Category Archives: books

by

Searching into the Inimitable: A Guide to Research on Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens sometimes referred to himself in correspondence as “The Inimitable,” and while it’s unclear whether this was meant to be straightforwardly hubristic or cheekily self-deprecating (knowing Dickens, it was probably both), the phrase has proven to be prescient. Dickens was an astonishingly prolific writer of journalism, fiction, letters, and plays; a mesmerizing performer of his own work; a passionate social critic, and the creator of some of the most memorable characters in the English language. So perhaps it goes without saying that the field open to the Dickens-focused researcher is deep and broad. Here is a guide to get you started.

Primary sources: Dickens wrote fourteen full-length novels (plus a good portion of an unfinished fifteenth, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which has spawned a cottage industry of potential endings), five Christmas novellas, many short stories and journalistic pieces (some comical, some melodramatic, some addressing social issues of his day), several theatrical works written for himself and his circle of friends to perform (Dickens was a talented actor who almost pursued a career on stage), and countless letters (including manuscript critiques from his time as a journal editor). Some of Dickens’ working journals, in which he outlined his novels and jotted down queries to ponder, also survive, along with extensive reworkings of his novels and stories that he created for his public readings. To borrow a line from Hamilton, Dickens wrote like he was running out of time. No Dickens researcher should feel obligated to read every word he wrote, but neither should any Dickens researcher attempt to write about him without making acquaintance with his work.

Other people’s reactions to Dickens are an important category of primary sources as well, including contemporary reviews of his works and accounts of his (literally?) mesmerizing performances at his public readings. You can find many of these quoted in secondary sources, but also check out historical periodicals databases, such as ProQuest’s British Periodicals Collection.

Contextual sources: Dickens undoubtedly helped to shape the Victorian period (the era spanning Queen Victoria’s reign, 1837-1903), but it also shaped him. Perhaps even more so, Dickens was marked by his childhood in the late Georgian period, which still contained elements of a pre-industrial “old England.” While Dickens’ works and especially his characters are often called “timeless,” he was a man of his time, and no serious Dickens researcher should ignore the historical and cultural contexts of his work. One of the best places on the internet to begin learning about 19th-century England is the Victorian Web (victorianweb.org), a massive, well-maintained site that combines contributions from scholars and readers around the world. (It also contains some articles about the pre-Victorian context of Dickens’ early years.) It’s also a good idea to read writings by and about Dickens’ contemporaries, some of whom were his close comrades and collaborators (Wilkie Collins) and others who were at times closer to frenemies (William Thackeray).

Scholarly works: Though in his own day, Dickens was sometimes dismissed as merely a popular entertainer, it didn’t take long for scholarly literary criticism to latch onto him. You can find scholarly monographs on Dickens through the lens of crime, the theater, the city of London, and many other topics. There are also many good biographies of Dickens, and while all will give you the same basic facts, each of the best ones has its own angle that makes it worth reading. (As one example, take Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens, which includes a number of interludes that imagine Dickens as a character in his own novels.) Dickens scholarship is regularly published in journals such as Victorian Studies and Dickens Quarterly, the official publication of the Dickens Society.

Fan productions: Not everyone who is a devoted reader and careful observer of Dickens is a scholar with a PhD and access to channels of peer-reviewed publication, and thus researchers should not ignore the productions of fans. While the word “fan” itself might be anachronistic in the context of Dickens, the phenomenon of fandom is not; Dickens’ serial novels had people lining up outside booksellers eager to get their hands on the next installment, and his public appearances (especially during his 1842 American tour and his famous readings later in life) filled auditoriums with people desperate to get a glimpse of him. Dickens’ fans range from prominent 20th-century writers such as G. K. Chesterton (who also wrote some “legitimate” scholarly work on Dickens) to the contributors on the Charles Dickens thread on fanfiction.net (there are quite a few). While the world of fan-produced writing is a bit of a Wild West, requiring the researcher to apply non-traditional methods of assessing credibility, research in this realm can yield exciting results.

