All My Road Before Me

auroraknight directed me towards a compilation of some of Lewis's early person writing, an edited-down diary he kept as a young man at Oxford from 1922 to 1927, named "All My Road Before Me." I finally started it, and I'm excited to see what it's like. This was kept during his atheist period, a time from which little of his work is often referred to, and I shall be fascinated to see the difference it makes in his work and outlook. I've always been amused by the fact that he actually had something of a distaste for the journaling process, and yet he did it fairly frequently throughout his life and generated some of his most important pieces (like A Grief Observed) that way.

It is not, apparently, to be considered the most instructive or insightful of his personal works. He apparently refers surprisingly infrequently to his wrestling with religion per se, which he said later what an enormous and emotional preoccupation for him during that time. But it's so interesting to see personal stuff about writers that you can use to better understand their work. It's actually been a motivator for me to keep this journal. If I ever were to become important for my writing, I like the idea of my journaling being used as a resource in scholarship of my works. I'd want it to be useful to get an image of who I was as an artist and a person, as well as the course of my work's development.

I wonder if it gives an accurate reflection. If it's anything like how I would characterize it myself.

New post on Mrshawking.com -- "Like a Loss," a ten-minute play set in the Hawkingverse

New post on Mrshawking.com!

This piece gives the first-ever first person look at the most speculated-upon character in the Mrs. Hawking universe, the late Colonel Reginald Prescott Hawking. One big question regarding the Hawkings’ relationship is how they interacted given the huge amount of silence, secrecy, and distance between them, and the one-sided nature of the affection. It’s a little hard for me to conceive of, as it’s tough to imagine how little talking and communication there would have to be to allow that, but this scene is my attempt to show a bit of how it might have been.

This piece was originally written on August 2nd, 2013, and was expanded over the course of November 2013. Some very talented, discerning theater friends kindly workshopped a reading of it for me, with Ben Federlin as the Colonel and Eboracum Richter-Dahl as Chapman.

Check out the ten-minute play here!