When I began blogging all those digital generations ago (2011), I decided that I was not going to apologize to readers when I missed a week. I would do what I liked and write whatever I wanted. As this is my 1302nd post, perhaps it was an unnecessary resolution. Once I found my feet, I doubt I missed more than a handful of weeks in the first decade of A Pilgrim in Narnia. It turns out I was good at this. I discovered that loved blogging. So, I poured thousands of hours into making A Pilgrim in Narnia the best piece of art that I could offer the world.

As a result of that hard work–and a good deal of algorithmic serendipity, no doubt–A Pilgrim in Narnia has has met all of my goals. The blog has done precisely what I meant it to do, allowing me to test material, hone my craft, and extend my reach.

First, I wanted a sandbox for playing with ideas about literature, film, world-building, literary criticism, fan writing, and theology. I designed this blog to be a place for academic experimentation and intellectual discussion. While readers may not always catch the links between what I talk about here and my academic writing and teaching, I am actively testing out ideas and taking scholarly risks on A Pilgrim in Narnia.

From a “Lit Blog” perspective, perhaps my core metaphor of a “Pilgrim” is a better word image than playing in a sandbox. I am trying to invite readers to join other pilgrims on the palmer’s way into all kinds of new worlds, like Narnia, Middle-earth, Discworld, Lilliput, Earthsea, New Urth, Panem, Ringworld, Oz, the Enderverse, the Field of Arbol, ancient Avalon and Númenor, the worlds of Harry Potter or the Dark Tower, Jane Austen‘s drawing-room, the New England states of H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King, Neil Gaiman‘s London or America, or L.M. Montgomery‘s land of wonder, Prince Edward Island. By going into that land, we are shaped and challenged and given new visions of what is good and true and beautiful. I am pleased to be both a guide and follower in this journey.

Reading is a pilgrimage of the mind and heart. So is writing. My second main goal was to hone my craft. From the beginning, I have been intentional about learning to write well and in many different modes. While I have not succeeded in creating an error-free first draft, and my spelling is atrocious (a nod to Grammarly here), my writing is more clear and vivid than a decade ago. I am still working on being concise, I’m afraid–and this challenge has winded me. However, the more I practice, the more I realize that I need to write in order to know what I really think.

Third, I began A Pilgrim in Narnia to extend my reach. Honestly, the statistics are kind of amazing for a niche, academic blog. We are likely to have our 2,000,000th viewer later this Spring. Sure, a lot of that is simply that Google trusts me as a content provider because of some algorithmic choice in its make-up. Still, the response has been startling because, often enough, my writing is made up of half-finished essays, incomplete ideas, and off-the-cuff supposals and suppositions that have varying levels of irresponsibility and thoughtfulness. Moreover, I write what I want. Sure, I occasionally create a clickbaity title or share a more broadly applicable resource. But I have never written for the sake of numbers.

Or even readers–though that is why these words are public rather than private. I create content because I love creating the content. That’s it. Academic responsibility, literary neighbourliness, and a teaching vocation are often my motivation for taking a rough note and making a carefully curated post of one kind or another. But I only do what I love.

The stats are cool, no doubt–and helpful in a certain kind of way. Occasionally, someone is impressed–though rarely my students, unless they are writers, designers, or social-media engaged.

But I have to confess–have I done so already?–that my drive to extend my reach was more than just making a difference in the worlds of readers and fans. I knew early on that I was not likely to get a tenure-track position at the University where I have now worked for 18 years. Despite winning awards, training thousands of students, and teaching more that 60 courses at cut-rate pay, I suspected that I would be unlikely to land a position.

I was right: I am still a nomad here, around when UPEI needs cheap teachers or a colleague in my discipline is on leave. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I share an office with all the Poli Sci, Philosophy, and Religious Studies adjuncts. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I am with my (pretty awesome) Inquiry Studies team. I love the people I work with. I love these students and I get to teach in creative ways. I love this campus and my Deans have been kind to me. But I remain an alien here. My name is never on an office door unless I have it printed out from a Canva template. I am here until they decide they are done with me, or I say the wrong thing in public, or until I am all used up.

UPEI leaders have intentionally designed the system so that I would continue to be under-resourced and alienated. They want it this way. And I choose to be here.

