Greetings! Here are a few things I’ve been up to recently; I’ll bet at least one of these will appeal to you, eh?
Chris Pipkin was kind enough to have me on the Inklings Variety Hour to talk about Narnia for Grown-Ups: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. We had a lively and fruitful conversation that got into some aspects of LWW that I don’t often hear discussed, so I found it a valuable time indeed.
Last Friday, I got to speak at the Inkling Folk Fellowship about “Occult Initiation in That Hideous Strength.” Lots of fine people shared perspectives on that novel, including Jennifer Woodruff Tait and Monika Hilder about gender; David Bratman about Merlin’s magic; Joe Ricke about the bear; and many more. I’m hoping they’ll let me post my presentation somewhere, but in any case, it’s meant to become part of my chapter for Joseph Weigel’s forthcoming book Planet Thulcandra: Science and Magic in That Hideous Strength.
Then I did a recording for The Plunge: Conversations on Theology, Philosophy, and Culturewith Derek Holser. That episode isn’t out yet (and won’t be for a while; Derek is very organized and has his podcast planned out a good way into the future), but wow! was that a rewarding dialogue. The idea is to take our time and go deep into a subject, so we did. Derek always begins by asking his guests to tell their life story so far, and he encourages vulnerablity, which led me to share some things I haven’t talked about publicly before. We chatted about Sehnsucht and magic before getting to the real topic: Tolkien’s narrators. I’m no expert in the minutiae of JRRT lore, but I think we did reasonably well. You let me know if you agree!
The next thing that’s been taking up a ton of my time is setting up my new YouTube Channel and revamping the Wyrdhoard website to support the new projects and content I’m planning. These include:
- YouTube shorts on the Inklings and Writing Tips
- The class on The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, for which I made a fancy promo video
- The class on Shakespeare & Justice, offered through Politics & Prose bookstore
- A new podcast (which will start out with re-releases of episodes from the old podcast) on public rhetoric, writing in the age of AI, the Inklings & magical modernism, and writing more effectively.
This is a lot, and I’m still trying to finish up the lectures for the Teaching Company and keeping up with work for my clients! Meanwhile, our smoke alarms malfunctioned and have been going off every couple of hours all night, so I’m here writing and video-editing instead of sleeping. Ah, well. I’m grateful for the energy to be productive.
I’d be honored if you’d like, subscribe, post, tweet, comment, forward, recommend, and all the things. What new projects do you have underway? Please let me know in the comments.
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