Every day after lunch, we sat in our fifth grade classroom and listened as Mrs. Jansta read a novel for fifteen minutes. The room was warm and smelled of grass and sour milk. I put my head down on my desk. Beside me, Kristen Hernandez snored. But I remained wide awake, riveted by books like
The Mouse and the Motorcycle,
Where the Red Fern Grows, and especially by
A Wrinkle in Time.
In the late 1960s, Madeleine L'Engle struggled to interest editors in her book. Finally, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published it and it promptly won the Newbery. Hers was a strange novel of child protagonists who grappled busily with morality and physics. I couldn't grasp her "tesseract" concept and how I might use it to transcend space and time to propel myself off to the beach, but I understood her theme perfectly. Don't conform. Celebrate joy and love and originality. Otherwise, you'll end up in a glass case like the terrifying disembodied brain at the end of her novel.
Throughout adolescence, I read her other books ? the rest of the Wrinkle trilogy and obscure young adult novels she penned before her fame. From the latter, I learned to love Holst's The Planets, Bach's cantatas, El Greco and Shakespeare. My favorite of her books, A Ring of Endless Light, inspired a letter on my finest unicorn stationery. Dear Ms. L'Engle, I penned carefully. Thank you for your book. I want to be a writer and work with dolphins like Vicky does in your novel. Love, Melissa Hart.
She wrote back.
Dear Melissa, thank you for the lovely unicorn paper. I'm sure that if you put your mind to it, you will work with dolphins. And you will become a writer. Love, Madeleine
I pasted her letter into my scrapbook. In college, I referenced it whenever my short stories met with particularly harsh criticism or I discovered halfway through writing a novel that it had no plot. I continued to read her books ? an adult novel set during Southern reconstruction, the love story rich with history and civil rights. I discovered her autobiographical works explaining how she came to be a writer, and what an author's life looks like when the wordsmith is also a wife and mother with a plethora of pets.
Spirituality informs all of L'Engle's books, but I suspect that she, like her characters, had a horror of the word "pious." To the people who frequented her books, religion meant something other than showing up at church once a week. It meant living a life infused with gratitude.
And so when my memoir, The Assault of Laughter, was published, I contacted her again. Dear Madeleine, I wrote. I wanted to let you know how much your books meant to me, and to tell you that you were right. I put my mind to it and I did become a writer. But I don't work with dolphins. I'm a wildlife rehabilitator, and I work with owls.
Close enough. Her letter arrived within weeks, typed by her secretary, but kind and warm. Thank you for your lovely letter. I'm so happy for you, Melissa.
Now, I receive fan mail myself. Sometimes it's from people who have read Assault. Sometimes it's from those who have come across my essays in a magazine or newspaper. Then I remember Madeleine, and regardless of how much work I have to do ? or how focused I am on my new novel or my teaching or the owls ? I always write back.