Adaptations: Dickens may be the most adapted writer of all time. People were adapting his work even before he finished writing his first novel—the loose (indeed, almost non-existent) copyright laws of the time, and the fact that Dickens published his novels in serial, allowed unscrupulous publishers and low-brow theater impresarios (not that Dickens had anything against low-brow theater as such) to come out with speculative endings to his works before Dickens himself had a chance to finish the stories. The tradition of adapting Dickens’ work for the page (see recent novels such as Drood and Death and Mr. Pickwick), the stage, and eventually the screen has continued, and the various interpretations of his characters and stories can provide the researcher with nuanced insights. Besides that, many of them are purely fun to read or watch. Dickens’ works, with their visually abundant settings and the exaggerated mannerisms of many of the characters, lend themselves particularly well to theater and film.

This brief guide has barely begun to plumb the depths of knowledge available to the Dickens researcher. May it introduce you to a lifelong friend.

by

book recommendation: Mariner

I’ve just finished what will probably turn out to be my favorite book read in 2024. (I think it’s safe to make that prediction in mid-November.) I chose Malcolm Guite’s Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a possible book club option for the arts-focused life group we’re starting at church. I was excited about both the author and the subject matter. Malcolm Guite is a poet, scholar, rock band member, and Anglican priest. I’ve heard him read his own poetry in person and speak on some podcasts, and I like what he has to say (and his gravelly British voice) a lot. And of course, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the leaders of the English Romantic movement, both a brilliant Christian philosopher and a renowned poet, known especially for the haunting ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Guite’s book is both literary criticism and biography–an insightful analysis of the Rime and its famous gloss (explanatory notes Coleridge added later in his life), and a careful demonstration of how the text interweaves with the narrative of Coleridge’s own life, especially his tragic descent into opium addiction and eventual recovery. Even if you aren’t a poetry fan or don’t know anything about the English Romantics, you will enjoy this book if you believe nature speaks to us about God, if you like ghost stories and/or seafaring tales, or if you appreciate a great redemption story. You will be captivated both by Guite’s clear, beautiful prose and by Coleridge’s scintillating verse (quoted amply throughout the book–you don’t need to know it ahead of time) and fascinating letters and journals. It’s rare that I read a nonfiction book that I wished wouldn’t end, but this was one of them.

by

a poem to share

Last week I received a beautiful, thick volume of Victorian poetry, published as a textbook in the 1960s, with excellent editorial notes and a fantastic breadth of coverage. My only complaint about the book is that it inexplicably omits one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I’ve always been under the impression that this was one of his best-known poems, so all I can guess is that either its omission was a mistake or the editor was tired of hearing it. I’m not tired of hearing it, so I’m going to share it with you here. This poem is in the public domain, and I obtained this text from the ever-helpful poets.org. (The accented syllables are meant to receive emphasis. Try reading this poem aloud; it’s even better that way!)

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;	
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells	
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's	
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;	
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:	        
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;	
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,	
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.	
 
Í say móre: the just man justices;	
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;	        
Acts in God's eye what in God’s eye he is—	
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,	
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his	
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
by

Sunrise over the Sea of Tiberias

In my last post (which was longer ago than I realized!), I mentioned that I’m working on a couple of short stories based on the life of Jesus. I want to share the latest draft of one of those stories with you. This is based on chapter 21 of the gospel of John. I feel like it needs one more paragraph to bring it to a close at the end, so if you have any suggestions, I’m open!

The sun was just starting to rise over the Sea of Tiberias. An orange glow crossed by thin dark clouds. The air was still chilly.

Some of us had gone fishing overnight. It had been Peter’s idea; he’d said he wanted to do something with his hands.

“But we’re not fishermen anymore,” Andrew had pointed out.

“What are we, then?” Peter had argued. That had silenced Andrew. “Besides, we’re not going to sell them,” Peter had said. “I just want to do something.”

Not all of us were trained as fishermen, but those who were gave us things to do, to keep us busy. We sat in the boat all night, quiet in the dark, drained of stories from the past week.

As the sun began to rise, we headed back to shore. A silhouette of a man was standing there. I shivered. He called out: “I guess you guys didn’t catch any fish?”

I thought I recognized the man’s voice, but I didn’t want to say it. I glanced at the others.

“No,” Peter called out. He didn’t sound irritated, just tired.

