Walter Wangerin, 1944-2021

He was an exceptional man, so passionate that he seemed almost to burn. As a public speaker, there are and were few like him, in part because he had an amazing stage presence--tall, square shouldered, almost fearful, although he didn't really scare people. As a writer, I know of none cut from quite the same cloth.

Once upon a time long ago, a conference of teachers asked me to introduce him before he spoke to a huge plenary session. I didn't know Walt well at that time, and I wanted to impress him. I remember that I used a brick that still sits behind me on a shelf of my library, a brick I dug out of a pile we found when visiting the place on the red prairie where Willa Cather's grandparents created a homestead, a place where she herself spent some girlhood years. 

I don't remember what I said exactly, but I know I referred to what that old brick meant to me, a symbol of a story that had profound meaning to me and that he, like Cather, had a permanent place in the museum of my own life. 

He loved the introduction--he mentioned it several times later when the two of us became good friends. I heard him speak for the first time several years before that introduction, when he returned to the school from which he once graduated, a preparatory school or seminary in Milwaukee, WI. Sounds contradictory, but he spoke fiercely but tenderly, remembering kindly some childhood years that weren't so bountifully blessed. 

The species of Lutheranism which he remembered in that speech was the kind Garrison Keillor incessantly refers to--dour, unflinching, driven by the kind of willful righteousness that often evolved into its own worst enemy. To me, it was clear that he wanted little to do with the kind of faith he'd learned and experienced as a boy, but he tempered that antagonism with more than a few homey memories.

We became friends when I was asked to join a writers group, the Chrysostom Society, that met annually to talk about faith and writing, some of the most famous names in evangelical publishing--Walt Wangerin, Eugene Peterson, Luci Shaw, Philip Yancey, and others. And me, oddly enough, although as a writer I never achieved what the others had and did. For a quarter century I was blessed to be among them.

Walt wrote everything--poetry, fiction, non-fiction; in The Book of God, he even took a shot at fictionalizing the Bible. He excelled at columns in a denominational magazine, columns that gave him a much valued readership among his own. As a writer, he had come out of nowhere when his The Book of the Dun-Cow, a fantasy he drew from Chaucer's tales, won all kinds of awards. He never stopped writing, not even when cancer dragged him down in its awful teeth. Instead, he wrote about cancer. 

What Walter Wangerin shared with Frederick Manfred, another writer I knew well, was a passion for writing that grew from a vivid sense of calling into a profession that might have seemed to others to be a life sentence from the Lord. He simply couldn't do enough of it; and spinning out more gave him a sense of mission that made him, in addition, capable of stunning performances behind a lectern. The speech he gave after my introduction so many years ago was amazing, electric, a living scrapbook packed full of the teachers he'd had as a boy, some of those descriptions wickedly funny. 

Walt Wangerin once wrote this about himself and his writing: “I present you with the very stuff itself of the events that have shaped this person before you, and so reveal the Shaper shaping. By these stories I am sinfully, gracefully whole, and whole may be the drama of God in me.”

I know he wouldn't like me saying it, but sometimes I couldn't help feeling that writing, to him, was sacramental, "the drama of God," and even its own means of grace. Maybe he wouldn't mind.

A decade ago, at least, he announced the cancer. Chemo was devastating. It beat on him, but he didn't succumb. I remember very well listening to what I thought would be his final speech at a big conference at Calvin College. I wasn't the only friend of his who, that night, simply assumed this would be his last.

Afterwards, the poet John Leax and I went to his room with a bottle of wine, sat there with him and Thanne for a couple of late-night hours; we told stories and quite specifically said our good-byes. It was, I remember, a touching moment. If there weren't tears, there could have been. We believed we'd never see him again.

Instead, he turned out about a dozen more books. His energy was ferocious, his faith, like some others of us, may well have been more luminous on stage and in prose than it was in quieter moments. 

He was a great man I wish, deeply, I could have known better. Two weeks ago he sent me a note, thanking me for an essay I wrote about him for a book about his work, told me he could barely climb the stairs anymore, and asked me about my grandchildren. Ten days later, finally, he was gone.

He taught me a great deal and was, as a writer and friend, a significant presence in my life, as was his wife, Thanne. I will always treasure my memories of being in his and their company, a blessing to me and to many.