Dr. Diana Glyer visited BYU’s C.S. Lewis society to talk about Lewis, Tolkien, and the benefits of creative collaboration.
PROVO, Utah (Feb. 15, 2020)—Last week, BYU’s C.S. Lewis Society had the privilege of hosting Dr. Diana Pavlack Glyer, who teaches full time in the Honors College at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California. Dr. Glyer specializes in studying the Oxford-based writing group known as “the Inklings,” which included both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
Glyer’s interest in the subject began when she read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and Lewis’s The Space Planet trilogy in high school. She loved them both and was shocked when she found out that not only did the authors live at the same time but that they were friends and met together regularly to discuss their writing. This discovery led to her now passionate interest in the Inklings, who met regularly at The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, England.
In her two published novels about the Inklings group, Glyer analyzes their collaborative process and the effect that it had on the works written by its members. As a result of her research, she is a strong advocate of the idea that creativity is best cultivated within a community.
The community that the Inklings produced gave its members a space to truly explore their potential. Glyer noted, “Lewis and Tolkien were two nobodies who made a commitment to get together regularly and talk about their ideas. And from those meetings, ordinary meetings between two ordinary guys, some of the greatest books ever written emerged.”
The collaboration that occurred at the Inklings’ meetings proves that “we need each other as creative people, as imaginative people, thinkers, and scholars. . . . As creative and successful people, in order to sustain our work—whether that’s the work of a scholar, a fiction writer, a painter, somebody in business, or somebody in the sciences—we need each other.”
Glyer concluded by reinforcing the idea that creation cannot happen in isolation and that we need supportive and encouraging communities. “That’s what the Inklings did for each other, and that’s what we need to do for each other a lot more than we do. We need to help, encourage, challenge, correct, edit, advise, and be there for each other, and this will lead us to connect with each other in really significant ways.”
—Heather Bergeson (English ’21)