Troubling Stars and Making Sayable

How the work of Madeleine L'Engle formed me into who I am today

The cover of my first copy had a penguin on an iceberg against the backdrop of a sunset. I remember exactly where I found it in our local library, on a shelf of new and notable books. It was the last of the Austin Family series by Madeleine L’Engle, but the first book of hers I’d ever read. My copy had an epigraph in the opening pages, the titular poem by Francis Thompson, “That thou canst not stir a flower // Without troubling of a star.”

I was thirteen and it was my first poem.