Pacific Inklings Festival

I was down in the L.A. area - specifically in a small lecture hall at Vanguard University, a Christian college in Costa Mesa - to attend the first Pacific Inklings Festival. This is a project of the Southern California C.S. Lewis Society, a long-established, Christian-oriented but not restrictive in membership, book-discussion group.

It was a small, first-time conference, with maybe 50 attendees. Over the course of six hours, including breaks for lunch and to spend time in the book sales room upstairs, as well as a brief awards ceremony, there were four papers.

Sørina Higgins was the keynote speaker. Editor of a book on the Inklings' Arthurian writings, she gave a wide-ranging and insightful talk on the role of Arthurian material in modern British literature, what moral and intellectual points the authors were making by using it.

Michael Paulus spoke on Charles Williams and the image of the city. A basic topic in Williams studies, this was impressively expanded by contrasting Williams's positive Way of Affirmation to his view of cities against the Way of Rejection of philosophers who loathe the urban, applying a similar contrast to technology, and tying it all to views of the future of artificial intelligence.

James Prothero, convenor of the Society, gave a similarly thematic talk bringing the Inklings into a consideration of the Romantic poetry movement: the goals and aims of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley; how Lewis as a scholar reacted to this and how it applied to his own creative work.

My own contribution was more modest in aim. Titled "C.S. Lewis Writes a Fan Letter," it was pulled from major research articles I'd done in the past on the history of the Inklings. Lewis, an unusually appreciative reader among major authors (compared to Tolkien, certainly) had a habit of writing living authors whose books he enjoyed, often before finishing reading the book, and inviting them to Oxford to meet the Inklings. Some of them actually came. I described the circumstances and read from the letters. The ones to E.R. Eddison, whose pastiche Elizabethan prose Lewis skillfully expanded on in his letters (and Eddison followed suit in reply), were particularly fun.

I was inspired to attend to make or renew acquaintance with these and other attending Lewis and Inklings scholars and sundry, and we had a pleasant, educational, and competently-run day of it. And then I was carried off to ...