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EPISODE 45: The Importance of Collaboration

We’ve heard that C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and others were part of something called “The Inklings.” But what actually happened in those gatherings and how did that shape their writings. We’ll explore that theme and related topics in this episode.

Resources:

https://www.dianaglyer.com

Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings, Paperback – December 8, 2015

A Compass for Deep Heaven: Navigating the C. S. Lewis Ransom Trilogy, Paperback – August 3, 2021

Transcript


Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman, and today the question that matters is: Why is community and collaboration so very, very important? And I'm delighted that my conversation partner today is Diana Pavlac Glyer. She's a professor at Azusa Pacific University, and she teaches the great books in the honors college there. She has done so many hours of writing and research about the Inklings, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. She wrote a book, The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, that was very successful, but it was an academic book, and so she wanted to write for a broader audience and has written Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings. Diana, welcome to Questions That Matter.

Thank you so much, Randy. It's really a joy to be here today.

Well, and you have a new book, a fairly new book, just coming out, so let me give you a chance to do a commercial for that one, even though that won't be the focus of our conversation.

Fruits of Collaboration

Well, thank you for that opportunity. I was really privileged to work with a group of outstanding scholars to solve a problem that many C.S. Lewis fans have. And that's that sense that we read his science fiction novels, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, and we have that sensation that there's a whole lot going on in those books, but it's really going over our heads. And I sat down with this group of scholars, and we worked together for a little over a year trying to ask the question, what does C.S. Lewis assume you already know?

Oh, yes.

Because the truth is C.S. Lewis is smarter than any of us, but he gives us the undeserved compliment of assuming that we know all of the references, all of the allusions, and so forth that he wants to throw into a series of fiction books, as he does. And so I worked with these scholars. We produced a book called A Compass for Deep Heaven: Navigating the C.S. Lewis Ransom Trilogy. And what it does is it tries to give the building blocks and the backdrops of the science fiction novels, so that people can really enjoy those and catch what's going on in those stories.

Oh, man. All right, well, I'm a customer because I want to say that I've read the Space Trilogy twice, but I think it's more accurate to say I have tried to read the Space Trilogy twice, and I always feel really stupid afterwards because I think, “I just don't get this guy,” which is… Well, it's embarrassing because I work for the C.S. Lewis Institute, I'm supposed to understand everything he says. And I do so connect with him so well on other things. So, this book is going to be helpful, but all right, let's shift. Oh, sorry. You wanted to say more?

I was going to say I care deeply about this topic, because Out of the Silent Planet was the first C.S. Lewis novel that I read, when I was still in high school, and I loved the book for the way that it paints a picture of the spiritual experience. What does it mean to open yourself to new spiritual experiences, to see with new eyes, as the main character, Ransom, learns to do? Right? At first, he can't perceive an angel, or an elder. Over time, as he's open to new experiences and open to the discomfort of new adventures, he learns to see with fresh vision. And I really resonated with that concept. And so, I'm delighted that this book has come out and we're able to give people a little bit of help navigating that book and the others in the series.

Oh, this is great. Very, very helpful. Well, let's talk about this book, Bandersnatch. And of course, we have to start with the title. I'm sorry. Our listeners will understand the subtitle: “C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings.” Yes. Bandersnatch, help us out. Why? And by the way, I do understand it, and I love the way you wove… you talked about that at the beginning and the end of your book, and so it wraps very, very helpfully, but give us some definition here.

Well, so a Bandersnatch is a mythical creature, first appears in the works of, not C.S. Lewis, but Lewis Carroll, in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in a poem called Jabberwocky that some of your listeners may be familiar with. And so, in that poem, we're introduced to the furious Bandersnatch. And so, we don't know very much about Bandersnatch’s, except that they're furious. That means furious and intense and difficult and resistant. And the way that this comes into the life of Lewis and Tolkien is that someone once wrote a letter to C.S. Lewis asking whether Lewis had had any influence on Tolkien.

