Roanoke Friends Meeting - Quakers, 505 Day Avenue SW, Roanoke, VA (2026)

08/20/2026

QUAKER ARTISTS-AUGUST 2026

FRANKLIN ASLEEP DURING QUAKER MEETING FOR WORSHIP

A lithograph depicting Benjamin Franklin asleep during a Quaker Meeting for Worship was published in The Picture Book by the Educational Book Company in 1920. It was based on a half-tone engraving created by an anonymous artist in 1872. (Though there is a signature on the picture, it is illegible).

Franklin arrived in Philadelphia from Boston, in 1723, as a seventeen-year-old. Exhausted, hungry, he saw people entering a large building at Second and High Streets and followed them in. He looked around at the gathering, heard nothing, then fell asleep. At the end of the meeting, a man woke him. As Franklin noted later in his Autobiography, the building was the Great Meetinghouse, and the gathering was a Quaker Meeting for Worship. It was the first place he entered in Philadelphia.

I was charmed by the story and the lithograph. After all these years, it is still the practice in Meetings for Worship to leave people who are asleep undisturbed. (Except if they snore, when they are nudged gently!)

Gary Sandman

08/13/2026

QUAKER ARTISTS-JULY 2026

DAVID PARLETT

David Parlett (b. 1939) is a British creator and historian of card and board games. Known best for his Hare & Tortoise, he has also produced numerous other board games, including Chicken Out!, Pot Black: Snooker Dice, The Puzzle of Oz and Zoo Party. He has invented more than 70 card games that can be played with a standard deck of playing cards. Parlett is the author of The Penguin Book of Card Games and The Oxford History of Board Games and has been a writer and editor for Games & Puzzles magazine. In 1979 he won the German Spiel des Jahre (Game of the Year) and in 1981 the Dutch Speelgoed van Het Jaar (Toy of the Year), both awards for Hare & Tortoise. He has been President of the British Skat Association and is a visiting professor of Game Design at the University of Suffolk.

Parlett discovered Friends through personal friends and by reading Geofrey Hubbard’s Quaker by Convincement. In 1980 he began attending Croydon Meeting in south London, where he is now a member and has served as Clerk. He said that he realized that he had been a Quaker all his life and that he felt he was among people who were more interested in who you were than what you believed. Parlett has written for The Friend and made audio recordings of Quaker books and publications for blind people through Talking Friends. He is part of the Nontheist Friends Network as well as the Quaker Artists Network. His children attended Saffron Walden, the Quaker school.

David Parlett is a creative force, a maker of wildly entertaining games. The games are also visually beautiful. I had not been familiar with Hare & Tortoise, but I was charmed with the gorgeous edition I found online.

A quote:

“An inventor of games is like a poet or a composer. I regard a game as a work of art”.

Gary Sandman

06/27/2026

QUAKER ARTISTS-JULY 2026

E.V. LUCAS

E.V. Lucas (1868-1938) was a British author. A prolific writer, he composed essays, plays, biographies, poetry, novels and short stories. He is mostly known for his humor, especially his aphorisms. Among his books were Reading, Writing and Remembering; A Wanderer in London; Little Books on Great Masters; and Over Bemerton’s. He worked at the satirical magazine Punch for 34 years, ending as the assistant editor. During the same time, he was employed at the publishing firm Methuen and Company, first as a reader and then finally as its chairman. Lucas was a friend of A.A. Milne and introduced Milne to the illustrator E.H. Shepard, with whom Milne collaborated on the Winnie the Pooh books. He was also a member of the “Allahakbarries”, a cricket team of writers that was captained by J.M. Barrie and included, among others, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and P.G. Wodehouse. He received honorary degrees from the University of St. Andrews and Oxford University and was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour.

Lucas was born a Quaker at Blackheath Friends Meeting in south London. He was a student at Saffron Walden Friends School. Lucas was commissioned to write a biography of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet. As well, he was the biographer and editor of the collected works of Charles Lamb, a fellow traveler of Friends.

Some quotes:

The art of life...is to be thought odd. Everything will then be permitted to you.

Few women and fewer men have enough character to be idle.

Poor G.K.C., his day is past - now God will know the truth at last. (An epitaph for G.K. Chesterton).

Gary Sandman

06/17/2026

QUAKER ARTISTS-MAY 2026

GARRY KILWORTH

Garry Kilworth (b. 1941) is a British author of science fiction, fantasy and historical novels and short stories. He has also written an autobiography, travelogues and poetry. Eschewing any formulas, he is drawn rather to the enigmatic and the strange. He is a former RAF cryptographer, who has lived and travelled all over the world and has drawn on this for his books. Kilworth’s books have been shortlisted and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Carnegie Medal. They have won Lancashire Children's Book of the Year Award, the Charles Whiting Award for Historical War Literature, the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award. His Hunter’s Moon was a bestseller. His Attica, set in an attic the size of a continent, has been purchased by Johnny Depp’s film company.

Kilworth and his wife Annette became Friends in 1994. Many of his books explore themes of faith, the soul and transcendence. He calls them “stories from the inscape”. A writer of war novels, he points out that his books do not promote war but tell of its horrors.

Garry Kilworth is a fine writer, with a quirky angle of perception. Highly recommended!

Gary Sandman

04/20/2026

QUAKER ARTISTS-APRIL 2026

ANNE KNIGHT

Anne Knight (1792-1860) was a British writer and teacher. She is known for her children’s poetry and stories, including Mary Gray: a Tale for Little Girls and Mornings in the Library. As well, she edited School-Room Lyrics, a collection of verse. Knight was the headmistress and a teacher at Brook House, a school in Woodbridge, Suffolk.

Knight was born and raised a Friend at Woodbridge Meeting. Widowed early, she had been married to a Quaker cousin. She was friends with the poets Bernard Barton and Charles Lamb, the former a Friend and the latter a Friends fellow traveler. Barton also lived with her and her family, and his poetry was featured in her books. In the introduction to Mary Gray: a Tale for Little Girls, Knight echoed the old Quaker opposition to fiction, stating that she would leaven the stories with true anecdotes about animals, gardens and seasons. She is buried in the Woodbridge Friends cemetery.

Anne Knight is a charming writer, if a little didactic. Her concern was to teach moral lessons to children.

(Please note: Knight is not to be confused with Anne Knight, a contemporary Quaker feminist and abolitionist).

Gary Sandman

Address

505 Day Avenue SW
Roanoke, VA
24015

Opening Hours

10:30am - 12:30pm

Telephone

+15406320094

Website

http://roanokequakers.org/

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