I am thrilled to announce the title of my forthcoming book - Oxford Literarium - Oxford Writers in Time and Place.
Stay tuned for an October/November 2025 release for purchase (on Amazon)!
Here is another little snippet from the introduction:
How does place impact writers and thinkers? As research took me deeper into the daily lives of these authors and their thoughts about Oxford, I encountered more than library visits for research reading, I also trotted across the city and into the countryside with these writers imagining it in their time, seeing what they saw in the colleges and on their walks and I would follow along in my modern time. Some things really are still the same.
I read their journals and notes that describe Oxford and their experience as an undergraduate or a fellow. From sparkling moments to frustrations and everything in between. These places not only provided beauty (whether architectural or natural) which gave space to their thoughts, ideas, or ponderings, but also when a companion was with them a good discussion would ensue. Oxford is centered around discussion, whether in a tutorial or in a café. Meaningful conversations ensued and helped our authors develop their ideas, as it still does today.
Many of these sorts of discussions are recorded in letters and diaries that we can now imagine ourselves as we view them in these beautiful spaces, placing ourselves into their world for a time as our eyes cascade down the pages of records. C.S. Lewis, for example, had that now-famous late-night walk along Addison’s Walk with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson that changed the way he thought about myths that he loved, as he thought they were all false and Christianity was just a myth. In that conversation, Tolkien helped him realize that Christianity was the true myth, the myth became fact through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ.
Without that late night walk and conversation, highlighted with a sudden gust of wind that showered them with leaves causing them all to stand in awe, we might not have the C.S. Lewis we know today and the books he wrote in the years following that experience.
Lewis also took long walks from town to town (walking tours) with many friends like J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and his brother Warnie, stopping at country pubs along the journey, reading and reciting poetry while they traverse the hilly, grassy countryside.
C.S. Lewis’s house, The Kilns, is on a property with a natural reserve and a pond he would visit often, a very short walk from his front door, an area where it is said poet Percy Bysshe Shelley as young boy played around and sailed paper boats on more than 100 years earlier.
What we see, what we read, what we think about, who we listen to, and what we take to heart. These things shape us. Late night discussions that challenge our thinking and reading good books that present us with ideas we had not considered. Such ideas may augment what we already built in our understanding, but are we ever a closed book fully perfected in everything? Never. We have more to learn and discuss.
The book is open, and many pages wait beyond this current page where we are now. Do we dare go further to discover?
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