James A. Owen is the author of a series called “The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica.” The first book in the series, “Here, There Be Dragons” introduced us to the characters that would become the heroes of the stories: Jack, John and Charles.

Jack is actually C.S. Lewis, John is J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles is Charles Williams. They were each members of a group called the Inklings. This series is based on fictional adventures that these characters embarked on, into the Archipelago of Dreams, where they became Caretakers of the Imaginarium Geographica.

The second book in the series is titled “The Search for the Red Dragon,” and introduces new characters and a few more writers from that era to the story.

Now, author James A. Owen has revealed the cover art for the third book in the series: The Indigo King.

Having listened to the books on CD (I have the unabridged audio books!), I am very curious to learn what happens next in the adventures through the Archipelago of Dreams.

Check out the cover art on James A. Owen’s LiveJournal, and come and see him at LionCon, later this month!

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Hey, Narnia Fans! Welcome to “Behind the Wardrobe” an Interview Series with Douglas Gresham. Join me as we find out about CS Lewis, Narnia and more in this interview series.

Special thanks to Paul Martin (The Webmaster for NarniaFans) and to Mr. Douglas Gresham himself for this amazing opportunity. And an even bigger thanks to Mr. Gresham for putting up with a few of my impossible questions. Thanks for being such a great sport about it!

For this week: On The Shadowlands…

JS: What was your opinion of the play The Shadowlands?

DG: I think it a wonderful play, but then I am biased. I have been a consultant to Shadowlands in all its varying inceptions ever since Brian Sibley and Norman Stone first wrote the concept script about 20 odd years ago. Incidentally the play is being revived and will shortly open again in London’s West End. I don’t know though whether there are any plans to move the production to America though.

JS: How did you feel about how they portrayed Jack?

DG: I have seen so many productions in which the portrayals always depended on the actor playing the role that it is hard to remember a specific portrayal. The play itself portrays not C.S.Lewis, nor Jack, but a fictional character based on him. Remember that Shadowlands is not supposed to be an Historical documentary, but is a very beautiful love story based on real events in the lives of some real people.

JS:Thank you for the clarification that The Shadowlands is not a historical documentary. In a class I took in college it was, more or less, portrayed as a historical documentary to us.

DG: It was never intended to be so, and I would have though that it is pretty obvious. After all there are only four characters based on real people in the whole movie, all the rest are entirely fictional.

JS: Have most people mistaken the play for a historical documentary?

DG: I don’t think so, I haven’t come across too many folk who have.

JS: Notably one of the major differences was the absence of your brother David. How did you feel about this change?

DG: This change was made for very straightforward theatrical and dramatic reasons and so when I fully understood the reasons I had no problem with it.

JS: Would you be able to elaborate a bit on what the theatrical and dramatic reasons for the exclusion of your brother from the play were?

DG: It is very simple really, first, if you have two children each reacting differently to the same situations, you automatically have two subplots. In the first TV version of Shadowlands this was done, and on studying it later, it was discovered that having the two subplots actually detracted from the main theme of the piece rather than complementing it, so it was decided to drop one child for the Stage play version. Also contributing to that decision was the fact that for stage work each child character has to be played by two child actors as there are legal restrictions on how many performances a child actor may make without a break. This was seen to work very well and thus for Dick Attenborough’s version the one child policy was adhered to.

JS: How about some of the other changes they made to the story? For example Lewis driving, your character asking for Jack to sign a copy of Magician’s Nephew, of Jack as a Roman Catholic.

DG: As far as I know Jack was never portrayed as a Roman Catholic, but as for the rest I didn’t care hoot.

JS: How did you feel about Anthony Hopkins’s and Debra Winger’s portrayals of Jack and Joy in the film version?

DG: Tony was faithfully presenting the role he found in the screenplay, and not trying to be C.S.Lewis or Jack, and I think that is a pity because I think Tony could have portrayed the real Jack very well indeed. Debra on the other hand was superb as my mother. However if one is going to talk about the film, one has to say that Dick Attenborough is one of the finest directors ever to walk the planet (and one of the finest English Gentlemen as well) , and his fine touch and gentle hand made what I consider to be a classic movie with which I am very proud to have been associated.

JS: How well did Joseph Mazzello do at portraying you in the film?

DG: Very well indeed, but as I told him on set one day, for him it was easy, after all he had a script to follow, I had to ad-lib the whole thing.

JS: The funny thing for me with the film of “The Shadowlands” is that I forever associated both director Richard Attenborough and Joseph Mazzello with their roles as John Hammond and Tim Murphy in Steven Speilberg’s Jurassic Park.

