“What was the first thing you read of MacDonald’s, and when (or how) did you find yourself passionately pursuing a study of his life and works?”
Michael: I have been asked variations of questions like yours so many times through the years that I have probably answered them in a dozen different ways. You would think I would get tired of answering the question, How did you discover the writings of George MacDonald? But honestly, it’s a question I love to answer.
The reason is because of that word “discover.” The writings, thought, ideas, imagination, and creative and spiritual genius of George MacDonald are truly treasures buried in a field that we all “discover” in our own way, at our own time, and in ways that impact our life pilgrimages uniquely. In that sense, we all have a story to tell.
Nearly everyone I talk to about MacDonald, or who comes to me with their questions, is eager to share their story of discovery. People have been writing me, telephoning me, emailing me, driving long distances to visit Judy and me in our bookstore, even showing up unannounced at our doorstep (and when this happens in Scotland, it is really an unexpected shock!) to ask about MacDonald…but even more eager to tell us how they discovered MacDonald and about the difference he has made in their outlook and thinking. Literally just a month ago, we chanced to meet two people in Scotland in a serendipitous encounter, and their first question was almost exactly the same: “How did you discover MacDonald?” After answering briefly, I turned it around to what is perhaps the more important question, “…and how did you discover MacDonald?” Therefore, Melissa, I’m sure you, and whoever else might be reading this, has a story to tell just as remarkable as mine.
We are all “discoverers” together in this exciting pilgrimage. I am still discovering new depths in MacDonald’s writings I hadn’t seen before—after 45 years! It is an inexhaustible and never-ending quest.
In a sense, then, your question highlights a universal experience those of us all share who have come to love the writings of George MacDonald. We are moving through life minding our own business—or so we think!—when a chance encounter, word, circumstance, or book recommended by a friend…when something causes us to pause a moment and take a second look at something beneath our feet. Is that a tiny nugget of gold we have just kicked an edge of into the light with our foot? We stoop to pick it up and discover that it is gold. We fall to our knees and begin digging about with our hands, discovering a second nugget…then a third…and more! As we continue to read and explore, we realize that in MacDonald’s writings we have truly stumbled upon a great treasure—long-buried and still unseen by most of Christ’s church, but a treasure indeed that begins to change how we think, how we view God and the world and ourselves. Thereafter life is never the same.
This, then, is my story of “discovery” and it is probably no more remarkable than yours. It simply happens to be how Judy and I stumbled on the long-buried treasure of George MacDonald’s writings.
We had recently (1970) discovered C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. We were unable to find the set in the U.S. and ordered the books from England. A week after tearing open the package, Judy and I had breathlessly devoured all seven books and were left with our mouths hanging open.
Never had we experienced anything like reading the Narnia books for the first time!
The implications, especially in The Last Battle, were staggering. Seeds had already begun being planted in my heart during this time (1969-70) toward a potentially larger perspective of God’s purposes in the afterlife. Narnia contributed enormously to my expanding outlook. Both biblical commentator William Barclay and C.S. Lewis tended and watered those seeds until they took root and began to grow into the mighty fruit-producing Tree of Life called Infinitely Loving Fatherhood.
I cannot remember when I first read Lewis’s The Great Divorce. But the underlying theme of the book (even fictionalized) that death may not block all pathways between heaven and hell, nor close all doors of possible repentance, was a tsunami crashing against the shores of the traditional theology of my evangelical upbringing. And whenever it was that I first encountered Lewis’s fantasy, I took little note of the hugely significant appearance of a certain Scotsman who wandered onto the pages of the story about halfway through, engaging the fictional narrator in a most intriguing dialog. Later, when I read the book again, I could hardly believe I had missed his name on my first reading. (This device of Lewis’s exercised such a powerful impact on my imagination that I used it myself, twice, actually, in The Garden at the Edge of Beyond, and Hell and Beyond, bringing both Lewis and MacDonald into my own afterlife fantasies just as Lewis had MacDonald, and dedicating both books to them.)
But before that, in late summer of 1971, after having ventured through our own wardrobes into Narnia, I was in southern California visiting Judy at her parents’ home in Mountain Home Village. Judy didn’t know it when I arrived, but I had come to propose to her. I had driven south from my home in Eureka with some friends for my fateful encounter with my wife to be (I hoped!) While at Judy’s, my dear friend and former college roommate, Mike Schmidt made the statement that would change my life. It was the “chance word” that hinted at gold at my feet.
