Midst the Chaos of the last few weeks – laying out chapbooks, re-writing a panel presentation, prepping for 2 AWP readings, applying for jobs, planning my son’s birthday party, and steeling myself for a potentially major life-changing event – I re-read A Wrinkle in Time for the first time in 30-odd years. Oddly, there was never a more appropriate time for me to read it – thick in the maelstrom of the Black Thing (fears) as I am, learning how to fight back with more love, less anger. It’s been a delight to feel whisked away from the subway cattle while en route to my own veal pen, to feel tessered, untethered, caught in the whirl, but temporarily giddy with it, not anxious.
For a while now, I’ve felt called to return to AWIT as if it held a potency, a vastness, a key of sorts to return me to blacked-out parts of my childhood I can’t recall for some reason or another. To reconnect with a younger me connecting with the joy, vitality, resiliency, and anger of Meg – how it might have encouraged me to endure and trust myself as a teen. But – I don’t remember how I felt when I read it as a child. Just remember being lost so completely in stories that I felt dissolved – as though the corporeal me faded ever so slightly from the world, as though a book’s close allowed my body to re-inhabit rooms in a new way that felt brighter, buoyant.
So – thank you, Madeleine L’Engle for helping me through yet another transition. Thank you, Aunt Beast. And thanks to Diane and Phoenix for the reminder.
A Poet Librarian 