Madeline on Writing, Art, and Lineage

Madeline grew up in a house of art. Her mom is an art teacher, and creativity was always encouraged, always visible. “I’ve been painting since I was three years old,” she says. She remembers seeing baby photos of herself standing at an easel, hands covered in blue paint. Art was there for moments of joy and for moments of sadness too. Drawing became a way to process whatever was happening around her. It was instinctual, almost automatic.

Writing came later, and at first, she was resistant to it. Poetry felt restrictive. Meter and rhyme were not her thing. “I thought poetry was just kinda boring,” she admits. Shakespeare did nothing for her. That changed in ninth grade, when a poetry class introduced her to emulation and showed her that poetry did not have to live inside rigid rules. Around the same time, she joined an organization called Girls Write Now, which paired her with a mentor and shifted her creative practice from something solitary into something communal. Writing stopped being something she did alone in her room and became something shared, discussed, and eventually performed. “That was the moment where a lot of my artistic practice shifted,” she says.