He and I had been talking enthusiastically for some time about the “possibility” that hell might be more purposeful than we had been taught. He had discovered Narnia the year before and had shared that discovery with us. And now, when talking outside Judy’s home in the San Bernardino mountains, Mike told me that our mutual friend Linda Provancha had recently read in Hannah Hurnard’s autobiography words to the effect that “anyone who loves C.S. Lewis will eventually go on to the writings of George MacDonald.”
My first response was something like shock. The idea that it was possible to “go on” from Lewis, as if there could be a greater author on the planet, seemed an impossibility. And yet, I thought, this unknown “MacDonald” bore investigation. If he even had a fraction of Lewis’s wit, wisdom, imagination, and literary gifts, his books would certainly be worth reading.
Therefore, when Judy and I returned north to Eureka (she accepted my proposal, by the way, and we were married in October of that year), one of my priorities was to investigate what I could find by the mysterious George MacDonald. I paid a visit to our local county library and indeed found several of his books. The selection was extremely limited, but enough to whet the appetite with the first few nuggets of gold. You asked which were the first MacDonald books I read. What I found in the library, which Judy and I quickly gobbled up just as we had the seven Narnia books, were MacDonald’s two Curdie books (The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie), At the Back of the North Wind, and the 1963 edited edition of Sir Gibbie by authoress Elizabeth Yates.
Those, then, to answer the first part of your question, were the first books I read by George MacDonald.
And they ignited your passion for MacDonald, I take it? You must have enjoyed them.
I did. All four titles were good…they were very good. It was obvious that we had stumbled on another author with Lewis-like imaginative gifts, and a man of similar outlook toward God and his expansive purposes. Yet these four books—much as I enjoyed them, and as motivated as I became to find more—did not instantly fire my “passion” as you put it. The fires had been lit deep within me, but they increased slowly. MacDonald’s influence on my spirit during those first months of discovery was a gradual process.
That said, I was certainly intrigued!
MacDonald’s occasional asides and his obvious imaginative references to higher spiritual themes were even more pointed than Lewis’s in Narnia. Who could read the Curdie books and not observe the germ of inspiration for Narnia? Especially was MacDonald’s inspiration of Lewis evident after I learned of Lewis’s own story of “discovery” of MacDonald in 1916. In MacDonald, I realized I was plumbing the depths of Lewis’s own faith-origins. More and more I found that what I had loved in Lewis, he had actually gleaned from MacDonald! MacDonald was the root system for everything I had found so wonderful in Lewis. But as I say, these were gradual revelations, each one of which sent down more and more roots into my spiritual consciousness.
Who could read all four of the first books I mentioned and not be stirred by the imagery, rich symbolism, and practical spiritual truth to imagine what high things MacDonald might be hinting at:
“I will tell you how I am able to bear it, Diamond: I am always hearing…the sound of a far-off song…I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music…but what I do hear is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship…Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all cries…It wouldn't be the song it seems to be if it did not swallow up all their fear and pain too, and set them singing it themselves…And do you know…that song has been coming nearer and nearer. Only I must say it was some thousand years before I heard it.”
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And there he saw another wonder: on a huge hearth a great fire was burning, and the fire was a huge heap of roses, and yet it was fire. The smell of the roses filled the air, and the heat of the flames of them glowed upon his face. He turned an inquiring look upon the lady, and saw that she was now seated in an ancient chair, the legs of which were crusted with gems, but the upper part like a nest of daisies and moss and green grass.
“Curdie,” she said in answer to his eyes, “you have stood more than one trial already, and have stood them well: now I am going to put you to a harder. Do you think you are prepared for it?...It needs only trust and obedience.”…
“I dare not say anything, ma'am. If you think me fit, command me.”
“It will hurt you terribly, Curdie…but much good will come to you from it…Go and thrust both your hands into that fire,”…
Curdie dared not stop to think. It was much too terrible to think about. He rushed to the fire, and thrust both of his hands right into the middle of the heap of flaming roses, and his arms halfway up to the elbows. And it did hurt! But he did not draw them back. He held the pain as if it were a thing that would kill him if he let it go…He was in terrible fear lest it should conquer him…
At last it ceased…and Curdie thought his hands must be burned to cinders if not ashes, for he did not feel them at all. The princess told him to take them out and look at them. He did so, and found that all that was gone of them was the rough, hard skin; they were white and smooth like the princess's.