The man called back: “Let down your net on the right side of the boat. I think you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

Someone gasped. I saw John smile and nod. “Do it,” said Peter. Of course we did. I wasn’t there three years ago, but I’d heard the story dozens of times.

Immediately, the net was full of fish. This was not a surprise—again we all knew what to expect—but it still took my breath away. I paused to gasp some air into my lungs. “Grab the net!” James hollered. I did. But even with all of us pulling, we couldn’t get the net into the boat.

“Drag it in,” said Peter. “I’m going to talk to Jesus.” He took off his coat and jumped into the chilly water.

The orange glow was spreading up from the horizon. James and John got us into the little boat, not the main boat, so we could pull the net into shore without having to weigh anchor. My job was to hold onto the net for dear life.

When we got to shore, there was a small coal fire with bread toasting over it. Just when I realized I was hungry, the man raised his head from the deep consultation he had been in with Peter and smiled. It was unmistakably Jesus. There was a moment when I forgot he had been dead a week before. I remembered when he pushed his hair off his forehead and when I saw the ugly scar in his hand. “I’m making breakfast for us,” he said. “Hand me a couple of those fish.”

I grabbed two of the fish from the teeming pile. They were cold, and a ray of sun shone off their silver scales. I placed them in Jesus’ hands, which were warm from the fire. “Thank you,” he said, looking in my eyes, and it sounded like a blessing. I didn’t know what to say, and Peter looked eager to continue their talk, so I turned back toward the net. “We should count these,” Thomas said.

“Why?” I frowned. “We’re not going to sell them.”

“Someone will want to record the number.” He gestured toward the others. At least two of them were writing down their experiences with Jesus. I was just trying to make sense of it all in my head.

“Is the number important?” I looked at the net. It was just a small one, not a big commercial net like I’d seen some of the fancier-looking fleets have. But it was bursting, a multitude of fish now glowing with the fire of the mostly risen sun.

Thomas shrugged, already spreading out a canvas for them to dry. “Anything might be important.”

So, I helped. As Peter remained in hushed conversation with Jesus, who listened carefully as he turned the fish over the fire, as James and John mended a net just on the edge of their discussion, as Nathanael walked the beach alone, picking up driftwood for the fire, I helped Thomas count the fish. There were 153.

The sun had fully risen when Jesus said, “Breakfast is ready.” He broke the bread and passed it around. He burned his fingers on the fish as he divided it up. The skin was salty and crispy and the flesh flaky, and I didn’t know if it was because God had cooked this fish or because Jesus of Nazareth just had a lot of practice preparing food in the open air. But it was perhaps the best fish I had ever eaten. The bread, too, was soft on the inside with a faint char on the outside, and this surprised me not at all.

Jesus looked out to sea, toward the sun in its strength. Then he looked back to us, casting his gaze around the circle, where we all sat licking our fingers. “Remember,” he said. “You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth. You are the fishers of men.” He smiled. “But you are shepherds now, too. As I just told Peter, I am sending you to feed my sheep.”

Peter ducked his head and gave a grin that looked uncharacteristically shy. I thought about how Jesus had called himself the good shepherd. Now he was asking us to be the same.

by

writing goals for 2024

As I think about my goals for the new year, I’m considering how I want writing to fit into my life in 2024. I have always seen myself as a writer, but after a few highly productive years leading up to the completion of a novel in 2019, I’ve been in a dry spell, at least by comparison. I do a lot of writing for my work–mainly emails and grading feedback–but in this post, I’m thinking about writing that is both more enjoyable and less ephemeral than those, important as they may be. So here are some writing goals I’d like to focus on in the new year.

