Greetings, my dears! Here’s a little update on the things I’ve been making for you recently. Some are gifts I’m freely giving you; others are professional projects through which I’m earning a living, but all are crafted and created with love towards my readers, viewers, listeners, friends, and family. I hope you’ll find something here you’re eager to unwrap and enjoy.
Classes and YouTubes and Podcasts, Oh My!
The project I’m currently most excited about is my Lion, Witch & Wardrobe class. In preparing and teaching this course, I’ve discovered the very great depths and layers of this supposedly simple children’s story and come to appreciate again the rich meaning it conveys. I love exploring its truths and challenges with a smart group of students. Now, the class is available to you in two formats. I’ll be offering a shortened live class through Politics & Prose on January 20th and 27th. If you want recordings of the longer version, you can buy my brand-new LWW Coursepack! I’m quite pleased to have gotten those classes edited and compiled for you so that you can enjoy them at your leisure or give them as a gift to someone else.
I’ve also had fun putting some content up on YouTube, most notably a Narnian Countdown to Christmas. Although Christmas Day 2025 has passed, we’re still in the 12 Days of Christmas, so why not go and have a look? I’ll probably either re-edit or re-record and re-release these at some point as a free mini-class on YouTube. There’s some other stuff on my channel, too, such as a little piece about what I’ll be offering in 2026 and recordings of the two talks I gave in Kansas at the Eighth Day Institute about Tolkien & Williams’s friendship and about one of CW’s dense Arthurian poems.
The most significant stuff on my YouTube channel so far, however, is all found in my podcast, WORDS DO THINGS, which is where I’ve been investing a ton of time. I’m trying to get such a variety of content on there that people of differing beliefs and backgrounds will feel represented. I just released an interview with a lesbian Lutheran minister who gives a history of the word “queer” and talks about Jesus as a divine female figure. I’ve got an episode scheduled with a right-wing Charlie Kirk fan who wants to eradicate the word “transwoman.” There’s one with an activist whose husband has just been released from ICE custody after several months without necessary medical care; she thinks detainees are being murdered by being dumped into the ocean out of military aircraft. I talked in a solo episode about how to stop fighting so bitterly with one another over words. So check it out if that sounds interesting, please. Heck, even if you’re not interested, do me a favor, will you? Press play, mute it, and let it run in the background so that I get more views and the algorithm likes me better! 🙂
And here’s a news flash that will probably please you: When I finished the current series on “Bad Words,” I intend to switch topics and talk about what J. R. R. Tolkien believed about the power of words. Won’t that be grand?!
Of course, I’m plugging along with the draft of my book The Oddest Inkling: An Introduction to Charles Williams. I’ve got a massive, sprawling, unreadable version with all of the content roughly where it needs to go; now I’m going through, one sentence and paragraph at a time, revising into readable prose, nicely-organized units, the right tone, and a reasonable order. Whew, it’s a time-consuming process! But as Yeats wrote: “a line will take us hours maybe.” The Friday before Christmas, I spent 5 hours working on one sentence! Gotta pick up the pace if I hope to finish this book before I die or become senile.
If any of this stuff interests you, especially if you want to provide feedback on my works in progress or get input from a loving, lively group of writerly friends on your own drafts, please consider joining my Author’s Circle! Members get access to my writing, monthly meetings to talk about my work, and monthly meetings to share their own work! It’s really like a little Inklings of our own.
Let’s see, what else. Oh, there’s my real job: I’ve got great editorial work for clients underway. Our current projects include an historical and psychological memoir; an article about Lewis and Barfield; a YA time-travel portal fiction adventure novel; a thoughtful Tolkien fan-fic; a science-fiction first-contact novel with theological significance; a study of C.S. Lewis’s Irishness; and a life-journey quasi-autobiographical novel. I have space in my schedule for a few more clients, so if you’re looking for a beta reader, developmental editor, or writing coach, please let me know!
I also led a reading and discussion of The House by the Stable recently for the Inkling Folk Fellowship and taught a Sunday School class for some United Methodists on C. S. Lewis’s “On Learning in War-Time” (that didn’t go over very well) and another on Malcolm Foley’s book The Anti-Greed Gospel (that went very well!).
I’ve got some podcast recordings coming up, plans for a Charles Williams course in February, and some other juicy offerings for further in the future. Stay tuned, keep writing, and make beautiful things!
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