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Our partnership in words is of long-standing. Madeleine and I met as speakers at a writer's conference at Wheaton College over forty years ago. Her reputation as a novelist and essayist was legendary, even then. A Wrinkle in Time had received the Newbery Medal, and the Crosswicks journals had just been published. We exchanged books and began a correspondence. Her first book of poetry, Lines Scribbled on an Envelope, had recently gone out of print, and since my husband Harold and I had just started our publishing house, I asked her, "Why don't we reprint the volume in a new edition, along with some of your more recent poems?" Madeleine jumped at the idea. The next year, The Weather of the Heart was released, and later, A Cry Like a Bell. Madeleine welcomed my suggestions for minor revisions to her poems, and, tit for tat, was always ready to comment constructively on mine. One of the last things she asked in a phone conversation last January was, "Why haven't you sent me your new poems?"

Of course, there were disagreements. We never actually fought, but we regularly entered into vigorous differences of opinion. We both considered this one of the great advantages of our friendship, growing as it did out of a working editorial bond. We learned astonishing things from being honest and forthright with each other ("as iron sharpens iron … "). Coming as we did from opposite ends of the Christian spectrum, we nearly always met in the middle, benefiting from rich interchanges and discussions. "Book talk and God talk" formed continuing themes in our letters, phone conversations, manuscript revisions, and face-to-face dialogue.

As we all know, Madeleine loved to jolt her readers out of their conventional ruts. They didn't always agree with her, but her fresh ideas set us all thinking in new and fruitful ways, opening up new horizons.

Walking on Water, Madeleine's best-selling work on the complex, mysterious connections between faith and art, came about early in our relationship. I had asked her to write about her philosophy of creativity, and months later she handed me an untidy pile of typescript, saying rather dismissively, "Can you do something to make this work? Right now it has no shape!" For several weeks I cut and pasted (on my living room floor—this was pre-computer), making piles of pages with ideas that seemed related, then recombining them into what I hoped was a coherent sequence, the kind of statement that would reflect what Madeleine believed and practiced about God and writing in her life. Both she and Hugh were pleased with the result, and the trust between us deepened as we continued to work together to bring more of her nonfiction books to publication.

We shared much more than manuscripts. Our friendship blossomed way beyond the writer-editor relationship. We gave mutual support in times of crisis, such as the year both our husbands died of cancer, and when I was depressed enough to be near-suicidal and Madeleine talked me down, like talking the pilot of a failed plane to a safe landing. After a serious car accident, I was able to be with her in San Diego for a week of telling jokes and singing hymns and telling bedtime stories as she healed. There were visits back and forth between East and West Coasts. Travels by car in the U. K. and Canada, lectures together at Regent College, Calvin College, and at Oxford and Cambridge. Parties at "924," her home in Manhattan, her famous roast leg-of-lamb dinners, proofreading sessions on her dining room table, supervised by Terrible and Kelly, the literary cats. Sunday worship at the Church of All Angels, where I remember her, one Advent, suddenly standing up to a commanding height, like the angel of the Annunciation, and declaring "Fear not!" Visits to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for noon Eucharist. Saying Compline together at the end of a day.

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September (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51