Note: the following blog post is a repost from our 2009 Southwest Regional Retreat Writers Workshop blog. Click here for the main 2009 C.S. Lewis Southwest Regional Retreat page.

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Review of The Company They Keep:
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Dr. Diana Pavlac Glyer

“No man is an island, entire of itself,” John Donne wrote in the 17^th century, “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main . . .”

Everyone needs others. If God had meant us to do this life solo, He would have stopped with Adam.

In The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, Dr. Diana Pavlac Glyer has written about the community shared by the Inklings and the influence it had on the lives and works of individual members - C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, R.E. Havard, David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, Warren Lewis, and others.

Charles Williams thought we should live by the principle that, everyone, all the time, owes his life to the lives and labor of others. He believed in co-inherence-the unity within the Trinity, of all Christian believers, and of divine and human in the Incarnation.

The story of the Inklings gives us an exceptional example of the elements of influence and encouragement. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: the following blog post is a repost from our 2009 Southwest Regional Retreat Writers Workshop blog page. Click here for the main 2009 C.S. Lewis Southwest Regional Retreat page.

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This is the first of my reviews of the Southwest Regional Retreat and Writers Workshop speakers’ books. I hope they motivate you to run out and get them (through this website’s bookstore, of course) and read them.

Nan Rinella

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Book Review:

Blue Hole Back Home by Joy Jordan-Lake

BLUE HOLE BACK HOME tugs at the heart like that big swimming hole drew the young people of the Appalachian mountain town to its frigid waters in that hot summer of 1979.

A tale so haunting in its realness, its earthiness, its foreshadowing of tragedy from the moment Farsanna, “the new girl lifted her brown legs up over the tailgate of the truck” and the mangy pack introduced her to the Blue Hole and the all-white community of teens. Shelby Lenoir Maynard and the other four teens of the pack welcomed the new girl from Sri Lanka.

The story begins with the narrator, Shelby Lenoir Maynard, grown and living in Boston. A chance encounter triggers her memory of the events that happen when she was sixteen-years-old and “skinny and awkward and carried whatever smarts I had then like a warning.” In the telling she sheds her constructed shell to face the guilt her past brings her: “Maybe some parts of your past don’t stay just where you thought your life left them all shredded in pieces.” Read the rest of this entry »