This is a book about a girl who left home without quite
meaning to. One evening, doing her algebra homework, the sixteen-year-old
abruptly realizes the tight-knit fundamentalist community she has been raised
in may not have all the answers it claims to have. Then what to do with her
familiar, immersive life: Sunday School, church, prayer meetings, vacation
Bible school, mother-daughter banquets, midnight vigils, revivals, and car
washes?
In college, she discovers the language of poetry. It offers
a path-through metaphor and imagery-that transcends the literalism and
insularity of her childhood. Ahead of her lies a career as poet, playwright,
essayist, and teacher.
Leaping from the Burning Train tells this story in loving and exuberant detail, without
the self-righteousness that sometimes accompanies contemporary memoirs by those
who have left conservative Christianity. Throughout her journey,
including an early acquaintance with death and grief, the figurative language
of poetry remains Jeanne Murray Walker's constant companion. And that language,
over time, sustains her in a deepened, more authentic form of the faith she
never abandoned.