Now, it's very important to be careful here, because the letter is long, and it's important, and you know the importance of not taking a quote out of context, right? But in that particular letter, there's one line that people have glommed onto, and that is Lewis's response, which said, “No one ever influenced Tolkien. You might as well try to influence a Bandersnatch.” So, when I first started my research on the mutual influence of Lewis and Tolkien, everywhere I went, people kept on throwing this quote back at me. “Lewis said it. I believe it. That settles it for me.” And I was like, “I don't think you're listening carefully enough, and I don't think you're looking at the larger context.” What Lewis is saying is that, when you gave critique to Tolkien, he pushed back. Now, I don't know about you, Randy, but when someone critiques something I've done, it's not uncommon for me to resist a bit. It's not uncommon for me to say, “Yeah, but wait a minute. If you only understood, then you would get what I'm doing here.”

Yeah, yeah, right.

So what Lewis is saying in essence is, “When we critiqued Tolkien, he was argumentative,” but that doesn't reflect the deep changes that Tolkien made in the manuscript as Lewis and Tolkien and the other Inklings worked together in these weekly meetings. So, think about this: There's 19 men who meet twice a week over a period of 17 years. They're reading their rough drafts to each other and then talking about those drafts, giving feedback on those drafts. All that time, they're writing in the context of this ongoing conversation. And to me, part of what's interesting about that is you think about something like The Lord of the Rings, right? It took Tolkien more than a decade to write that. So, he writes a chapter, reads it to the Inklings. They give him feedback.

Yeah, yeah, good.

He not only revises the chapter that he's just read, right? He goes home, and he's thinking about all of this. And we can look at the manuscripts. He does up to 18 different versions of any given chapter. But there's something else going on, too, that I like to call the influence of anticipation. So, I want you to picture Tolkien there, sitting on a Wednesday night thinking, “Tomorrow, I'm going to have to read to the Inklings. And I'd better be careful to not say this, because Charles Williams is going to critique me. I better shift this because otherwise Lewis is going to get on my case, and I better include some of this, because otherwise Warren Lewis is going to get bored.” The influence of anticipation is the way an author shapes a work in response to their perception of who's going to be listening to it, right? So, all of these books, more than 300 books and important articles, created in the context of this ongoing conversation, this collaborative group, this very, very influential circle of support.

So, my book Bandersnatch is a little bit tongue in cheek in terms of the title, because what I try to do in this book and also in The Company They Keep, is demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the things that they said to each other made a significant difference in the work that they were doing.

Oh, man, this is great! And this has got application far beyond just writers getting together, and we'll go into that in a bit, but that's really encouraging for me to hear. “Okay, so at first, Tolkien was resistant and pushed back, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he didn't take it all in.” And that kind of push back and argumentativeness, I don't know if that's the right word. It's actually quite beneficial for working together in collaboration.

When I first started showing some things to my wife that I wrote that I wanted her to critique, there were quite a few times where she would say something, and she would say, “I think I know what you're trying to say here, but I don't really understand it.” And my first response would be, “Well, here's what I'm trying to say.” Now it’s to the point of, “Well, if you didn't understand it, then I need to rewrite it.” It's as simple as that.

Yes. That’s right!

She'll say, “So what are you trying to say?” I say, “Well, let me try again, because if you didn't get it, and you know me really well, then anybody who's going to read this is going to say, ‘He's not making any sense.’”

Yep. So, when I work with writers, often I'll tell them that, when we read our own stuff, we see what we meant.

Yeah.

A reader can only see what we said.

Isn’t that disappointing?

It is so disappointing. But you're exactly right. To have a wise reader, like your wife, it’s worth its weight in gold because they tell us what we actually said, and all of the things that we're missing, that are part of the furniture of our understanding, aren't necessarily part of theirs. And for them to help us figure out: What am I saying? What am I intending? And how's that coming across? Not only at a denotative level, what we call just the raw meaning of it, but also at a connotation level. I've been working with a grad student this semester who has a bad habit of insulting the people he's trying to reach.

That is a bad habit.

I’ve spent a lot of time saying, “I know you want to critique the idea, but you're coming across as hostile. Did you mean to do that?” And he was completely oblivious to the way that his tone was coming across. We need people in our lives who can look at our work and say, “Your content is good, but the tone is off.” Or, “Your content is good, but the level of formality is inappropriate.” Or what I often am dealing with is to say, “The content is great, but there's enough material here for five articles, not one.”

You're flooding people. They're drowning in your content. Yeah.

There you go. And maybe you need to break it down into smaller bits and unpack each idea a little bit more substantially. And so those people who can give us that kind of perceptive feedback is so valuable.