“Come to me,” she said.
He obeyed and saw, to his surprise, that her face looked as if she had been weeping…
“Would you like to know why I made You put your hands in the fire?...Have you ever heard what some philosophers say—that men were all animals once?...there is another thing that is of the greatest consequence…that all men, if they do not take care, go down the hill to the animals' country; that many men are actually, all their lives, going to be beasts…But you must beware, Curdie, how you say of this man or that man that he is travelling beastward. There are not nearly so many going that way as at first sight you might think…two people may be at the same spot in manners and behaviour, and yet one may be getting better and the other worse, which is just the greatest of all differences that could possibly exist between them…
“Now here is what the rose-fire has done for you: it has made your hands so knowing and wise, it has brought your real hands so near the outside of your flesh gloves, that you will henceforth be able to know at once the hand of a man who is growing into a beast; nay, more—you will at once feel the foot of the beast he is growing.”
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Gibbie…was always placing what he heard by the side…of what he knew; asking himself, in this case and that, what Jesus Christ would have done, or what He would require of a disciple…
Gifted from the first of his being with such a rare drawing to his kind, he saw his utmost affection dwarfed by the words and deeds of Jesus…
Thus, as the weeks of solitude and love and thought and obedience glided by, the reality of Christ grew upon him, till he saw the very rocks and heather and the faces of the sheep like him, and felt his presence everywhere, and ever coming nearer…He would dream waking dreams about Jesus, gloriously childlike. He fancied He came down every now and them to see how things were going in the lower part of His kingdom; and that when He did so, He made use of Glashgar and its rocks for His stair, coming down its granite scale in the morning, and again, when He had ended His visit, going up in the evening by the same steps. Then high and fast would his heart beat at the thought that someday he might come upon His path just when He had passed, see the heather lifting its head from the trail of His garment, or more slowly out of the prints left by His feet, as He walked up the stairs of heaven, going back to His Father. Sometimes, whena sheep stopped feeding and looked up suddenly, he would fancy that Jesus had laid His hand on its head and was now telling it that it must not mind being killed; for He had been killed and it was all right…
At last, like one of its own flowers in its own bosom, the spring began again to wake in God’s thought of His world; and the snow, like all other deaths, had to melt and run, leaving room for hope; then the summer woke smiling, as if she knew she had been asleep; and the two youths and the two maidens met yet again on Lorrie bank, with the brown water falling over the stones, the gold nuggets of the broom hanging over the water, and the young larchwood scenting the air all up the brae side…The four were a year older, a year nearer trouble, and a year nearer getting out of it. Ginevra was more of a woman, Donal more of a poet, Nicie as nice and much the same, and Gibbie, if possible, more a foundling of the universe than ever. The mountain was a grand nursery for him, and the result, both physical and spiritual, corresponded…
More even than a knowledge of the truth is a readiness to receive it…The secret of this power of reception was that to see a truth and to do it was one and the same thing with Gibbie. To know and not do would have seemed to him an impossibility.
✤
And so many more!
Is it any wonder, with the foundation of these four books, that MacDonald took increasing hold of me…and that I wanted to share this wonderful buried treasure with the world!
Just hearing those brief quotes in my mind from MacDonald reminds me of so much in his writing that I, too, have come to love.
Another thing these four books accomplished was to fire my determination to locate more titles by MacDonald. Because what I discovered, to my disbelief and dismay, was that very little of MacDonald’s huge corpus of fifty plus books was in print. The few titles we found in the library along with several fantasies (including Phantastes and Lilith), were it. Nothing else was available. No full realistic novels, no sermons, no poetry, no biographies. Only North Wind, the Curdie books, miscellaneous children and the adult fantasies, and the Yates’ edition of Sir Gibbie. And after meeting “wee Sir Gibbie,” I had to find more of MacDonald’s novels! How many more characters like Gibbie might there be!
Tell me something is impossible and all you do is make me more determined than ever to make it possible. Tell me there are no books by MacDonald to be found…and I will find them!
