October 20, 2010

Author Diana Glyer to Speak at the Wade Center on
“C.S. Lewis’s Fingerprints on the Map of Middle-Earth”

Author Diana Pavlac Glyer, presents a lecture titled “C.S. Lewis’s Fingerprints on the Map of Middle-Earth,” at 4 p.m. Wednesday, October 20. The topic of her talk is based on her study of collaboration among the Inklings, which was completed using resources at the Marion E. Wade Center.

Dr. Glyer is the author of The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Her book reveals the behind-the-scenes story of how Lewis, Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and other Inklings influenced each other’s works and accomplishments. This engaging work was published in 2007 and in the words of Wade Center Associate Director Marjorie Lamp Mead, “deserves a place in the library of all those who value the works of the Inklings.”

Dr. Glyer is a professor of English at Azusa Pacific University and was the winner of the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies in 2008. Copies of her book will be available for sale at the event.

This lecture is free and open to the public. It takes place at The Marion E. Wade Center, located at 351 E. Lincoln Avenue in Wheaton (campus map).

The Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College is a special library, archives, and museum devoted to the works of seven British authors including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, and Owen Barfield. Wheaton College (Wheaton, Ill.) is a coeducational Christian liberal arts college noted for its rigorous academics, integration of faith and learning, and consistent ranking among the top liberal arts colleges in the country.

I received this heartening note from my friend David Bratman:

I am reading a small book called Shakespeare's Modern Collaborators by Lukas Erne (London: Continuum, 2008), and found this gratifying, and rather familiar-sounding, statement in the Introduction (p. 1):

"Shakespeare's play texts as they reach us are the result of collaboration. What this emphasis on collaboration entails is a view of Shakespeare that contradicts a Romantic understanding, or misunderstanding, of Shakespeare as a solitary genius whose original ideas found direct and perfect expression in his plays, unhampered by any material and social constraints.  Rather, a well-informed view of Shakespeare needs to start with the acknowledgement that what we think of as Shakespeare's plays have been shaped by at least four different forms of collaboration."

And he enumerates them:

1) Actual co-authorship of some plays
2) Collaboration with actors, including writing parts with specific actors in mind to play them, and playhouse alteration of the text, particularly abridgment
3) Printers, who introduced "alterations, omissions, substitutions, transpositions, interpolations, as well as additions"
4) Modern editors, whose choices of texts and of corrections tremendously affects our view of the text.

And #4 is what the book is about, hence the title.

Yessir. That's what I'm talking about.

Today this notice flitted across my FaceBook NewsFeed: another collaborative project, this one with Jeff Johnson. Phil Keaggy is one of the all-time biggest talents out there. He stays fresh and relevant and inspired by continuing to work closely with others.

The rest of us should take note.

In January 2009, guitarist, Phil Keaggy and keyboardist, Jeff Johnson shared their musical talents and ideas as part of the annual retreat of the Chrysostom Society - a group of writers and poets - at Laity Lodge in the hill country of Texas. They had met before on several occasions and had even sent musical ideas back and forth to one another on behalf of another producer for a book on CD. But it was in this place “where heaven and earth meet” that a friendship was born between the two musicians. It wasn’t long before a musical collaboration was also begun through the internet between Phil’s home studio in Nashville, TN and Jeff’s facility on Camano Island, WA. The result is this original recording in collaboration with images by artist, Kathy Hastings and a poem by Luci Shaw.

The river, up to the ankles,
invites our feet to test its depth and learn
through the skin of our soles
how water chisels limestone, first laying it down,
then knuckling it, leaving the long print of fluid
all along the stream bed. We discover
what it might be like to walk on water,
and how the stone itself supports the flow
as it composes its own fluid music,
a naked sound around us as we wade,
a lilt that lifts the heart.
Together, sun and stone and water write
their rippling continuo between the hills.
Sometimes the lens of water, like an eye,
deepens to a blue profundity, the way
music needs no words,
being its own language.

~ By Luci Shaw
Poet, author What the Light Was Like,
Writer in Residence, Regent College

For more information about this collaboration, check it out at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KchWP2RKawI