Jon Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner, is a former teen and campus minister. He began his journalism career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and became the Journal's third editor in 1962 at age 20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines, and more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity Today, and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

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Jon Kennedy's latest book is The Everything Guide to C.S. Lewis and Narnia, now in stores, from Adams Media, F&W Publications. From May 9, 2007 through July 2, 2008 his blog entries or "Jonals" were articles inspired by readings in Lewis's work that didn't fit into the book. Click here for a list of all articles in the C.S. Lewis Overflow series. The book is available for purchase in support of the Liberty Museum in Nanty Glo and is also available on Amazon.

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Write what you know

Jonal entry 1095 | March 25 2009

Over lunch on Sunday my friend Lucille suggested, in respovse to my enthusiasm for my current writing project, a book about the qualifications of C.S. Lewis for sainthood, that since I already have one published book on Lewis I should find another topic. I pointed out that of all the topics I know enough about to begin writing a book on, Lewis is still the most "publishable" or "marketable" in terms of actually interesting a publisher. But in my typical failure to grasp the bon mot at the right moment, I failed to mention that this book on Lewis is the one I wanted to write years before The Everything Guide to C.S. Lewis and Narnia was even conceived. I wouldn't presume to begin comparing myself to Lewis, but it is a fact that The Problem of Pain was not his idea, but his publisher's, even though it remains one of Lewis's best presentations of basic Christian principles (and Everything CSL was my publisher's idea).

This one, about Lewis's fitness for sainthood and what constitutes saintliness, was my own idea for what would make a good book about Lewis, not an idea concocted, as it were, in "committee" applying formulas based first on marketability and secondarily on the value of the project to the literary oeuvre available on its subject at this time. Moreover, Everything CSL is what makes this book practically possible, much like Lewis's publishing success with his apologetic and scholarly books made it possible for him to publish his children's fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia, even when his publisher thought a childen's fantasy not a very good idea for an Oxford scholar.

Counting his own fifty or so titles, there are hundreds of books on Lewis, his life, and his thinking. But that's not because people want to write so much about Lewis as much as there is a demand for more to read about him. And it's revelatory that his own approach to writing did not follow the advice my friend gave me. Over and over again, he returned to the same "topic" to write about. In some instances he would address the topic in nonfiction and then again in a fiction "take." For example, the nonfiction The Abolition of Man is complemented by the fictional That Hideous Strength.

And James Como, who is a founder of the New York C.S. Lewis Society, a professor at the City University of New York, and the author of at least three of those books about Lewis, believes that Lewis wrote and published at least five versions of his autobiography. The first he wrote in his twenties, at the height of his atheist period, as an epic-style poem, Dymer. The second is Lewis's first fictional prose book, The Pilgrim's Regress, which retraces his own journey through the thicket of philosophical and aesthetic influences he went through in his school and university life until he found himself back in the embrace of Mother Kirk (the church). A third is the one he actually called his autobiography (Surprised by Joy), a fourth is one of the Chronicles of Narnia (The Magician's Nephew) and the fifth, Till We Have Faces, his final work of fiction.

"Write what you know" is probably the most universal and helpful bit of advice a seasoned writer can give beginners and which probably pops up in the first session of writing courses more than any other. Many of Lewis's books were inspired by experiences he went through in his own life, as The Pilgrim's Regress recounts the steps toward his conversion back to Christianity and A Grief Observed recounts, almost as a diary, the steps he took toward recovery from grief after the death of his wife.

And if a) you agree as I do with Lewis's premise that "the salvation of the human soul is the real business of life" and b) if you agree as many many other critics and experts have proposed and I concur, that C.S. Lewis was the most effective presenter of Christianity to the post-Enlightenment generation of the latter twentieth century, there is plenty of room for more interpreters of Lewis's insights into the nomenclature of that generation's grandchildren, as I aspire to be. It's appropriate that just as Lewis interpreted the insights he gained into Christianity from George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton from his grandparents' generation, it's appropriate that I try to put Lewis's and his colleagues Owen Barfield's and Charles Williams's ideas and idioms into the idioms of the hip-hop, post-modern generation of today. If I have to read a C.S. Lewis essay or sermon about five times before it really sinks in and starts forming my own thinking, I'm betting there's a "market" for a new restatement of the kernel thoughts there for a generation that won't read anything more than once or twice.

—Webmaster Jon Kennedy

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