Teamwork

We here at the C.S. Lewis Institute love the fact that we are part of such a large team of people participating together in discipleship, really all around the world. That's not an exaggeration. And some of us are staff, but many, many, many are volunteers, and then even a greater number of our participants in our programs and beneficiaries of our resources. We would love to invite all of you to prayerfully consider also being part of our financial support. We need people who will give monthly, quarterly, annually from their financial resources to help us continue to expand and produce the kind of materials that are helping God's people grow in depth and strength as they walk out their faith in our world. Thanks for considering this.

You know, for many years, I was in campus ministry and now, with the C.S. Lewis Institute, I serve in the area of apologetics and evangelism. And I tell people that, in addition to our learning how to articulate the gospel and how to answer questions people have, we need just a few people around us, closest to us, who will listen to our tone of voice and the way we say things, so that we can get feedback from a fellow Christian, who will say, “Listen, your answer was great, but people don't want to hear the way you said that, and they're not going to say, ‘Oh, that was lovely. Please tell me more.’ They're going to run.”

So, we need that. And, again, I especially need that. This reminds me a little bit: Living here in Northern Virginia, I've gotten to know quite a few people who serve or have served in the military, and I remember meeting this one guy who he told me he was on a team of contrarians, and what that meant was, whenever there was a military plan being put together, a battle, an invasion, whatever, there was a team of generals who put things together, and then he and his team of fellow colonels would come in and say, “Here's why that won't work. Here's the problem here. Here's the problem.” And they valued this contrarian team so very, very much, because, like, “Okay, we need to hear the toughest criticism, because they want to make it succeed, too.”

So, in a way, I think you're saying that Tolkien and Lewis and the other Inklings had that, and we are the beneficiaries of reading books that, “Okay, I see how this flow. It works,” because they did the hard, hard work of editing, of “No, you’ve got to take that out.” “No, they won't get that.” I think this is just so very, very helpful. You say, very early on in the book, page three, you said, “I was only 16 years old when I first discovered the Inklings, and I wanted to know the answers to two simple questions: What did these writers talk about when they met to discuss their works in progress? And what difference did these conversations make to the books they were writing?” And that's what you then lay out for the rest of this book. So, say some more about how else did it shape their final writing projects?

Sure. So, you’re talking about C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. You're talking about two of the most important writers of the 20th century in terms of top books sold worldwide, in terms of continuing and even increasing influence. These two guys have a remarkable legacy, and I believe, and I argue in Bandersnatch, that they would not have accomplished what they did if they had not had each other. Iron sharpens iron, and that process of bringing out the best in each other is so important, it's so critically important, that it's not just critique or opposition. I love the idea of a team of contrarians. I think we all need those people in our lives, and we need to give them permission, right? To say, “Hit me with your best shot. Tell me where I've gotten off base.” I wonder if that isn't as important in our spiritual journey, in our teaching and our parenting, as it is in our projects, to have people that we invite to say, “What do you notice? What am I missing? Where are my blind spots? Can you help me to do a better job at this thing that matters?”

But it wasn't just those things. When you're looking at the Inklings, they were very, very good at giving one another encouragement. Now, encouragement means to put courage into the heart of someone, right? And a lot of times when you're working on a project, you have to face those long, dark nights of the soul. All of us do. All of us come across times when we just want to give up. Tolkien gave up on Lord of the Rings at two particular seasons, and I don't mean he got a little blue. He totally abandoned the project. Both of those critical moments, he had lunch with C.S. Lewis, and Lewis, in one instance, encouraged him, praised him, and gave him the positive feedback he needed to begin to believe in that project again. The other time, sensing the needs of his friend, what Lewis did is throw out a challenge. “Hey, I'm working on a book. What are you doing? Sitting on your hands?” That's a gluer paraphrase, but yeah, the idea is really good. He understood what it would take to light that fire and help his friend get that project back on the rails. How many times do we face discouragement or disappointment? How many times do things go not the way that we anticipated, and we need somebody to say, “That's okay. Let’s move on.” And so, we talk about praise and encouragement, sometimes a little bit of pressure, right? Accountability. I love the idea of having people who are holding us accountable, but not to the things that they think we should be doing, but to the things that we declare that we want to be doing.

Oh, good, good.

