First Words Friday: Week 7 – 2019 – A Wrinkle in Time

I’m taking another workshop through Tweetspeak Poetry called Writing Toward Joy and led by the incomparable Megan Willome. We are working our way through Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time by making florilegia–bouquets of sparkling text that we create out of sentences that jump out at us. We then try to see what new connections we can make out of those or what deeper beauty we can find. We’re also practicing a form lectio divina and writing poetry. Seriously, if you’ve never taken a TSP workshop, you should.

Anyway, today I’m sharing some first words from this much beloved (sometimes controversial) Newberry Medal winning book that was initially rejected 26 times.

First words from Chapter 1 (such detail!)

It was a dark and stormy night.

In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraithlike shadows that raced along the ground.

The house shook.

Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.

She wasn’t usually afraid of weather.–It’s not just the weather, she thought.–It’s the weather on top of everything else. On top of me. On top of Meg Murry doing everything wrong.

My edition ends with L’Engle’s Newberry Medal Acceptance Speech, “The Expanding Universe.”

Here are her last words.

Up on the summit of Mohawk Mountain in northwest Connecticut is a large flat rock that holds the heat of the sun long after the last of the late sunset has left the sky. We take our picnic up there and then lie on the rock and watch the stars, one pulsing slowly into the deepening blue, and then another and another and another, until the sky is full of them.

A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

Have you read this book?
Who is your favorite character?
If you could go through a wrinkle in time, where would you like to go?