  1. Get back into the habit of writing in my notebook for 15 minutes a day. I started doing this in September after I read Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and wanted to rediscover the joy of writing, especially in longhand (a practice Goldberg speaks highly of). Throughout that month, I wrote for 15 minutes every morning. Most of what I wrote will never be shown to the world (though this post was a result of one particularly productive day), but it was a good practice, and I’d like to get back into it consistently in 2024.
  2. Research and revise two short stories based on incidents in the life of Christ that I drafted in 2023. These stories resulted from my daily writing practice. They are quick sketches that need research give them accuracy and authenticity. I may use my research and revision process to help me develop some resources for my students (I wrote about this idea here), but even if I don’t end up doing that, I would like to get these stories into a state that I’m happy with.
  3. Reread Sam’s Town to help me decide whether I want to work on the sequel. Sam’s Town is the novel I self-published in 2019. Soon after I completed it, while still riding a writing high, I started the sequel, Sam’s Home. But then I got married, moved, and lived through the pandemic, and the few brief attempts I’ve made to pick the manuscript back up haven’t really gone anywhere. So in 2024, I’d like to reread Sam’s Town in hopes of recapturing some of that excitement. Even if I ultimately decide not to make writing the sequel one of my goals for this year, I think I’ll enjoy revisiting those characters who played such an important role in my life for several years.

Three is a magic number when it comes to goal-setting, so I’ll stop there. What are some of your goals for 2024, writing-related or otherwise?

by

ode to The Muppet Christmas Carol

Instead of a post about teaching and learning, today I want to share with you a brief homage to one of my favorite Christmas movies (though, now that I think about it, there’s a lot of teaching and learning going on in A Christmas Carol). Earlier this month, my parents treated their kids and our spouses to a delightful gift: a screening of The Muppet Christmas Carol in Pittsburgh’s beautiful Heinz Hall, the music track replaced with a live performance by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (which was fascinating–I heard things in the music that I’ve never noticed while watching the DVD or VHS). This gift prompted me to write the following reflection in my journal. Regardless of your favorite adaptation of A Christmas Carol (I know this can be a heated debate), I hope this post brings a little joy to your Christmas celebration. God bless us, every one!

What do I love about The Muppet Christmas Carol? First and foremost, it’s Michael Caine’s performance as Scrooge. He holds nothing back; there is not “I’m acting opposite puppets” wink in his eye. He is one of the sincerest, most sinister, and yet most sympathetic Scrooges ever.

Another thing I love is the script. Though Muppet jokes and silliness abound, the language of Charles Dickens (who loved jokes and silliness where appropriate) permeates the movie. I give it a large share of the credit for why I fell in love with Dickens’ writing. Similarly, the film’s set–which, now that I’m an adult, I can see isn’t going to win any production design Oscars–still gave me an early love for the close-knit, crowded, alternately dark and brilliant world of Dickens’ London.

The music, of course, is what prompted the live screening we attended. The songs have a very Muppety essence to them, but that doesn’t stop them from containing some of the profoundest lines in the whole Christmas movie canon. The score is tonally spot-on: very British in is instrumentation, ominous when it needs to be and joyous when it needs to be, Christmasy all the way through.

Of course, there are nostalgic reasons too. I can’t picture a Stockslager family Christmas without it. I don’t remember when we started watching it on Christmas Eve night because “after all, there’s only one more sleep ’til Christmas,” but I know we’ve been watching it every year pretty much since it came out in 1992.

Watching the movie with a huge crowd and hearing their reactions was really special. Of course, laughter is the easiest reaction to hear, as well as the one we’re most likely to express aloud in public, so we heard a lot of laughter. But it was all at tonally appropriate times (unlike some cringy inappropriate laughter responses I’ve heard during live theater performances), and besides, both Dickens and the Muppets would love knowing that their work brought a crowd together with laughter, especially at “this most festive season of the year.”

by

my fall shirt and a habit of writing

I’m finally reading Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg–one of those classics that appears on almost every list of essential books on the writing craft–and I’m really enjoying it. Nothing about Goldberg’s kind observations makes me feel guilty about my recent lack of writing productivity, but I did decide last week that I wanted to put some of her strategies into practice, so I’ve started handwriting in my journal for 15 minutes every day. Much of what I’ve written is probably interesting only to me. One of Goldberg’s big points is to practice writing concretely rather than abstractly, so I’ve been doing detailed but not particularly lyrical descriptions of things like the house we lived in until I was seven and the sky in front of me while I was sitting on the patio the other morning. But this morning, I wrote something that has a little bit of humor and a little bit of a life lesson–the kind of thing I like to share on this blog–so here it is, with some very light editing for clarity.