So since I was never going to be “Professor of Theology” or “Associate Professor of Speculative Literature and Contemporary Culture” or “Chair of Curiosity Studies,” I needed to make my own lectern. I needed a space to speak from. Thus, I worked hard on A Pilgrim in Narnia so that it could become a platform. Instead of a grand title, when I blurb a book–like James Como’s Mystical Perelandra–I have “A Pilgrim in Narnia” instead of University of Metrocity or St. Fabulouso College. I like how it looks on Matthew Dickerson‘s upcoming book, Aslan’s Breath, the simple note:

Brenton Dickieson, Curator of A Pilgrim In Narnia.

Not that I would turn down a research and teaching post, if you happen to have one laying around. It’s just that I am glad that blogging has given me a connection with other scholars and fellow fans, so I can be the “A Pilgrim in Narnia” guy whether I’m speaking in Oxford or teaching a local Senior’s College class.

Not that it’s perfect. In one of my retrospectives, I wrote:

The only thing the blog hasn’t done is get me a book deal, land me a major award, provide me an invitation to speak in a warm spot in winter, put me in line for a tenure-track position, or get me a chance to argue about Tolkien with Stephen Colbert.

I’m still waiting for Colbert‘s team to call and I really would love a flight to just about anywhere in the midst of a Canadian winter. But since starting A Pilgrim in Narnia, I have had hundreds of connections in panels, guest lectures, workshops, podcasts, documentaries, book clubs, and social media events. I work with Signum University and taught for six winters at The King’s College in New York City on the strength of this blog. I haven’t gained a tenure-track invitation, but my portfolio has landed me chances to develop scholarship in new ways, like hosting the MaudCast or teaching in Applied Communications, Leadership, and Culture.

And, it turns out, A Pilgrim in Narnia did land me a contract with a major book publisher. More on that another time, but I am pretty chuffed.

Beyond the big blog numbers and the international media attention in major urban markets, as a reader, writer, and teacher–jeepers, as a fan, a nerd, a lover of things he loves–A Pilgrim in Narnia has opened for me a world of wonderful connections. Because, beyond all else, I wanted to create a space for reading well. Good readers are less rare than I once thought they were, but the list of our allies is becoming rather thin. I feel rich in friends in these digital realms, which then tumble into the three-dimentional life I live.

There were also goals that I adapted as I grew. For example, as I confessed in my 700,000th view party in February 2019, I was still trying to work out my time balance. Back then, I was six weeks from finishing the solid first draft of my thesis, so it really was on my mind.

And as I matured and my work and dreams evolved over the years–and as social conversations changed in form–I began to press in on the advice I gave to others in my post, “The 5 Most Common Mistakes Bloggers Make.” I have defined myself (#2) over the years, but I have been content to be a bit loose on the edges. I can make links between C.S. Lewis and L.M. Montgomery easily enough, but my fellow Prince Edward Island author seems pretty distant from Dante or Nnedi Okorafor. I’m fine with that, and readers over the years have been content to ignore lots of what I’ve written, I’m sure. After all, I produced and published such exciting resources as the chart on the left.

A great deal of what I have done here is addressing flaw #3, “They Don’t Translate.” A Pilgrim in Narnia is not just a public-facing place for scholarship, but is meant to be an honest engagement with various academic, literary, and readerly worlds I inhabit. Indeed, with Tolkien studies, it is often hard to distinguish a knowledgeable fan from someone who is writing critical scholarship simply by their Quenya accent. I have never written or spoken about Tolkien without learning something from a reader or audience member who simply knew much more than me and could awaken me to myriad links within the Legendarium.

What about the #1 mistake, “They Don’t use WordPress”? Well, I do, though their “helpful new accessible features” are making it more and more burdensome to work here. Long before WordPress tried to Instagramize writing, I became content with the spirit of that law in that I did not update the website design. I liked the image of someone walking down the road in the woods that came free when I first made this space. I have begun the redesign now, but failing to keep my finger on the cultural moment of design and thought, I have consistently made the mistakes people make when producing social content.

And, well … it worked. It all worked. By that, I don’t mean a particular level of popularity or literary quality. I mean the whole thing.

It worked and I wrote–and kept writing. In the decade beginning with my first calendar year of blogging (2012), I published between 100,000 and 200,000 words on A Pilgrim in Narnia. It has been wonderful.

Beginning in the Fall of 2022, my productivity slowed and I exceeded my mental bandwidth. I burnt out. I had lots to say, but I lost my ability to say it. Over the last couple of years, I have written 74 draft posts–but I could finish none of them. The mental magic that makes me a creative teacher and scholar is my ability to grasp ideas and talk about them in crisp, tight, meaningful ways. Ideas bump together in my head, readings and rereadings find their meaning, and I see things in ways others don’t–or cannot–see.

