Jeanne Murray Walker, the award-winning author, poet, and Merion Station resident, shares her journey through life and constantly evolving relationship with religion in her moving new memoir, Leaping From the Burning Train: A Poet’s Journey of Faith, writes Gina Lizzo for the Main Line Today.
In the book, she details her departure from the fundamentalist community in Parkers Prairie, Minnesota, where she was born, to figure out what lies beyond the walls of Protestant Christianity.
“When I was young, I only felt safe in a conservative family structure and church,” said the poet. “It felt like my home. As I got older, I began to see that new options were not only possible, but some of them were exciting. I wanted to see where they would take me.”
Murray Walker describes herself as a poet who thinks in terms of images. This prompted her to include the “burning train” reference in her memoir.
“When I realized I was losing my ability to believe that things will go on running faithfully along a safe track, I became deeply alarmed,” she said. “The book’s early chapter describing the train wreck is a metaphor for that experience of failure.”
Read more about Jeanne Murray Walker in the Main Line Today.