So, I say to a friend, “You know what? I'm in summertime now. I have a lot of writing to do. I need to get out and walk 20 minutes a day. If I don't get outside, it's just not going to be good for my health. Could you keep me accountable for that? At the end of every day, I'm going to send you a text. I'm going to tell you how many minutes I walked. All I'm going to text you is my number. 20 minutes, 19 minutes, 23, so you'll get a text at the end of each day with a number in it.” And a simple task like that can fill our hearts with a sort of expectation for one another. And I think that that kind of accountability can be important. Again, I like the word expectation better than accountability. Accountability sounds kind of parental, doesn't it?

It does, yeah. This is good. So, I've often struggled with that word. It's like, “Oh, no! Someone's checking up on me.” So, what did you say, the word instead? Expectation?

Expectation. I'll be meeting later today with a friend of mine, and he has been working on a book. And one of the things he knows I'll do is I'll ask him how that book project is coming and, whether it's coming well or he's kind of hit a dry spot or a dry spell, I'm interested. So to be living in expectation means to stand on tiptoe, waiting to see what the other person will do. It's a way of communicating, “Your work matters to me. I'm going to follow up on that thing that you were talking about doing.” And that's, I think, one of the great gifts that the Inklings offered each other, by having regular times of getting together. And that's one of the gifts I think we, as Christians, need to offer to one another as well. So those are some of the different ways that the Inklings interacted, praise, encouragement, pressure. They modeled for one another what it meant to be an author.

C.S. Lewis's brother, Warren Lewis, was not an author when he joined the Inklings. He went on to write seven books of history, his own personal kind of fascination. But he saw that others were doing the work as writers, and he sort of picked up, “Aha! This is how it's done. This is how you get from an idea to a page of notes to a draft of a manuscript to a published book.” And he watched the role model that the other Inklings had provided, and then he went on to be a very, very successful writer. One of his books is still in print, in fact. It is used in college courses on French history.

So those are some of the different things that I think we all need. And I learned them by watching what the Inklings were doing and learning more about their process of support.

This is really great! As you're talking, there's a question I want to ask: This may feel like we're taking a detour, and I promise, if so, it will be a short detour. Well, I shouldn't promise that, maybe. But I've always been intrigued by this one story that I heard, and I think you're someone who can really help me, and I hope our listeners. There’s this story of Lewis and Tolkien talking, and Lewis supposedly says to Tolkien, “Tollers, people are just not writing the kinds of books you and I like to read. We're just going to have to write those books ourselves.” And what I want to know is: Okay, so what were those books that were being written that were not the kinds of things that Lewis and Tolkien wanted to read? And I think, if we know that, then we'll see how Lewis and Tolkien's books really stood out, not just as great books, but as very, very different, almost rebellious maybe? Maybe that’s too strong of a word, but certainly an antithesis to the stuff that was popular and being written. So, who were those other writers? And what were they writing that was so not the kind of stuff that C.S. Lewis and Tolkien would want to read?

That's such a great question, because it really gets us to the heart of collaboration, right? So, the books that came out of that conversation were different, but they had their genesis at exactly the same moment. And so, this conversation, what Lewis and Tolkien were talking about were contemporary thrillers, primarily science fiction adventures and novels, but popular books, the kind of thing that you grab as you're at the airport to read on your vacation. But they were particularly thinking of science fiction sorts of things, books that included time travel and traveling outer space.

But what they didn't see in the run of the mill popular writing of the time is that they didn't see what they called the mythological or mythopoeic impulse. And what they meant by that is a myth is a story that embodies the values of a culture. A story that embodies the values of a culture. So, when you have the values of a culture, a lot of times those are expressed propositionally through a series of statements, as in, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” That's a propositional statement. But a lot of times myths are captured in our stories. So, you have a story in America like The Little Engine that Could, which is one of our American myths. “If I just think I can, and if I work hard enough, and if I grit my teeth, and I don't give up, I will be successful.” So, there's a myth, or a principle, that's embodied in a story, right?

So, what they were looking for was a popular, briskly written, exciting story that also, underneath it, woven through it, told something true about what it meant to live this life, to be a believer, to live a life of faith and a life of value. So, it wasn't the idea of what’s sometimes called smuggling theology. It's like, “Let's see if we can stuff a secret message in there.” But could they tell stories where truth was woven into the fabric of the way the story was told? And so what Lewis and Tolkien did that night, literally, is toss a coin. This event is called The Wager. And they tossed a coin, and Lewis took on the challenge of writing a science fiction space travel novel, and Tolkien a time travel novel.

