"Good, Not Safe": Structure vs. Chaos in Narnia and the Writing Workshop‪.‬

NO ONE MORE EAGERLY ANTICIPATED last winter's release of the blockbuster film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe than the students at our small Christian liberal arts college in midtown Manhattan. The movie brought into our writing classrooms a renewed interest not only in the children's novel on which the screenplay is based, but in the entire spectrum of literature by C.S. Lewis, one of the 20th century's most lucid Christian apologists--a collective excitement comparable to the rekindled passion for J.R.R. Tolkien that accompanied the Lord of the Rings films. More than that, however, it gave us faculty members a legitimate excuse to revisit the fantasy world of Narnia, most for the first time since childhood. As college writing professors, we looked to the book for ways to harness newfound student energy in the classroom. But as creative writers ourselves, our second tour of Narnia, more critical and methodical this time around, proved even more fruitful. The book version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (LWW), first published in 1950, could be viewed as the product of a group that nearly every contemporary fiction writer is intimately familiar with: the writing workshop, in this case the informal writers' group known as the Inklings. As participants in numerous creative writing workshops ourselves, we have been conditioned to read literature from that particular perspective--not as passive subjects or strictly analytical critics, but as fellow craftsmen. With LWW, a workshopped novel that reaches the very peak of craftsmanship in its genre, this form of reading is irresistible.