer one of the most challenged books, but while it was, Madeleine had some responses that I think might be helpful to consider in our current moment.

In 1983 Madeleine gave a talk at the Library of Congress called “Dare to be Creative.” (The Marginalian has a great essay about it), In it she says:

We all practice some form of censorship. I practiced it simply by the books I had in the house when my children were little. If I am given a budget of $500 I will be practicing a form of censorship by the books I choose to buy with that limited amount of money, and the books I choose not to buy. But nobody said we were not allowed to have points of view. The exercise of personal taste is not the same thing as imposing personal opinion.

My mother and her siblings can attest to the fact that there were certain kinds of books that were not allowed in the house (comic books!), and I have a strong and stinging memory of my grandmother being disappointed (to put it mildly) when she learned that I had written about Flowers in the Attic for an eighth grade book report.  But again, “the exercise of personal taste is not the same thing as imposing a personal opinion.” My mother gorged on comics at friends’ houses, with no argument from her parents. What could they say?

Madeleine was horrified at institutions and movements that try to limit free will and choice, that have such a small-minded vision of God that they are afraid of questions and demand certainty. “It is the ability to choose which makes us human,” Madeleine wrote in Walking on Water. People must be free to choose, even if they sometimes choose badly or wrongly. Others cannot make those choices for someone else. It is bad enough when individuals or institutions vigilantly guard their borders: “When we censor out most of the world in order to protect our own little version of it, we are creating a kind of hell.” (Penguins and Golden Calves); it is worse when that little version becomes the basis for violently imposing on others. A growing field of scholars like Kristen DuMez, Philip Gorski, Samuel Hall, and Andrew Whitehead have begun to document and expose a movement that seeks to impose through legislation and judicial rulings a very narrow vision of the United States as a theocracy (White Christian Nationalism), where choices of all kinds are proscribed and state violence as well as vigilantism are enshrined in law.

If Madeleine were alive today, what would she be doing? Where would she be speaking? To whom would she be called to minister? I’m not exactly sure, but I do know that she is still at work through her books that continue to be read, and that she is always on the side of more curiosity, more compassion, more choice.

 

Photo by Don Hicks.

Charlotte Jones Voiklis is Madeleine L’Engle’s granddaughter and executor of her estate. She is the co-author with Jennifer Adams of A Book, Too, Can Be a Star (October 2022), a picture book biography illustrated by Adelina Lirius; and, with her sister, Léna Roy, of Becoming Madeleine (2018), a biography for middle grade readers. Charlotte has also written and spoken of her grandmother’s work to a variety of audiences. With a PhD in Comparative Literature, Charlotte’s work experience includes teaching and grant making. She is a volunteer mediator.

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Guest Blog Post: If You’re Paying Attention

by Jessica Kantrowitz

Well, dear ones, 2022 has been a bit of a year already, hasn’t it? I’m not going to write, here, about all the things that have been going on, in the world, in America, in my own small circles, but I will say that it is a lot. I don’t know anyone who isn’t reeling from the steady stream of bad news—epidemiologically, politically, and otherwise. It’s overwhelming and exhausting. Many of us are burnt out, or well beyond burnt out. Many of us are angry and outraged. Anger is an entirely rational, appropriate response to so many of the things happening in the world right now.

But it’s not the only appropriate response.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably heard the expression, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.” It’s so ubiquitous these days that my Googling attempts to find the original author just came up with pages and pages of unattributed quotes. (But let me know if you know!) And if you’re here at the Madeleine L’Engle blog, you’re most likely familiar with the quote from A Wrinkle in Time:

“Stay angry, little Meg,” Mrs Whatsit whispered. “You will need all your anger now.”

But is anger the only byproduct of paying attention? I don’t know. I think paying attention can trigger all manner of emotions and reactions. Fear, overwhelm, sorrow, hopelessness—even joy and hope. Anger is a useful motivator, sure, but all our feelings tell us something, give us insight into ourselves and the world around us.

If you feel angry—that’s appropriate! If you feel despair—that makes sense. If you feel joy because you’ve worked so hard to heal your mental health and are finally in a good place, and cannot let yourself be pulled into that pit again, even by national crisis—that’s valid. Joyful people can work for change, too. Sad people can make a difference in the world. Angry people can use their anger as fuel—but there are other fuels, too.

When Mrs. Whatsit told Meg to stay angry, that was because that was Meg’s particular weakness-turned-strength. It was what she told Meg the first time Meg went to Camazotz, and it was in contrast to what her principal, Mr. Jenkins had said to her when she got in trouble at school:

“Try to be a little bit less antagonistic. Maybe your work would improve if you were a little more tractable.

If you’re not familiar with the somewhat old-fashioned word tractable it means, “easy to control or influence.” This, Mr. Jenkins said, would help her get along at school, but it was the exact opposite of what she would need to resist the mind control of the evil being IT. Meg’s anger and intractability were seen, by her teachers and herself, as faults, but Mrs Whatsit gave them back to her as a gift:

“Meg, I give you your faults.”

“My faults!” Meg cried.

“Your faults.”

Meg’s anger, her antagonism, her intractability (all things, incidentally, that women are told much more frequently than men are their faults) were her gifts.

But those were the gifts given to Meg, not to Calvin, or Charles Wallace, or to Mrs. Murry or Mr. Murry, or the twins. Calvin was given his ability to communicate, and Charles Wallace was given the resilience of his childhood. Mr. and Mrs. Murry, and the twins Sandy and Dennys weren’t explicitly given gifts, but we see them play out in the series: Mrs. Murry’s quiet patience and trust, Mr. Murry’s willingness to risk his life for what he believes in, Sandy and Dennys’ loyalty and dependability. You and I might be given something else, a particular talent, or hard-won wisdom, or a different fault-turned-strength. Anger at injustice is a gift, but there are other gifts. Perhaps the most important thing we can do is acknowledge our feelings without judgment, to let them tell us what they’re there to tell us.

Author and therapist Krispin Mayfield recently tweeted:

“In unhealthy families, certain emotions aren’t allowed. We have to choose between connection with our parent OR expressing anger, sadness, worry (whatever emotion isn’t allowed). The same often happens in churches, & with good reason, we end up believing the same about God.”

But what if all emotions were allowed, and even welcomed, in our families, in our communities, in our churches and mosques and synagogues? What if our weaknesses were our strengths, both individually and because we supported and complemented each other in community?

When Meg goes to face IT for the second time, to save her beloved little brother, Mrs Who quotes the King James Bible (1 Corinthians, though she doesn’t give a reference):

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.

The more we pay attention in our lives, the more we realize this to be true, that the weak things have strength the mighty things don’t understand, that when we look for where God is moving, where the energy and hope is, we have to look among the marginalized, among the despised, among those left out and forgotten, and not among those with power and privilege. We pay attention and we get angry, or we pay attention and we get sad, or we pay attention and we feel numb and overwhelmed, or we pay attention and we compartmentalize and allow ourselves to be renewed by hope and joy. We pay attention, and we let ourselves feel what we feel.

And then, angry, scared, grieving, joyful, overwhelmed, hope-filled, despairing, intractable—we work together to make the world a better place.

 

Jessica Kantrowitz

Jessica Kantrowitz is the author of several books of prose and poetry, including The Long Night and 365 Days of Peace, and the creator of the Finding Your Voice Writing Workshop (next one starts October 7!). She lives in Boston in the fall (and in the other seasons, too, but fall’s her favorite). More at www.jessicakantrowitz.com.

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