DG: Knowing them both personally made a big difference I suppose.

JS: Though it could be worse. I even had a friend who had a hard time watching the film as she associated Anthony Hopkins with Hannibal Lecter!

DG: I think that a lot of people had that reaction to him in Remains of the Day rather than in Shadowlands, but I know what you mean.

JS: Have you ever considered playing Jack in a production of The Shadowlands?

DG: I really don’t think I could do it justice (the role I mean), I am too emotionally involved in the whole thing.

That’s it for this weeks installment. Come back next week when we discuss Douglas’s book Jack’s Life , CS Lewis’s unfinished novels “The Dark Tower” and “After Ten Years”, the film of The Screwtape Letters and some other matters.

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We’ve just posted the twenty-first edition of the NarniaFans Mailbag. We’ve answered four letters this week from such topics as why they call C.S. Lewis “Jack,” the missing “in-depth companion guidebook,” Prince Caspian filming, and possible use of flashbacks in future Narnia films.

Click here for the twenty-first NarniaFans Mailbag!

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“It has been my ambition to make a really good film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the other books in the Chronicles of Narnia series for about 25 years, and by the grace of God I now have some very fine executive talents working with me – to make my dream a reality,” says C. S. Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham.

Over the years Gresham has toured the world speaking about the man he fondly calls “Jack” and worked as an adviser to the C. S. Lewis Company (which handles the Lewis Estate), while also running a ministry in Ireland called Rathvinden House. But the past year has found much of his time devoted to dealing with Hollywood as he works on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as co-producer and “a sort of resident, in-house Narnia consultant to the project. I have been involved in the scripting process and the production from the very first day.”

Gresham acknowledges that Lewis himself was not a fan of the medium of film, and Gresham also recognizes that some of the previous attempts to translate Wardrobe into a movie have been less than spectacular. He knows that preserving the legacy of the beloved fantasy series is never easy.

“Preserving its integrity, its messages, its magical literary quality, and its dignity, while avoiding vulgarization and overexploitation of them, these are daily challenges,” he says.

Yet Gresham promises this big-screen version of the tale will be like a “leather-bound, gilt-edged classic on a shelf full of tattered paperbacks.” He adds, “I think that even Jack would be amazed and fascinated with the wonderful film technology that has been developed recently but perhaps less than delighted with the uses to which it has been put. I hope we address that failing to some extent with this film.”

[Read the rest at ChristianityToday.com]

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Douglas Gresham’s dream for most of his life was to bring C.S. “Jack” Lewis’ classic tale of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” to the movie screen and in December it will come true.

Gresham, 60, is the stepson to the author of the classic story and recently co-produced the forthcoming “Chronicles of Narnia” based on Lewis’ books of the same subject. He spoke at North Central Michigan College Tuesday in a crowded cafeteria.

“It has been a great adventure,” he said.

But he asked, why do people like to read these books? His own answer: “My motivation is through the Narnia chronicles and ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ they represented some qualities we lost.”

Those qualities were duty, honor, chivalry and courage. Qualities that Gresham said we threw away in the 20th Century and now in the 21st Century – “As civilization crumbles around us” – people want them back.

[More at Petoskey News-Review]

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George Sayer, author of Jack & recorder of the 1952 home-made tapes of Tolkien reading from The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings, died recently in Malvern, Worcs.

As I walked away from New Buildings, I found the man that Lewis had called “Tollers” sitting on one of the stone steps in front of the arcade.

“How did you get on?” he asked.

“I think rather well. I think he will be a most interesting tutor to have.”

“Interesting? Yes, he’s certainly that,” said the man, who I later learned was J.R.R. Tolkien. “You’ll never get to the bottom of him.”

Author George Sayer will bring you closer to the real C.S. Lewis in Jack. Drawing from a variety of sources, including the million-word diary of Lewis’s brother and from twenty-nine years of close friendship with this century’s most influential Christian apologist, Sayer gives a warm and enlightening insider’s look at the man whom God used to bring many back to the faith.

Offering never-read-before glimpses into Lewis’s extraordinary relationships and experience, Jack details the great scholar’s life at the Kilns; days at Magdalen College; meetings with the Inklings; marriage to Joy Davidman Gresham, and the creative process that produced such world-famous works as the classic Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, and The Screwtape Letters.

Mythlore says this book is “likely to become the definitive biography” of C.S. Lewis. It is that and more–an intimate account of a gifted literary scholar and best-selling author, the man who has helped generations hear and understand the heart of Christianity as never before.

