Saturday, September 08, 2007

Madeline L'Engle 1918 - 2007

A Wrinkle in Time

Who taught you to ask the big questions? Who showed you that there was fantasy within your reality and to cherish it? For me, that was Madeline L'Engle.

Somewhere in second or third grade, as religion began it's slow collapse around my questioning mind, I found an unexpected joy and solace in the stories of Meg Murry, Charles Wallace, and the twins. True, it was escapism in fiction, but was more speculative fiction - a base in the real world - than it was science fiction or fantasy. Madeline L'Engle played with time, manipulated science, and wrote about multiple dimensions long before I ever heard about string theory (still don't have a firm grasp on that one). I began questioning my world, my universe, in a creative and imaginative way, and I'll never forget all the time I spent attempting to visualize a tesseract.

I owe a lot of my own imaginative process and the very seedling of my writing to Madeline L'Engle. She will be missed.

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