Margaret Dulaney has written story-based essays on mystical themes for a quarter of a century. In 2010 she began offering these writings on ListenWell.org, a website featuring once-monthly spoken word essays, exploring open-faith ideas through story and metaphor. She has authored three books of nonfiction: To Hear the Forest Sing, The Parables of Sunlight and Spend Some Love. Her first fiction book for younger readers, Whippoorwill Willingly, is a magical adventure in the style of beloved children’s classics. Meet Margaret…

You are an author, but is it your day job? If not, what does fill your days? I have been writing essays for 21 years now, solely intending to lift my audience. I try always to offer hope, hope is my medium. Indeed, my purpose in writing is to engage the reader (or, in my case, listener and reader) to walk along with me as we explore various themes together. These are typically spiritual/philosophical musings teased out through metaphor and story.

I had been collecting these musings for many years before I realized that I could offer these writings in spoken word form on a website. This was in 2010 when ListenWell was born. Listenwell.org offers one ten-minute recorded essay every month. When I launched this effort fifteen years ago, I hoped to build an audience for my writings, but I have come to love writing these musings so much that I do it now for sheer pleasure. I also enjoy hearing from listeners and always appreciate the engagement.

What is your most recent book, and what inspired you to write it? My most recent book, Whippoorwill Willingly, is a novel for young people. I was busy working on a book about a loved one who was experiencing clinical depression and how very difficult and necessary it was for everyone involved to try and hold onto hope when Covid came to visit. I thought I didn’t want to offer this hard book now. I want to uplift my audience, take them by the hand, and run off to a healing place with loving animals, enchanted lakes, old-growth forests, and kindred spirits. It was then that Whippoorwill began to tell me her story. I listened gratefully.

I was raised on mysticism. My grandmother had a near-death experience in her 30s and came back from that experience to spend the rest of her days studying the writings of the mystic Rudolf Steiner. If I had to boil down what mysticism means to me, it is the belief that everyone has their own unique connection to what I will call here the Great Spirit of Love. There are many names for this Spirit. Mystics appear in every faith, but they all profess this very individual connection, with no need for the middleman: the church, synagogue, priest, or mosque.

What book uplifts you? Two of the writers I depend on the most wrote in the 19^th century: the Scottish writer George MacDonald in The Princess and the Goblin and the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. They both began with careers in the church and left their posts to speak of this individual connection freely.

Whippoorwill Willingly is a novel for the young in spirit, born out of the same love of mysticism as my nonfiction writing. I hope parents will share the book with their children and grandparents with their grandchildren. Its audience is the childlike between the ages of nine and ninety-nine.

Learn more about Margaret and her book via her website.