The very scarcity of MacDonald’s books ignited my resolve. Their rarity elevated them to inestimable value in my eyes. And when I heard of certain volumes entitled “Unspoken Sermons,” I salivated at the very idea of what those mystery-books might contain. By that time I had encountered sufficient hints in North Wind and the Curdie books, Sir Gibbie, and some of the fairy tales and fantasies to be convinced that MacDonald’s sermons must surely illuminate in more straightforward fashion his fascinating and controversial perspectives on hell and the afterlife. It would be years, however, before I would actually find those books for myself. They proved to be the deepest buried treasure of all. In the early 1970s, MacDonald’s original non-fiction titles simply weren’t to be found…anywhere.
It is difficult for people today to imagine what it was like back then. Not only was there no internet, no Amazon, no eBay, there were no personal computers. Even the simple calculator, which we now take for granted, was still on the technological drawing board. The first “computer” I was able to use in my writing (more than a dozen years later) was located in an entire house. In the early 1970s, the only way to locate out-of-print books was by poring through the dusty shelves of used bookstores, or by enlisting mail-order “search services” that linked together the network of antiquarian bookstores in the U.S. and Great Britain.
Visiting my elderly grandmother in Washington in late 1971 to introduce her to my new bride, it was with an excitement impossible to describe that in Shoreys Bookstore in Seattle, on a bottom shelf hidden from view by an entire row of books in front of them (in order to double the available space, the books were stacked in two rows on each shelf, one behind the other), among the “Ms” my eyes fell on two titles, both almost a hundred years old: Robert Falconer and The Marquis of Lossie. They were the first original MacDonalds I had ever laid eyes on. My hand quivering, I removed them, flipped through them, smelled the aging and dusty paper, literally aware that I was holding in my hand perhaps the greatest treasure of my life. Their cost was nominal—two or three dollars. I began reading Robert Falconer that same evening.
Thus began for Judy and me a long search that went on for years, during which we visited countless bookstores and used many book-search services all over the country, to locate, here one, there another, maybe from another source two or three original titles by MacDonald.
It took years, but slowly and steadily we managed to put together an expanding library of MacDonald’s 19th century novels. Judy still remembers holding for the first time an autographed copy of Salted With Fire I was fortunate enough to locate and bought for her as a Christmas gift. (It remains her favorite of the novels.) Still, however, the “Unspoken Sermons” remained unfound, the great underground vein of gold that I desperately hungered to locate…but which remained illusive, hidden, and unknown.
During 1972 and 1973, the first years of our married life before we had a family and before our Christian bookstore began to expand to multiple stores, Judy and I read every one of the novels of MacDonald we could find. It was a rich time in our young lives, relishing in the stories and characters created by MacDonald. And as we were drawn into MacDonald’s world, a fascination and love for MacDonald’s homeland of Scotland—till then a complete unknown to us—also took root within us. We began to talk wistfully of what it would be like to live in a small stone cottage in the highlands, surrounded by Gibbie’s world of solitary mountains, heather, sheep, drinking tea and eating oatcakes and reading MacDonald’s Scottish stories. Slowly and steadilyMacDonald’s world took us over. We knew that we had indeed, discovered a literary and spiritual treasure.
A quantum change took place when I read MacDonald’s Malcolm. I had discovered the sequel to the Malcolm doublet at Shoreys, but it was not until later that we were able to locate a copy of Malcolm itself that I set out to read the Malcolm/Marquis story in its entirety. Oddly, however, my first effort proved to be a failure. Curiously, many of the books that have been most influential in my life began in failure. My first attempt to read the Bible through bogged down in Leviticus and I simply quit. It took me two or three tries to make it beyond that legalistic stumbling-block. My first forays into Thomas Kelly’s A Testament of Devotion—the single book that has probably changed me more than any other—likewise ended in my giving up the effort. And so it was with Malcolm. I had encountered the heavy Scottish dialect of MacDonald’s books before and found it daunting. It obscured the story with a haze of confusion difficult to penetrate. As much as I had loved the Yates’ edition of Sir Gibbie, I found the much-longer original almost impossible. I found the edited Yates edition full of light…yet the original was—I am almost reluctant to say it—slow and dreary by comparison. I had ploughed through Robert Falconer, my first exposure to an original MacDonald novel and its incomprehensible dialect. But “ploughed through” is exactly what it was like. As I read, I felt like I was slogging through molasses. Reading MacDonald’s original works definitely involves a very steep learning curve, and at that point in my life I found it very hard going.