I’m wearing this shirt that I bought last year at the church bookstore because it was on deep clearance and I was standing around bored. I’m not even sure why we were selling it in the church bookstore because there’s nothing particularly Christian about it, but we do sell a lot of basic-Midwestern-woman-of-a-certain-age stuff in the store. (I don’t say “white” because I know some non-white women who like this kind of stuff. It is a widespread phenomenon.) Anyway, this shirt. It has one of those lists that Sarah and Mark [my siblings] and I like to make fun of: spiced apple cider, crisp air, pumpkin pie…(that’s just the part I can read while sitting in bed. The bottom probably says, “hayrides and hoedowns.”). Then in the middle of the shirt, in that ubiquitous hard-to-read script, it says, “But I love fall most of all.” I’m not sure why the “but,” since there’s no contrast being made. I guess the shirt just wants to be argumentative. Also, my wearing of the shirt is a lie, since fall is not my favorite season, and that is how I interpret the claim, “I love fall most of all.”

The bottom line is that I can’t decide whether I need to wear the shirt ironically (i.e. by making mocking comments about it whenever I wear it). The fact is that I do enjoy all the items on the list, at least those I can see. (Okay, I just looked. I do enjoy the other things too, though hayrides make my eyes itchy.) My conflict over this shirt probably has to do with deep-rooted identity issues and my desire to appear not to be exactly what I am, a basic Midwestern woman of a certain age. By the way, we’ve started selling scented candles in the bookstore, with names like “Vanilla Delight,” and I really want one.

by

what “adjunct faculty” means

This summer I took a seven-week break from teaching for my main institution, and I’m finally getting around to writing a blog post about it, largely as a way to reflectively journal about the experience. But as I thought about what I wanted to say, I realized that, since other people will be reading this journal entry, it might be productive for me to spend some time explaining how I was able to take a seven-week break (not normal in most industries!) and, more broadly, how I get compensated for my work. I hope some of you will find this information interesting in its own right, but also–full disclosure–I have a point I want to make at the end of the post.

Let me start by evoking what many people likely picture when they hear the job title “college professor.” I live near an old and prestigious university, and there’s a part of town I sometimes drive through where, I’m told, a lot of the professors live–and where there are some truly palatial homes. I won’t make a blanket statement about all faculty at this university, but I think it’s safe to assume that some of them are being compensated very generously. This makes sense–the university has been there for a long time, and it has a lot of donors. The professors who live in these homes have earned advanced degrees; many of them have probably published books and articles in prestigious publications, and they likely spend a lot of time producing and supervising important research. This is probably the kind of person most people picture when they hear the phrase “college professor.” (And I want to be clear that those professors work hard for their paychecks! Even those who have graders or teaching assistants do a lot of behind-the-scenes work that most people don’t think about–lesson planning, keeping up with new research in their field, serving on committees, answering emails, and perhaps doing administrative work for the university. College professors work hard, just like people in any industry.)

The professors I’ve just been describing are generally on a full-time contract with their university, meaning that they know ahead of time how much they’ll be paid each year, and they receive benefits (health insurance, retirement plan matching, etc.) from their employer. (Many of them may also benefit from the academic job security mechanism known as tenure, but I won’t get into that in this post–it’s a complicated system, and I’m no expert on it.) But there’s a whole category of college faculty, known as adjuncts, who aren’t on full-time contracts. Instead of receiving a salary, adjuncts get paid per class. This means that their compensation can vary from semester to semester (or term to term), depending on the courses that are available for them to teach. While they may be doing forty hours (or more) of work per week, adjuncts usually do not receive full-time employment benefits.

Every college has different ways of assigning classes to adjuncts, and the adjunct experience can vary widely from school to school. For example, at some institutions (like the ones I serve at), adjuncts–at least on-campus ones, and many universities are doing more to include online adjuncts–are invited to events like faculty orientation, can request supplies from the department budget, and can even serve on committees (which allows them to give input that may affect their working conditions and teaching satisfaction), while at other institutions, adjuncts struggle to receive any kind of professional support. The pay scale can also vary widely for adjuncts, depending on factors like number of students in a class, the adjunct’s level of education, and the institution’s budget.