Suddenly–it seemed sudden at the time–the magic was gone. Bright shiny digital conversation spaces became tarnished. I became muddled or overly complex in my thinking. I am a scholar of words and I lost my words. There was just nothing left.

2022 overwhelmed my senses, exhausting me utterly. I began to have serious gaps in my memory of the last couple of years–an experience I haven’t had since the illness and death of my mother in 2016. On Dec 21st, 2022, I submitted my final student grades and fell into bed, ill. I missed Christmas, for the most part. It was more than a week before I began to emerge. It was pretty scary.

I had had some warning signs. I know that PhD’s often experience burnout, though I felt pretty good in the months after my Viva on Labour Day Weekend, 2019. In the February 2020 graduation ceremony at the University of Chester, someone tweeted a congratulations note with a pic of the program. I was enjoying my teaching, and had reconfigured my whole writing curriculum to integrate Lego as a tactile activity and visual illustration. I was preaching a 10-episode series on “Remembering Heaven” in my local church while a pastor was on furlough. I was enjoying rewritng my thesis into a book and reconnecting with some friends that seemed distant in the last year of the PhD. I pitched a series of conference papers for May and June 2020, and looked forward to returning to the Marion E. Wade centre in Wheaton, IL (the Inklings archive).

And then the world ended. Depending on which political party you support or resist in whatever country you are from, you experienced COVID-19 quite differently. The newest plague and stay-at-home orders inspired a fun blogging series on C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces. However, it also brought on a tremendous amount of work, as we redesigned our courses and student supervision for a remote emergency format. I had designed a lot of online and distance education curriculum, but this was trying to recreate the much different experience of live learning in poorly designed digital spaces. I cannot emphasize this enough: it was so much work.

And, of course, I was not paid for much of it.

As we moved from semester to semester in a pandemic environment, I found I had to be constantly redesigining my modes of work. Not intentional redesign in a desire to increase the value of my writing and teaching, but reactive and frantic adaptations to unpredictable challenges. At first, I was from hopping from term to term. Eventually, I was lurching from week to week, waiting for the next door to close.

And some doors did close. The King’s College is a brilliant undergraduate Liberal Arts program, and it fell to financial pressures last year. Since 2005, I have been teaching at my alma maters Regent College in Vancouver and Maritime Christian College in Charlottetown. In 2020, I gladly helped Regent’s very cool faculty team with some tips for online teaching, and they discovered they had new tools at their fingertips. Without fanfare or even a note of thanks, my fifteen years of distance ed teaching ended. Maritime Christian College also found its way into cyberspace modes and graduated its last cohort of local, live, in-class students. I taught two dozen courses there over the years, and during COVID I taught my last group of Greek students. I love teaching Greek.

So it has been emotionally hard, financially distressing, and physically exhausting.

And the work is unending. Last spring, we had a month-long faculty strike, where once more UPEI administrators were offered a chance to treat long-term faculty members as integral to their educational vision, not contingent or extraneous. They declined, and spent more than $1,000,000 of government and student dollars to ensure that an entire class of underlings is there to support the luxuries of administrative pay and faculty security.

Even with very supportive colleagues, it was discouraging. Even with a very cool curriculum to teach, it was hard to return to campus this fall. My son was walking across our heritage quad with me a few months ago and said, “I think I would love to make this campus home.” I did not answer, but my response was very clear:

So do I. I wish I had a home here. I wish I was truly welcome.

This discouragement came on the heals of unending work and a minor but personal heartbreak. In the weeks and months after Hurricane Fiona hit Prince Edward Island on Sep 23rd, 2022, I continued to be deluged with work.

At home and in our institutions, we were clearly not ready for a full hurricane. The first deluge was literal: we fought to keep water out of our house and to get the water out of my office and library.

Then, the second deluge: we were 12 days without electricity. That’s 12 days in the capital city of a Canadian Province! The storm knocked out the entire grid, and daily life became this huge affair of protecting the house from water damage, keeping freezers cool (we lost our fridge food), keeping neighbours safe, cleaning up all the downed trees, and keeping my in-laws’ home safe and comfortable. As mid-autumn nights set in, there was no way to heat their house.