With Malcolm, the incomprehensibility was rendered all the more difficult by Duncan’s odd characteristically “highland” dialect. It was even more off-putting and peculiar than the dialect of Sir Gibbie and Robert Falconer. Honestly, I could make very little of it…and soon gave up.
But by this time, I think it safe to say that I was hooked on MacDonald. I could see the brilliance, even in the originals, so I read them and stuck with them, and steadily climbed the learning curve to the point where I began to drink deeply of MacDonald’s writing, even those aspects of it that I had found difficult and incomprehensible before. So eventually I tried to read Malcolm again. I think it may have been on my third try that I finally broke through and kept going far enough into the story that the plot and characters and setting began to take mesmerizing hold of me.
What happened next is impossible to put into words. Yet you will know what I mean because everyone has had something like this experience with different specifics.
Malcolm’s story took me over.
It consumed me.
Once I broke through the dialect barrier and managed to get far enough along in the story, I began to fly…turning page after page in a cold sweat…riveted, gripped by every twist of plot, positively spellbound. Everything about the story was hypnotic. I had only experienced such a thing once before in my life—that was in reading Narnia. Now I felt myself being drawn through a new wardrobe…but this time not into a fantasy world of witches and dwarfs and fawns and fairy-tale castles, but into a real place, the real Scottish village of Portlossie where I met real people—Malcolm, Miss Horn, Mistress Catanach, Sandy Graham, Florimel, the marquis, the mad laird, Blue Peter. (Well…of course they were not really “real” people, I knew that…but they were real to me!)
Portlossie became my personal Narnia, my own enchanted land of make-believe…yet somehow an intensely real world at the same time. The “reality” of my personal Narnia was the thing that distinguished it from Narnia. It was a world I could actually participate in. As much as we all love Narnia and secretly want to live there, we know that we’re never really going to be able to. It’s a fairy-tale world. But Malcolm’s world took me over with a sense of “real” reality. I thought, “I am part of this world!”
I don’t know why the story took me over as completely as it did. But as I flew through the book and then devoured the sequel (The Marquis of Lossie,) I realized that this was quite simply the best constructed, most brilliantly conceived, most thoroughly engrossing, most skillfully written novel (the two books together) that I had ever read. Every strand of the intricate plot was woven together into an exquisite tapestry that literally left me quivering, breathless, and stunned with its spiritual scope. The deathbed scene between Mr. Graham and the marquis was literally the most powerful scene between two people I had ever read. The whole was simply a masterpiece of fiction. And the reality of place was so palpable that one could not help falling in love with the setting no less than the characters and story. As I say, Portlossie became my personal Narnia. I wanted to be transported there, to be there, to walk its streets, its wide expanse of beach, its rocky bluffs. From that moment I knew I had to visit Scotland some day—though it would be more than a decade before that dream materialized. The entire “experience” of the books enveloped me. I had scarcely closed the covers of Marquis before I went straight back to Malcolm and began reading the whole saga again.
Naturally, after an experience like that, one’s natural response is the desire to share your experience with others. I wanted to tell everyone, “You have to read Malcolm’s story!” I wanted to open the treasure troves to the whole world. There was gold enough for everyone! It wasn’t a buried treasure to be hoarded, but to be spread abroad!
But it was not an experience that could be shared. There were no books to be found. It had taken us years to find just single copies of MacDonald’s books.
And the dialect! Even if there were books available (which there weren’t), most readers would not have the patience or determination to penetrate the haze of incomprehensibility of the thick Scottish brogue. It was just the difficulty I had encountered myself.
So how to share Malcolm…how to make it accessible…how to make MacDonald’s masterpiece available to widespread numbers of people? I had to find a way to share Malcolm! But the question of how plagued me.
Obviously you must have figured out a way!
Yes…but it took a while!
I had begun writing in 1969, wrote my first book in 1972-73, and in 1976 received my first “acceptance letter” from Bethany House publishers. During the late 1970’s I was fortunate to publish a half-dozen non-fiction books with Bethany and other publishers.
At this time, to my amazement, there were still no new editions of MacDonald available—mostly, to my regret, no novels and no sermons. Malcolm remained as inaccessible as ever. Several years had passed since our discovery of MacDonald. If anything, the availability was shrinking. Still we had not been able to locate so much as a hint of MacDonald’s sermons. I fully expected that I would never read a single one of those “unspoken” treasures, whose mysterious content still caused me to drool with unrequited hunger.