Until summer 2020, I taught on a university campus on a full-time faculty contract. Since then, I have been teaching online as an adjunct for two different universities. (Side note 1: It was marriage and moving, not the pandemic, that caused this shift. Moving to online adjunct work was a free choice I gladly made. I point this out because some adjuncts are in their position because it’s the only one their school can offer them, or because they’ve been demoted from full-time positions due to budget cuts or other factors. Side note 2: While adjuncts can teach either online or in person–some people do both–the number of people employed as adjunct faculty has risen dramatically with the growing popularity of online education.) Let me briefly describe what my adjunct experience has been, being careful to clarify that this is just my experience. I would be interested to hear from other adjuncts about their own work!

I teach a graduate and an undergraduate course at each of my two universities, for a total of four courses I teach regularly (four “preps” to use a common teacher expression). At any given time, I’m usually teaching two to five classes total. (Side note: One of my schools has eight-week terms, while the other has six-week terms for grad classes and five-week terms for undergrad. I find it confusing to keep track of what week each of my classes is on, so I have to use my planner carefully, and occasionally I turn down teaching offers because I don’t want to deal with all the overlap!) For two of the classes, I’m the “subject matter expert,” or SME. A SME is the person responsible for maintaining and updating the course content (and sometimes, creating it in the first place, which was my experience–meaning that students get to see my face in the video lectures and therefore get to know me better than a lot of online students get to know their faculty) and providing support and advice to other faculty teaching the course. Each term that I teach one of the courses I’m SME of (which is almost every term for me), I get a SME stipend, which is a pretty significant amount. I make more money from my grad classes than my undergrad ones, since teaching them requires more specialized knowledge (but is not necessarily harder!), and I get paid more than someone who does not have a terminal degree–a PhD in my case. I’m not going to tell you my total pay, but when you combine all my classes and add other income sources like serving on master’s thesis committees (not very lucrative, but one of the most rewarding parts of my work), I make roughly the equivalent of what my husband makes as an engineer with a full-time salaried position. But while he gets paid every week, I get paid every five to eight weeks, making it really hard to incorporate my pay into our budget!*

This is turning into an incredibly long post, so I’ll wrap it up with a couple of things I hope people will learn from this post. First, if you’re considering an academic career (as I know many of my students are), keep adjuncting in mind as a possibility, but also be aware of the potential challenges of this type of work. And remember that the description I’ve given here is just one person’s experience! Second, in our busy, hyper-connected culture, the stereotype of the leisured professor is not true anymore, if it ever was. Despite what some politicians may want you to think, universities are not paying faculty big bucks to do nothing. The work of teaching at the college level can be rewarding and delightful, but it is hard work—and important work. Yes, we all have all the information in the world at our fingertips, but the job of professors (and of teachers at all levels) is not merely to convey information but to help students learn how to interpret that information, to think deeply, to have meaningful and respectful discussions with others, and to love learning. I’m grateful to be able to do that work and to be compensated well for it, and I hope universities will continue to see adjuncts as a crucial partners in that work and give them the support they need and deserve.

by

Creative writing tip: Find your Inklings

There’s a lot of talk these days about finding one’s “tribe” or one’s “people.” If taken to extremes or left unexamined, this attitude can worsen the polarization that plagues our society by excusing us from spending time with and listening to people who are different from us. But underlying this idea is a good impulse: the desire to connect with people who share our interests and joys.

Earlier this summer, I read Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings, which is a collective biography of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, but even more than that, a fascinating account of an unusual group of men who “found their people.” The Inklings, as many of my readers will probably know, were an informal club of friends–mostly Oxford and Cambridge academics, mostly Christians–who met for years, twice a week, to eat, drink, have intellectually rich discussions, and–most famously–read aloud from their works in progress, some of which turned out to be genre-defining sagas like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. The atmosphere of the group, as well as some weird ideas that floated around during their intense discussions (Carpenter doesn’t shy away from these), was shaped by the group’s demographics (almost exclusively middle-aged white Englishmen) and the times in which they lived. But within their similarity, they were a remarkably diverse group in their marital status, politics, religious expressions, and philosophies on all sorts of things (e.g., how a fantasy world should be constructed). And, by all accounts, their strongly-held, often opposing opinions made the group exciting, not threatening. They were fans of each other’s work (even when they criticized it), and most importantly, they were friends.

