Madeleine L’Engle has had one of the most long-lasting impressions on the YA genre. We chatted with her about imagination, time, writing and more!

It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger.

“Wild nights are my glory,” the unearthly stranger told them. “I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me be on my way. Speaking of way, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract”.

Meg’s father had been experimenting with this fifth dimension of time travel when he mysteriously disappeared. Now the time has come for Meg, her friend Calvin, and Charles Wallace to rescue him. But can they outwit the forces of evil they will encounter on their heart-stopping journey through space? 

Young Adult Mag: You’ve had many jobs….tell us about some of them.

Madeleine L’Engle: Well they were all in service of my writing. I was an actress, I owned a general store, I taught, I did whatever I could to make ends meet, all while writing.

YA: Your most famous work “A Wrinkle In Time” was rejected around 30 times before being published. How did you find the strength to keep submitting?

ML: How does anyone find the strength to do anything? I had an otherworldly feeling, which is throughout the novel, that it was a story of time, of space, of the universe that needed to be told – which is why I wrote it and ultimately why I think it was published.

YA: You have strong religious overtones in your books…thoughts on why that does or doesn’t resonate?

ML: People are looking for something, anything to hold onto in this crazy world. My beliefs are my own, however I’m very devout.

YA: What are the most important things to you?

ML: Family, writing, family. In that order.

YA: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

ML: Never be aspiring, just be writing. Never stop writing.