{"id":10730,"date":"2020-05-19T16:27:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-19T23:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=10730"},"modified":"2020-06-20T16:32:21","modified_gmt":"2020-06-20T23:32:21","slug":"of-course-im-meg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2020\/05\/19\/of-course-im-meg\/","title":{"rendered":"“Of course I’m Meg”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a New Collection of Old Stories, Madeleine L\u2019Engle Is Back<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Heidi Pitlor<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
According to Madeleine L\u2019Engle, who died in 2007, \u201cYou have to write the book that wants to be written.\u201dCredit…Sigrid Estrada<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cA Wrinkle in Time,\u201d an adolescent girl\u2019s fury is nothing to be renounced \u2014 instead, it\u2019s ammunition to be stockpiled in the battle against evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2018Stay angry, little Meg,\u2019 Mrs Whatsit whispered. \u2018You will need all your anger now.\u2019\u201d Mrs Whatsit\u2019s words are radical, written as they were decades before the Riot Grrrl and Girl Power movements and their celebration of female wrath. Meg Murry helped pave the way for Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen and Beatrice Prior. With some heavy-duty extrapolation, one might say that Murry\u2019s spirit can also be found in the environmental activist Greta Thunberg (mocked by the president of the United States for being \u201cvery angry\u201d), Parkland\u2019s gun control advocate Emma Gonz\u00e1lez (called an unimpressive \u201cskinhead lesbian\u201d by one Republican candidate) and countless other young women who have harnessed their outrage into political movements against powerful forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When asked,\u00a0Madeleine L\u2019Engle\u00a0<\/a>once admitted, \u201cOf course I\u2019m Meg.\u201d For years, L\u2019Engle fought a culture that scorned girls\u2019 emotions and intelligence. She also faced off against a myopic publishing industry. \u201cA Wrinkle in Time\u201d\u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/em>a book of speculative fantasy woven through with physics, metaphysics and theology \u2014 was\u00a0rejected by 26 publishers<\/a>\u00a0before it found a home. Editors questioned whether the audience would be adults or children. The story was not what people expected from middle-grade fiction; perhaps most galling, the book was not just one thing at all. Meg \u2014 and maybe Madeleine \u2014 could be angry, but also impatient, loyal, insecure, determined, underachieving. Of course a girl \u2014 a person \u2014 is never just one thing either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at NYT<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times In a New Collection of Old Stories, Madeleine L\u2019Engle Is Back By\u00a0Heidi Pitlor In \u201cA Wrinkle in Time,\u201d an adolescent girl\u2019s fury is nothing to be renounced \u2014 instead, it\u2019s ammunition to be stockpiled in the battle against evil. \u201c\u2018Stay angry, little Meg,\u2019 Mrs Whatsit whispered. \u2018You will need all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10730\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}