On Wednesday, we’ll celebrate our 1,000th post on A Pilgrim in Narnia! Begun in 2011 as a sandbox project for thoughts about C.S. Lewis’ writings, the blog has certainly grown. With nearly 900,000 hits, 18,000 comments, 100 guest posts, and 7,500 followers from nearly 200 countries, the reach of this little academic project has grown past my wildest imagination.

So, we’re going to have a little party!

I honestly have no idea how to have a party on WordPress as there is really no such thing as a party for a Prince Edward Islander (or an Inkling!) that doesn’t include food and drink. So we’ll have to call it an at-home potluck and hope for the best. We will have a bit of a “highlights reel,” and a chance for you to share some of your favourite conversations. What’s your favourite book by C.S. Lewis? Now that Christopher Tolkien has died, what do you hope the next Middle-earth volume will be? Where should the field of Inklings Studies go? Are there any Inklings of the future writing today? What will adaptations of Inklings stories look like on film and TV in the 2020s?

Whatever we talk about, I hope it will be fun!

I will also host a little giveaway, with some C.S. Lewis resources including a 1st edition copy of The Great Divorce. It is not an expensive item (perhaps about $40 value), but a relatively rare souvenir of what I think is Lewis’ most important work of fiction (someday I’ll have to defend that claim!). There are some provisos below.

Here are some ways that you can join in the 1,000 Post Party and be eligible for a prize:

• Follow the Blog: You can click “follow” to read the blog in the WordPress Reader, or follow by email, or like the Pilgrim in Narnia facebook page

And do one or more of these three things:

• Share A Memory: On this post or on Wednesday’s party post, share your favourite blog, guest post, comment convo, or series on A Pilgrim In Narnia (if you share your memory here, that may jog some memories of my own)
• Share a Link: Reblog, facebook-share, or retweet this announcement, and then share the link to that share with the blog’s twitter account, @PilgrimInNarnia
• Share a Meal: Send a ham to a professor of literature in postwar country and get an entry! Okay, a ham may not be the best gift, and maybe you don’t know any professors in distress. But if you share on Wednesday’s post or tweet the deets to @PilgrimInNarnia that you have donated a meal to a family displaced by war, I will put in the draw

I appreciate the many great folks who share my work on facebook and other social media, but I don’t have a way to track those shares. This is basically a one entry per person kind of thing. My personal Twitter account is @BrentonDana, and I hope you will follow me there (I will follow back). I’m using @PilgrimInNarnia for this giveaway because I have a lot of @BrentonDana conversations that make it harder to track. Follow @PilgrimInNarnia and share this news for a chance to win.

I’ll also note that I can only mail the prizes to residents of Canada, the United States, or Europe, including the UK. My apologies to the world, but the UK, the US, and Canada do make up 90% of my visitors, and I have worked hard to make this blog free–even paying out of my own pocket to erase the ads. The giveaway books are from my own collection.  The copy of The Great Divorce is a 1st printing, 1st edition from 1945 without a dust cover, eminently readable in fair to good condition with some pencil marks. It is more of a personal collection than an investment. If a US reader wins, for safety reasons I may wait to mail with US post when I go there in May.

Hope to see you out on Wednesday where we can raise a digital and/or local glass and share some stories!