The third deluge is the administrative work that has followed. I had worked almost without a breath through 2022, teaching 6 new university classes (though one was a Narnia study, so mostly design and student support, not lecture prep), producing and delivering 3 academic papers and 5 other public lectures, and writing a major grant application (about 550-600 hours of work). Sep 21st, 2022 came, the grant was submitted, I slept, and then the storm hit on the 23rd.

And here, in the deluge of work, I was swept away in a current stronger than Atlantic hurricanes or institutional abuse. I stared at a screen with 582 unread email. I could find no time to write–or, when there was time, no words to align my thoughts with. I missed manuscript deadlines and went weeks and months without seeing my friends. I dropped every digital connection possible to maintain a few.

And I lost opportunities. I have 5 great guest essays ready to appear on A Pilgrim in Narnia from 5 very interesting scholars and writers, and I cannot do the two-hour job of editing and setting them. They are good pieces, too. You will like them. I had a book project fail and missed a chance at a small research fellowship. I have had to cancel a pretty great Signum SPACE class scheduled for this winter. In 2020, I began saying “no” to most invitations to speak or write something. In 2021, I turned the tap off completely, turning down every invitation, even if it paid or could make a transformative difference in someone’s life. I missed so very much. I went several months without pay. And still, the deluge of work has overwhelmed me.

It has been hard.

Sadly, gladly … I’m not sure … but many of the things that have made me exhausted are wonderful.

My last year of Greek at MCC was one of my favourite classes every, and led to a reading group.

I was paid full-time to teach Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture for two terms, and taught brilliant courses–including one of my most meaningful capstone-course teaching experience, and two chances to teach “C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia: Leadership, Communication, and Culture” … I just love teaching that class. Our Inquiry Studies team at UPEI has started the Curiosity and Inquiry Research Collaborative Lab (CIRCL), and we have our own lab space (I call it the “Room of Inquirement,” but I don’t know if that’ll catch on). I am extending my foundation-year teaching in new directions and am a coach for Signum University.

I had two long-term projects go into peer-review, open-access publication, and won the L.M. Montgomery Institute’s 2020 Elizabeth R. Epperly Early Career Paper Award. I became the host of the MaudCast and got to appear in full-beard on a very cool documentary. I have been invited to blurb or provide feedback on a handful of great books. I have loved every one of the talks and lectures I have done during the COVID era, even though most were online. I did my first keynote lectures with a “Dr.” in front of my title. I taught super cool short courses like “Spirituality in the Writing of L.M. Montgomery” at the Atlantic School of Theology and a rereading of Anne of Green Gables with a fantasy lens for SPACE. I have been allowed to do guest lectures for the Center for Theology, Spirituality, and Ministry at Northwind Seminary. Even though I couldn’t be live in Iași, Romania, they let me pre-record and share my talk, “Passports to the Geography of Fairyland: Can C.S. Lewis and L.M. Montgomery be Kindred Spirits?” I was a guest DJ on CBC radio.

It has been such a brilliant season of the mind!

And my son is grown, and is a punk studying music at Holland College’s School of Performing Arts. He writes great songs and my wife is a superstar Kindergarten teacher, and it is wonderful, even when it is hard.

On the scholar-writer-teacher front, most exciting of all, I had my manuscript accepted at my dream University Press and breezed through peer review. I am absolutely loving this final rewriting draft.

Do you see how cool all that is? Who needs a salary and health care from an employer when I get to do all that stuff?

It turns out, I do. When I say “it broke,” I mean also that I broke.

There was the burn out at the end of 2022, which I’ve described. I reduced my work in 2023 and began to put some new habits in my life. I began seeing a counselor and took some health advice. I even booked a 6-night Mexico vacation with my family to give myself space to heal. And it worked! I came back from Mexico a new man.

However, there is damage done. I had been a NO-VID until August 2023, when I tested COVID positive and had a week of pretty normal cold symptoms. I recovered and began a new term. Soon, though, I was sleeping through entire weekends after a week of pretty normal work. By October, I was having to take sensory breaks between sessions or classes. On Hallowe’en, a migraine set in, and I lost nearly a week. After that, I could not tolerate bright light or noises. And I was still sleeping whenever I lay my head down.

Most significantly, besides the pain and exhaustion, I could not tolerate computer screens for more than a few minutes at a time. I went from my normal 8-10 hours a day on a computer to struggling to get 2 hours. Unsurprisingly, student assessment didn’t go away. Notes of support to students, feedback, administration–all those things continued at their normal pace, but I was working at 20% capacity. Every day, I was turning out all the lights in my office or sneaking into an unused storage space and wrapping my jacket around my head. I would then sit in the dark until the dizziness and confusion went away.

