Story Frame 8 – Made of Stars: on location with Madeleine L’Engle

“We are all made of the same stuff as stars, you know,” said author Madeleine L’Engle calmly.

Her words caught me by surprise. Although the stars, the sky and the universe are all characters in a number of Ms. L’Engle’s books – especially A Wrinkle in Time, her world-famous fantasy fiction novel from the early 1960s – I’d never heard this before.

Distracted as I was by the surreal astonishment of finding myself sitting in her kitchen, listening to her talk to us over a bowl of soup her son had made from scratch – that comment still caught my attention.

How had this come about? In the weeks after saying ‘yes’ to Martin when he asked if I’d like to work on storyline development for his latest documentary about the intersection of creativity and religion, I’d segued from our initial meetings over coffee in my kitchen to having a little workspace of my very own at the documentary workshop, along with a small but regular paycheck.

And when he asked if I’d like to go with the crew on a road trip to Litchfield, Connecticut to interview author Madeleine L’Engle for his documentary Creativity: Touching the Divine, I said yes again, beyond excited at the opportunity to meet the legendary author of A Wrinkle in Time.

In the days leading up to the interview, I re-read A Wrinkle in Time, my head filled with the tingling anticipation of getting to meet one of the most magical and revered authors from my childhood.

The morning of our departure, the crew piled into a large white rented van – Martin; Bertch, our gaffer and lighting guy; Tim the shooter; and Ellen, the woman who’d helped with a grant to fund the documentary and who was every bit as smitten as me with Madeleine L’Engle’s stories. In addition to the five of us, there was also all the production gear, which occupied the space of several passengers. Sister Gretchen, the nun from New Orleans, stayed behind to run the documentary workshop in our absence.

After a day on the road in the cramped production van, we pulled into Litchfield late in the afternoon the day before the shoot, checked into the Tollgate Hill Inn, then headed over to the on-site tavern to shake off the road over a few cold beers and grab some dinner.

The following morning, we made our way slowly down the long road that leads to the old farmhouse Madeleine L’Engle and her husband bought and renovated back in the early 1950s. As we rounded a corner, suddenly there she was, standing at the open door, smiling and ready to welcome us in.

We parked and one by one, tumbled out of the van to meet her. Nearly five feet ten inches tall with closely cropped hair, a wide-collared flowing white blouse and dark skirt, Ms. L’Engle towered over me. Her half-moon dark eyes and arched eyebrows had a slightly surprised but friendly look. She and Martin discussed possible locations for the interview while the rest of us unloaded the gear.

After considering the options, Martin chose the attic – a small space up under the eaves where Ms. L’Engle did most of her writing. Shelves crammed with books lodged in all positions were built into the small walls. Flowered curtains hung from the windows. An L-shaped workspace was cluttered with nests of papers and an old typewriter. An old keyboard was lodged behind them. This was the place where all the magic of her many stories had been concocted, the secret space where her writings went from her mind onto the paper.

We tucked, wedged, and squeezed ourselves along with the lighting set ups, the audio recording gear, the tripod and video camera into the available nooks and crannies. With no other space available, I sat cross-legged on the floor, notepad in my lap, waiting to write down whatever she shared with us.

Martin posed the questions he’d prepared and Ms. L’Engle responded easily and openly. She’d done this many times before.

“I’ve been a writer ever since I could hold a pencil!” she said when he asked her how it all began. She wrote her first story, she told us, when she was just five years old. The only child of two loving but neglectful artists, she’d had a lonely and awkward childhood but grew up with an appreciation for creative responses to life’s confusion, especially writing.

“Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for that’s where we find truth,” she told us. “Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.”

Madeleine L’Engle was a devout Episcopalian. She explained how she loved to interweave faith with science and the universe throughout her writings, creating her own unique way of looking at the world.

“Some things have to be believed to be seen!” she quipped.

When she wrote A Wrinkle in Time, the story of a young girl and her younger brother transported through time and space in search of their father, a gifted scientist, she knew she had something special.

The two children are aided in their quest by the whimsical trio of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which – all of whom conspire to help rescue the children’s father from the evil forces holding him prisoner on another planet. Described as a mix of Christian-inspired themes, loosely conceived quantum physics, populated with supernatural characters and told in her own quirky writing style, A Wrinkle in Time was turned down by publishers twenty-six times.

With each rejection letter, Ms. L’Engle told us, she took her frustrations out at night, when she walked her dogs down her long farmhouse driveway.

“Why, God?!” she told us she would shout up to the stars. “You know it’s good! Why can’t anyone else see that?!”

Imagine the audacity of telling God that He knows something you wrote is good, I thought – that’s confidence.

“You have to write the book that wants to be written,” she said. “And if the book is too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

For children!?

In her writings, Ms. L’Engle drew upon Albert Ein­stein’s theory of relativity, German theoretical physicist Max Planck, who’d won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of energy quanta, and Werner Heisenberg, one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. Their writings, she said, reminded her of staring into the night sky as a child which had given her an appreciation for the vastness of the universe.

But she knew her audience. She also knew how well a central theme of many of her novels – that it’s okay to be different, beneficial, even – would resonate with many.

Eventually, someone did take a chance on A Wrinkle in Time and published it. It went on to win the Newbery Medal for Excellence in Children’s Literature – among other awards – and has since sold more than six million copies worldwide.

At the end of the interview, Ms. L’Engle invited all of us to join her for a bowl of soup down in her big old farmhouse kitchen. With the camera and gear packed away, the conversation became more folksy and casual. She told us she used to show her husband early drafts of her books and his response would often be a list of the small changes he thought needed to be made.

“Don’t tell me the mistakes!” she told us she would shout at him in frustration.
“First, tell me it’s good! After that, then you can tell me what’s wrong. But first, tell me it’s good!”

That this hugely successful author admitted her husband’s approval was important to her was charmingly revealing. As the crew shuffled out to begin loading the gear back into the van, I lingered in the kitchen for a few minutes to ask if she had any advice for a shy but aspiring writer.

“I do have advice for people who want to write,” she said. “There are three things that are important. First, you need to keep an honest journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Write what you think about life, and what you think about everything. Second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour — write, write, write!”

I resolved to do all three. Martin took a photograph of us standing together in her kitchen. In the photo, Ms. L’Engle towers over me, beaming. I’m standing beside her, looking shyly excited, wearing Martin’s jacket draped over my shoulders as I hadn’t dressed warmly enough for the cool Connecticut weather. I still have that photo.

I left Litchfield with a head filled with more thoughts about writing than of filmmaking, while also appreciating that I would not have had this opportunity to visit with Madeline L’Engle were it not for this documentary.

As we made our way south on the highway for the long journey home, my thoughts once again played with the tenuous chain of what-if’s that had brought me to this moment: my mother giving me a copy of A Wrinkle in Time as a child … my mother taking me into New York City to see the Nutcracker … if I hadn’t wanted my own daughter to see the Nutcracker … if the PBS station hadn’t been in pledge that evening … if I hadn’t picked up the phone the following morning to call them about it… and if I hadn’t spoken to the stranger with nice shoes at the local town hall meeting – well, this magical afternoon would have happened for somebody else, not me.

But this new career was only just getting started and the road ahead would soon be filled with potholes and plot twists I could not have imagined.

Don’t try to comprehend with your mind. Our minds are very limited.
Use your intuition.”
Madeline L’Engle (1918-2007)

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