As I talk about in the piece I touched up and republished yesterday, “CSL:LMM, C.S. Lewis and L.M. Montgomery,” I have been playing with the ways that Montgomery and Lewis overlap–even though they are writers of a different generation, gender, style, voice, class, country, genre, education, religious perspective, literary goals, and public profile. My first foray into this question was a presentation that turned into a book chapter, “C.S. Lewis’ Theory of Sehnsucht as a Tool for Thinking About L.M. Montgomery’s Experience of ‘The Flash.’” You can find some conversation about the paper here, and the paper is now in The Faithful Imagination, edited by Joe Ricke and Ashley Chu. But the question of the CSL:LMM link continues to intrigue me.

After presenting my paper on “Sehsucht and The Flash” in 2018 at the C.S. Lewis and Friends Colloquium at Taylor University, I bumped into some of the nice folks from The C. S. Lewis Society of Central Indiana in the pop-up conference bookstore. We were chatting, which ultimately led to an invitation to speak with their august society on this Montgomery-Lewis link–no doubt because Anne of Green Gables remains such a hugely popular novel, and it is an angle into Lewis’ works that is a bit unusual.

Now, as members of Generation Zoom, we can cross time and space and I can attend their meeting without any great cost. So tonight I am speaking on “A Flash of Joy: Discussing C.S. Lewis and L.M. Montgomery” at The C. S. Lewis Society of Central Indiana, from 7-9pm Eastern time. I have a number of slides and points, but I hope it will be a conversational evening. You can see the poster below.

And you are welcome to join! You can check out their Facebook event page, or email cslewis.indy@gmail.com for the zoom link.

Perhaps you would like to do some reading or listening before the meeting. You can find the MaudCast on Spotify, Podbean, and others treaming sites. In this confessional article, I list my scholarship on Lewis and Montgomery, and in 2020 I summarized my Montgomery work up to that point. Since that point, I have had an article on Anne’s House of Dreams and theodicy win the Elizabeth R. Epperly Award for Outstanding Early Career Paper and slated for peer-review publication in 2021–provided I complete all the revisions well.

Poster Link in PDF: BD_Lewis_Montgomery_poster_2021_link