Madeleine L'Engle: Jerome Stueart's Appreciation

An eloquent and heartfelt appreciation by Jerome Stueart, a writer published in Tesseracts, Redivider, and Strange Horizons, among others. Stueart was a Clarion student this summer and this piece originally appeared on his class's google distribution list...One of my very favorite authors died today at 89. She was the author of A Wrinkle in Time, and hundreds of YA novels that I read growing up. I gelled with her characters a lot--these misfits who loved science; her books were always riddled with elements of faith, too.Unfortunately, those got her in tussles with the very people she was trying to help--evangelical Christians, who put A Wrinkle in Time on the banned book list for its use of a "medium" and for saying that Buddha was on the same level as Jesus. She also (gasp!) used witches as her main characters, who of course turned out to be both angels and centaurs...I thought she was valiant. I got a chance to meet her and was interviewing her for my local newsletter when she found out I was a Southern Baptist. She wouldn't do the interview. When her friends vouched for me, that I was a big fan and would not question her faith she let me do the interview. She called Wrinkle "her response to the German theologians" and by that I don't know what she meant, but the book has such strong elements of faith-outside-the-box that it's inspiring in a whole different direction. Rather than depend on dogma, it allows fantasy to expand the possibilities of God, the Universe, and everything.She also meant the book for the adult market. No one would buy it.She finally placed it with Farrar Straus and Giroux as a YA novel and the book garnered a Newberry, as well as other awards, and is cited time and again as one book that children remember from when they were growing up. It had a strong female protagonist whose faults were her strengths.I thought the world of this woman. She will be sorely missed by more than just me.-Jerome Stueart