But after my Narniaesque experience with Malcolm, I continued to search my brain for some way to share my discovery with wider numbers of people. My thoughts drifted back to the Elizabeth Yate’s 1963 edited edition of Sir Gibbie, which had by this time also gone out of print.
Why shouldn’t I “edit” the Malcolm doublet just as Elizabeth Yates had Sir Gibbie?
This was long before the realization would be painfully borne upon me how derisively the purist communities of the MacDonald and Lewis intelligentsia would look upon the act of “editing” MacDonald’s originals. All I knew was that here was a way to unearth the treasure, pull up the vast troves of gold into the light of day, and make them available and accessible to everyone!
My expanding experience as a young writer, following Yates’ example and studying and guided by her methods, gave me the confidence that I could make Malcolm and The Marquis of Lossie available as readable fiction that anyone could understand but that would still sound and feel just like MacDonald himself. I hoped that my experience in the world of publishing though our bookstore and the publication of my own books might enable me to find a publisher eager to publish “new editions” of MacDonald’s classics.
I spent the years roughly between 1975 and 1981 editing the two books, working my edition over and over, translating the dialect, polishing, pruning, refining, trying to bring the same expertise and faithfulness to MacDonald as had Elizabeth Yates before me. The more familiar with the dialect I became, aided by its links and my knowledge of German, as well as a Scots dictionary, the more it became second nature to me. It was a new experience. I had to learn as I went. And going over MacDonald’s words and phrases and paragraphs word by word, slowly, methodically, I came to know his writing and his style and his methods of communication with a wonderful intimacy that I think is impossible to experience any other way. It taught me more about writing than all the writing books I had read. It was an experience I treasure more than almost anything I have ever done.
(When I later corresponded with Elizabeth Yates, thanking her for her groundbreaking influence on my work, and for her contribution for the awakening of interest in MacDonald that was taking place, she was extremely gracious, and delighted that I had continued the work she had begun.)
When I eventually began to send out query letters to publishers about the project, however, I was surprised to find none of them interested. Even those publishers known for their interest in Lewis and MacDonald (Macmillan, Eerdmans, etc.) turned down my idea. Those years were filled with one disappointment after another, one rejection after another.
Finally my own publisher, Bethany House in Minneapolis, till then exclusively a publisher of non-fiction, began to publish some Christian fiction. On a lark, I decided to send them my proposal for Malcolm, with the first few type-written chapters of my edited version. Intentionally I broke off my sample at a cliff-hanger between Malcolm and Florimel.
My little ploy worked. Bethany’s Carol Johnson wrote back, saying they were “cautiously interested,” adding that one of her reviewers wanted more of the manuscript…and wanted it now!
Bethany House published my edited version of Malcolm (whose title, against my wishes, they changed to The Fisherman’s Lady) in 1982. (I should add, for the record, that the tawdry “romance fiction” covers were put on the books against my input as well. They were not worthy of MacDonald’s stature and I have been embarrassed by them ever since. Unfortunately, when working with a publisher, often the author has no vote in such decisions. Swallowing my disappointment was the price I had to pay in order to get MacDonald’s work in print and available gain.)
In any event, thus began my series of edited MacDonald novels.
One of the results of the huge renaissance of interest in MacDonald that the edited novels spawned in the 1980s, bringing MacDonald’s name back into public consciousness in a widespread way, is that the demand for his original books increased exponentially. Prices for original editions skyrocketed. This succeeded in shaking loose many long-buried and hidden editions that had been gathering dust in garages and attics and boxes of ignored Victorian writings for decades. Availability of old editions of MacDonald exploded. The result was that sixteen years after our discovery of MacDonald, we received notification from one of our book-search contacts that he had found copies of the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons. I had to gulp at the $100 and $150 price tags! But I had no choice. It was a quest I had been engaged in for years. I placed the order, knowing that I was about to set eyes on the mother lode, the deepest veins of MacDonald gold of all.
I was not disappointed!
That is the story of my first reading of MacDonald and the igniting of my passion to study his books and absorb their truths and share his writings that has continued to this day.
And so, Melissa…what is your story of discovery!