I Want To Write A Chapter At The Kilns

Nearly everyone has read C.S. Lewis' "The Chronicles of Narnia", and if you haven't...go buy the series (there are seven books), and read, most particularly, "The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe", which is to be released as a full-length feature film in time for Christmas this year.

I had the opportunity this evening to meet Douglas Gresham, who is Lewis' stepson. He's a charming man in his 60s who wore knee-high boots, a white turtleneck and a cross to the reception at our church. He spoke with a deep, resonant voice of his relationship with a writer who meant so much to me as a boy...and then of his friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien, another favorite of mine. When asked what it was like growing up in an environment so steeped in the stories that were the most powerful literature of the 20th Century, and now some of the most popular books ever written, Gresham simply said that what he remembers as a boy of going to meetings of The Inklings, Lewis' writing group (which included Tolkien and several others, and was probably the most influential writer's group ever formed), was how much laughter there was. These were not stodgy, pipe-clenching, robe-wearing Oxford dons; they were lifelong friends who delighted in shredding each other's work in a way that must have been delivered with equal parts harshness and humor, but never with disdain. Anyone who stood up to read his work before that group had to be brave; at the end of a very long evening, his work would be...well...worthy.

Gresham's account of those meetings of The Inklings rings true. When I was a boy, my father's friends would gather weekly to work on model railroads...not the kind of fantasyland you'll find beneath Christmas trees now and then, but genuine works of art. What I remember most about those meetings that happened at our house was that the laughter was almost continuous.

I believe that the spirit of all that seriously good-natured creativity imprints on a place and on the people who live there.

Lewis' home is known as "The Kilns". Twice each summer, the C.S. Lewis Foundation hosts a week-long seminar, in which eight people live for a week in the cottage to study and learn and sometimes write.

I'd like to go there...spend a week in study and thought and discussion, and see what ideas well up. I'd like to stand up in the pub where the Inklings met, the Eagle and Child (or "Bird and Baby" to the locals), and read aloud something I wrote, and have it ring true in that space that still holds the memory of so many wonderful ideas.