Madeleine L'Engle: Herself - Reflections on a Writing Life plus a little Annie Lennox

I'm already getting ahead of myself on this blog, as this is Sunday and I think I finished this book on Friday (or perhaps even Thursday) - but I haven't had a chance to write about it yet.
Note that from updates on the Madeleine L'Engle site I saw that she is writing a book about Meg from A Wrinkle in Time in her fifties, but it seems unlikely this will be published, as it was already in progress in 1998.

This book is a great source of inspiration to me as a person and as someone who might be trying to write fiction someday. Madeleine L'Engle to me is one of the wisest people in the world. She is the author of the Time Trilogy (Wrinkle in Time, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Wind in the Door) and many other fiction and non-fiction books, including Meet the Austins, A House Like a Lotus, and a set of autobiographical journals called The Crosswicks Journals - my favorite is The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, because she talks about the summer when her mother died and how hard it was (taking care of her, watching her decline, and so on).

In this book, Carole F. Chase has compiled several short essays/commentary from Madeleine on writing, faith, her books, and other topics, into ten sections.
Some of this material is from the Crosswicks Journals and other books mentioned above, and some is from workshops she gave in the seventies and more recently (these are all in the L'Engle collection of Boswell Library at Wheaton College.)

Reading these words is like sitting and having coffee with Madeleine right when your inspiration or faith that you can go on is lagging. It's really reassuring to read that she also needs to write every day (just like a pianist needs to practice every day) and to be reminded of the 2.5 years that A Wrinkle in Time spent going around to various publishers before it was finally published.
I just had lunch with a friend of mine who is working on a science fiction novel and much of Madeleine's comments and thoughts would be helpful to him - will send him the link as I bet he will just want to buy it.

Madeleine L'Engle and Annie Lennox
I am also a big fan of Annie Lennox, especially her new album "Bare" - and I was listening to this at the same time as reading this book. It's like having the combined wisdom of two wise older women (attention I always crave since I don't have a mother.)
The below song seems to fit into this inspirational theme even though the song and most of the songs on its album seem a little depressing:

Annie Lennox's Pavement Cracks
portions: (this song looks fairly depressing but notice she is "walking just the same" even though all this stuff is happening):

The city streets are wet again with rain.
But I'm walking just the same.
The skies turned to the usual grey.
When you turn to face the day

oh and love don't show up in the pavement cracks
all my watercolors fade to black
I'm going nowhere and I'm ten steps back
all my dreams are falling fast

where is my comfort zone?
a simple place to call my own?
cause everything I want to be
comes crashing down on me

Also I found this commentary from Annie herself on Pavement Cracks - I'm kind of happy about this as it seems to confirm my feeling about the song (that it is not really as depressing as it seems!)

Found at

Pavement Cracks: "Children have such an instinctive way of reacting to the world. They skip because they're happy. They delight in the moment - in the macaroni on the plate before them. We lose that freshness as we grow. Life knocks it out of us. Yet still, there's this miraculous capacity for new growth. In my darkest times, I'd walk with my head bowed, seeing only the cracks in the pavement slabs. But then I'd notice the weeds pushing up through them, like a metaphor for hope. All is not desperate. Change comes, even when it seems it won't."