Greetings fellow pilgrims on the path of curiosity and imaginative adventure. Things have been quiet here on the blog front, but some great new things are happening in the background. One of these projects is a brand new short course with Signum University’s SPACE program. SPACE is an online, interactive, non-credit short course program. It is really quite a gorgeous program for folks who want to engage in great discussions and learn about things they love.

Last fall, I taught “Reading L.M. Montgomery as Fantasy: Anne of Green Gables,” and it was one of my favourite teaching experiences ever. In fact, there might be a chance to run the course again in November. If you are interested, you can “wish list” the course here. For details on SPACE, including the cost of courses ($100-$150 USD), click here.

This year, I am offering what I think is a unique approach both to C.S. Lewis and to creative writing as an art. “Ink Spots and Tea Stains: What We Learn from C.S. Lewis’s Writing Habits” is a confirmed October SPACE module. I have spent hundreds of hours in C.S. Lewis’s archives, working with original manuscripts and the various drafts in his writing process. I have studied his letters, diaries, and autobiographical materials to discern his process. And I have researched what we can know about Lewis as a prose writer and poet in all his modes, including experts like Walter Hooper (a literary secretary), Diana Pavlac Glyer (on creative collaboration and the Inklings), and Charlie Starr (who has developed a system of analyzing and dating Lewis’s handwritten manuscripts).

Without ignoring the lines themselves, what can we learn from C.S. Lewis about writing, imaginative expression, personal discipline, and literary subcreation when we look between, beside, and behind the lines.

The name for this course comes from my experience visiting the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and sitting with the manuscript of The Screwtape Letters. There were a number of ink spots–Lewis used writing technology that matched his creative process–and there was a prominent round stain from one of his mugs of tea on a neat, clean page. In that moment, I began to understand Lewis as an artist. I also realized that much of what has been said about Lewis the Writer needs some rethinking.

You can find out more about the course and how to register here. Let me know if you have any questions. http://blackberry.signumuniversity.org/r/n9xF0y

C.S. Lewis is one of the most prolific and influential writers of the 20th century. And yet, in his early career as an Oxford don, he viewed himself as a failed poet. Moreover, his most canonical and transformational writing happened during the most stress-filled periods of his life. This short course allows students to peek into the writing life of C.S. Lewis. Our goal is to see through the lines of printed text by visiting the letters and archival remains of Lewis in a virtual setting. Most of C.S. Lewis’s papers remain undigitized and unpublished, available only locally at archives in North America and England.

As Professor Brenton Dickieson has visited these archives, he is able to invite students to appreciate C.S. Lewis’s writing life by looking at the way that he consciously and unconsciously built his literary career. This course is for writers who are developing their own habits and literary life-prints, as well as folks who are curious about C.S. Lewis’s life beyond the biographies and bestselling books.

We are not doing text close readings, but looking at the “paratextual” information available to us: writing drafts, letters, diary entries, manuscripts and typescripts, titles, and the like.

Week 1: Lewis: Pen, Ink, Paper
• C.S. Lewis’s Single-jointed Self-Conception as a Writer
• What Lewis Says about his Writing Habits
• Legendary Bonfires, Stuffed Dolls, and American Suckers: A Story of Lewis’s Papers and Manuscripts
• The Screwtape MS. Story: Part 1

Week 2: Leaves, Bombs, Stains
• The Screwtape MS. Story: Part 2
• “Villainous Handwriting”: Charlie Starr’s Lewis Handwriting and Rough Draft vs. Fair Draft
• Reconsidering the Lindskoog Affair with Manuscript Evidence of “The Dark Tower”

Week 3: Joy, Theft, Death
• “The Quest of Bleheris”: Lewis’s Teenage Novel

Week 4: Hits and Mythes
• Is it True that Lewis Wrote in a Single Draft?
• A Grief Observed
• Tumbling Through the Wardrobe: The Discovery of Narnia
• Arthurian Torso
• A New Sketch of Lewis’s Writing Process(es)