In the decades since the Inklings met, aspiring writers (especially fantasy nerds) have been trying to recapture the heady atmosphere of their meetings. I was once part of a creative writing group called, unabashedly, the Inklings, which held long, food-fueled sessions in which we read aloud from our works in progress and received gracious yet detailed feedback from our peers. Like the original Inklings, we were brought together not only by our love of stories but also (for most of us) by our Christian faith, which deeply informed our group’s philosophy even though hardly any of us were writing explicitly Christian literature. And like the original Inklings, many of us developed close, trusting friendships.

If you are a writer–or if you don’t write yourself, but you enjoy a good story and know how to give helpful feedback (or are willing to learn how)*–I encourage you to join a creative writing group. Don’t try too hard to recapture the atmosphere of the original Inklings; you’re not them. You don’t have to wear tweed or meet every week or even meet in person. (My old group moved to Zoom during the pandemic.) Not all creative writing groups even involve critique of works in progress; some focus on support, encouragement, learning new techniques, or even writing silently in each other’s presence. The greatest gift of a creative writing group is not the activities that happen during the meeting or even the works of literature that its members produce, but that feeling of belonging, of being understood by other people who also have stories in their heads. Or, as C.S. Lewis put it, “the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .'”

Subscribe to get notified of upcoming posts: an ode to my grandparents’ cabin in the western Maryland mountains and an explanation of how adjunct faculty get paid (much more interesting than it sounds!). Also, if you’re a fan of the Inklings, subscribe to my podcast, It’s Lit Time!, for an upcoming series on rereading J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth saga.

*Several of the original Inklings weren’t writers; they just enjoyed hanging out with their friends and hearing their stories.

by

my top tips for creative writing inspiration

Writing is hard, even for those of us who claim to enjoy it. I recently had a conversation with a former student who had graduated with a degree in creative writing but was having trouble finding the motivation to write, now that she was no longer required to do so for classes. I could relate, more than I wanted to admit. Though at first I felt like I didn’t have any advice to give her, I gradually–through about an hour of conversation–came up with the following tips. They aren’t magical, and some will suit certain people better than others. If you’re in need of writing inspiration, give them a try and see which ones work for you.

  1. Join a writing group. I recommend this one all the time. Being part of a supportive writing feedback group, online or in person, can bring all sorts of benefits, from lifelong friendships to marked improvements in your writing craft. More to the point of this post, belonging to such a group can work wonders for your writing motivation, both because hearing other people’s work can get your mental gears turning with ideas of your own and because knowing that people are waiting for your next installment creates a healthy, exciting pressure.
  2. Try some writing prompts. A book of story prompts (e.g. “Write a short mystery that includes a mirror, a bird, and Germany” or whatever) was one of the first gifts I gave my now-husband, an avid tabletop roleplayer who is always looking for campaign ideas. But you don’t even need to spend money on a book to do this; creative writing prompts abound on the internet. The constraints of the prompt can be a great antidote to writer’s block, and you can always abandon them once your story gets going.
  3. Set aside a regular time to write. This advice is so common as to almost be a cliché, but most people don’t do it. (Actually, I haven’t been doing it lately either, and I notice the absence of this routine in my life!) For several years, I spent the last half-hour of each of my workdays writing something–a PowerPoint for a class, a page or two of my novel, a blog post. Editing something I’d already written counted too. I was always amazed at how much I was able to accomplish in 30 minutes, five days a week.
  4. Read widely. Once again, this is common advice, but you’d be surprised how many people I’ve met who say, “I’m a writer, but I don’t really read much.” I understand it might not be your favorite thing to do, but if you’re a writer, you should be reading–in your genre, outside your genre, writers whose style you admire, etc. You don’t have to approach it like an assigned task (unless that motivates you to do it), but any reading you do is going to have benefits for your writing in some way, even if you don’t notice it right away.

I hope these tips are helpful to you! Let me know if you try any of them, and please share writing tips of your own!