[Order 'Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis' on Amazon.com]

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In his erudite new biography of Clive Staples Lewis, Alan Jacobs estimates that from 1949 to 1955, Lewis wrote 600,000 words of prose (not counting work on his book on 16th-century literature).

In anticipation of the new movie “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” Harper Collins is releasing all of them, and then some. One hundred and seventy books on, by, or about the famous author and defender of Christianity are being pumped into 60 countries in time for the Dec. 9 premiere.

It’s a stack tall enough to give even the most voracious bookworm vertigo. The result, though, is that readers can satisfy their taste for almost any aspect of Lewis’s life, letters, or arcana (the “Narnia Cookbook,” anyone?). Among the cascade of books are three new biographies of Lewis that share a Christian perspective, but are very different in their approach.

The Narnian, by Professor Jacobs of Illinois’s Wheaton College, which houses Lewis’s papers, is the most impressive, and is designed for readers who want to get to know Lewis the scholar and theologian.

Jacobs says he’s less interested in what Lewis (who was known to all as “Jack”) did on any given day, than in “the life of the mind, the story of an imagination.” While he follows a chronological format through Lewis’s childhood, the early death of his mother, schooling, and service in World War I, once Lewis is ensconced as a don at Oxford, Jacobs jumps around to themes that most interest him.

[Read the rest at CS Monitor]
[Order from Amazon.com]

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The dreams C.S. Lewis had that began in the late 1940s were different. Some were frightening and some were beautiful and, as he described them to family and friends, they involved lions, especially a giant lion that had a regal, yet wild personality.

Soon, Lewis began weaving these images into a story that also included a strange dream that he had at age 16. In it, he saw a faun holding an umbrella and some packages, standing in a snowy wood near a lamppost.

“He told people, ‘I’d like to make a story out of that image because it has been in my head all of my life,’ ” said Douglas Gresham, the author’s stepson. As Lewis would say, the great lion “Aslan simply leapt into the story and dragged all the rest of the Narnian Chronicles along with him. I believe that all of this was a gift from God, of course.”

These dreams became “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” the cornerstone of a seven-book fantasy franchise that has sold 90 million copies over 55 years, establishing itself as one of the most beloved works of Christian fiction of all time.

“Many people ask, ‘Why are they coming back?’ The answer is that these books never went away,” said Gresham, who has served as co-producer and the spiritual conscience of the movie project.

Gresham enters this story because his mother, poet Joy Gresham of upstate New York, began corresponding with Lewis in 1950 about literary and religious matters and they struck up a long-distance friendship. This relationship grew, over time, into a marriage complicated by her battle with cancer, a poignant romance described in a play and two movies entitled “Shadowlands.”

Unlike other Lewis biographies, “Jack’s Life” does not try to dig inside his psyche or offer a detailed map of his career as a scholar or apologist for traditional faith. Gresham said he simply wanted to tell the story — using images and language that would be accessible to children — of the “finest man and best Christian I have ever known.”

Thus, this biography begins: “If you are about eight years old, then you are the same age I was when I first met the man who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia. If you are eighteen, then you are the age I was when he died.”

Like Gresham, Lewis suffered the trauma of losing his mother when he was very young. Gresham notes that, when Lewis’ father died years later, Jack and his older brother Warren returned to Belfast to clean out the family home. They put all of their toys and other childhood memorabilia into a trunk and buried it in the garden.

Nevertheless, Gresham stressed that Lewis never “lost the intimate memory” if what it was like to be a child. While the scholar claimed that he was not good with children, his stories, letters and experiences late in life suggest otherwise.

“In my experience, he was excellent with children,” said Gresham. “He didn’t talk down to us. He may have brought himself down to our level, but he never talked down to us from above. – Jack was always conscious of the fact that children are people. They may be small and unformed, mentally and emotionally as yet, but they are people with all of the same trials, tribulations, frights and foibles as other people.”

Gresham paused, remembering. “In a sense, the child in him lived with him the rest of his life. … For anyone who is writing for children, that is an important thing.”

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The stepson of the creator of the much-loved Narnia books says C.S. Lewis would be pleased with the new movie. C.S. Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham, is acting as co-producer on the movie. He told Radio Rhema’s Rob Holding it will be a visual feast.

Douglas Gresham hopes that the movie will be successful enough to allow them to film some of the later books in the Narnia series. He has also laid down a challenge to today’s Christian authors and moviemakers. C.S. Lewis wrote the seven books in the Narnia series as a Christian allegory.

Mr. Gresham says his stepfather, known to his family as Jack, once told him mediocre Christian fiction is not good enough. He said the world needs more Christians writing good books, rather than more people writing Christian books.

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