Most tragic of all–at least in my strange brain–I had been having so much fun with my book, and I could not do more than 15 minutes a day on it. It has been painful at many levels.

“Are you well?” people ask me. I guess we are supposed to lie and say fine. Here on PEI, they say, “How’r’ye now?” and we are supposed to respond, “** Looks like weather’s coming.” (the ** is an unpronounceable affirmative intake of breath in our local accent” But I have not been well, and it doesn’t seem to matter if weather is coming or not.

At some point in November, I clued in to the fact that I may have Long Covid symptoms. As there is no diagnostic for Long Covid, and no cure, deciding that wouldn’t help me much. Except that it did one thing: Normally, I have been taught to power through pain, disillusion, busyness, illness, and stress. Sick days aren’t a luxury provided to me, but they aren’t in my moral makeup anyway. With Long Covid, powering through makes you more ill. Instead of trying harder, I had to learn where my limits were, and respect them.

In mid-December, I started to recover. I am now up to 60% capacity, I think. I turned down a couple of contracts and am now trying to recover time I lost with Signum University and the MaudCast. It is slow and a bit frustrating, but no longer so terrifying.

Through this … illness–I struggle even to write that, because there is something in me that thinks illness is a cop out, a shamre–through this illness, there have been two blessings.

First, I could read. I read a lot, including every back issue of the New York C.S. Lewis Society newsletter back to 2018, especially Dale Nelson’s “Jack and the Bookshelf.” I read poetry and my friends’ work. Reading worked for me–though I still cannot tolerate much time with audiobooks.

Second, strangely, throughout all of this Long Covidicity, I was very cheerful. I had trouble feeling despair. I felt stress and guilt, but not hopelessness. Without evidence, without any sign of it being true, I felt like this would pass.

How do I even explain it all? I have written and rewritten this post many times. In December, I was working on “A Cheerfully Weary Christmas Letter to My Readers.” Before that, it was “Feeling Failure in a Successful Year.” “The Wearying One-Thing-After-Anotherness of Things” was another title I considered, and quite like. Finally, I settled on this line that L.M Montgomery used to summarize the weariness of her last decade in a letter to G.B. MacMillan on Sep 3rd, 1925:

“the hateful feeling of breathlessness I have had for years”

“Breathless, breathless. Everything is breathless.” It’s been a while since I studied it, but that’s a way of translating Qohelet’s nihilistic complaint in Ecclesiastes. “Breathless” is a good word. Unlike “vanity,” my breathless chasing after the wind has beauty and purpose. Like I said: I have been cheerful. I did not sink to the depths of despair. It is hard. I am humbled as I try to rebuild my research, teaching, and writing toolkit. But I have hope there too.

So, what is this? It isn’t a break-up letter. I love A Pilgrim in Narnia and what it is, both for me and in the world. Neither is this an apology. I have a twinge of regret for the weeks I have missed, and some frustration for the remaining 73 drafts I can’t seem to finish. But to apologize is to presume I owe you something. I refuse to think of it that way. My words and design here are a gift to you, only if you want it. When you read, comment, share, critique, encourage, and use my work in your research or classroom, you give me a gift. When you read well and write well–even if I never see it–you bless me. I share these lines of lovely nonsense and sensitive readings not because we are caught in a social or economic contract, but because it is art. It is gift. It is possibility. A Pilgrim in Narnia is a companion to my work in the classroom and research. It is something beautiful I make–at least beautiful to me.

I want to keep writing and making because it is bound up with the calling that is at the very centre of my being. I curate A Pilgrim in Narnia because I want to.

What’s next? I don’t know. This week, I am stronger than the previous two weeks, but more dizzy and tired than the first week of January. I don’t know what comes next–though I am hoping to publish a guest post every couple of weeks. But I really don’t know. Perhaps successive apocalypses of plague and political strife and environmental catastrophe will once again set me off kilter from my usual writing and editing productivity. Perhaps I will lose that ability to do lots of things at once, which I love. Maybe my divergent, planets-colliding, curiosity-oriented magic as a teacher and thinker will never return. I cannot know.

For, after all, my struggle has never been any one thing, in particular. As a leader and teacher, the one-thing-after-anotherness of it all is wearying. I hope, though, that A Pilgrim in Narnia will become part of the way that I catch my breath.

All my best wishes to you all in the newness of today and every day.

Brenton