Now, at the time when they made that bet, you have to picture them… The way that I like to say it, Randy, is, at that time, C.S. Lewis didn't know he was C.S. Lewis. You know what I mean? They were just two guys in a pub making a really outrageous bet. It's like, “Yeah, let's write a bestselling novel.” “Okay, I will if you will.”

They cross a coin, they give each other these assignments, space travel, time travel, and then they walk home from the pub. And I picture them sort of sobering up as they walk, right? Thinking, “I've never written a novel before. I don't know what I'm going to do.” What happens is that Tolkien starts a story called The Lost Road, and he writes about three chapters of it, story doesn't really go anywhere, but what it does is open up new possibilities. And on the basis of that rough draft, he ends up writing The Lord of the Rings.

For Lewis, he goes home, and that very night, I picture him sort of irritated that Tolkien has sort of backed him into this wager. And so, he starts writing Out of the Silent Planet. Now, do you remember how Out of the Silent Planet starts? It starts with a professor who happens to be a professor of philology, which happened to be Tolkien’s subject, who's on a walking tour and who's so muddled that he gets lost and he gets stuck in the rain. He doesn't have a place to stay, and then he gets kidnapped and taken to Mars. So, I think the story at least begins with a little bit of Lewis's revenge.

Right!  Sure! I’ll show him!  I'll write him into the story as an absent-minded philologist, of all fields.

Yes! Absolutely! But here's the thing, here's what makes C.S. Lewis so fantastic, is, while it may start with an impulse that's maybe not altogether charitable, as the story starts going, it really sorts of takes off for him, and he starts to unfold this experience that Ransom has as he encounters the other, as he encounters cultures that are unfamiliar to him. And in that process, he really gives us a model for spiritual growth in that particular book. Out of the Silent Planet is wildly successful, and so the publisher asks for another. He writes Perelandra and so on. So out of this one conversation came Lewis’s three novels, but also Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I think that's a pretty good day's work.

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Thank you for going there with me. I have always been intrigued by that interaction with them, and so you've filled in some important gaps for me. Well, I want to take this last part of our conversation and just point it in the direction of: Okay, so what are the applications for a much wider group, for our listeners who are not writers or novelists who may say, “I'm not really one of those creative artists, but this talk about collaboration and community, this is crucially important, even if I'm never going to write a novel.” So, what are some of the applications on that broader scale about collaboration for us?

I love that question. Thank you for taking us there. I want to talk about two separate impulses or two separate responses to the example of the Inklings. One of them is just the recognition that, like the Inklings, we need other people in our lives. And it can be hard sometimes because we're all very busy. We all are just running at breakneck speed. We're all a little overwhelmed, and yet technology makes it easier than ever for us to stay in touch. Now, the Inklings didn't have just the Inklings. They had a number of other groups of support, places and ways that they connected with others. And I think that their model is really, really important. So, we may not need a critique group, but maybe we need a prayer group, somebody that we meet with regularly to pray. Maybe we need just a group that meets regularly for meals and conversation. I have a number of friends who make it a habit: Once a month, they get together on the back patio and share some food and conversations, some unstructured connecting time.

Lewis and Tolkien started, not with the Inklings, but with just getting together for lunch once a week. And that developed into the group known as the Inklings. So, I think we need to think about what kind of group do we need? One kind of group that may never have occurred to your listeners is what's called a parallel play group. And that's a group that gets together when people are working on projects. Think about a group of college students who get together to study in the dorm lounge. They're each studying their own little thing, but they're doing it together, because it just works better to know that there are other folks in the same boat that you are. And then there will be interruptions and there'll be laughter and there'll be good pizza and a little bit of fellowship. But in essence, that chore of studying becomes fun because you're doing it in the presence of one another. So that's one thing I would say: Are there ways that we can build in connection points of various types that meet various needs? And then the second thing I would say is we need to get better at what I call the vocabulary of collaborating. So, I think in a lot of cases, we coordinate our efforts, but we don't actually collaborate together, and the essence of collaboration is that as we connect, we change and the project changes.

Good. Yep.

We change because we're made for community. And, as we connect with one another, believe it or not, our brains actually increase in what's called neuroplasticity. Our brains become bigger. There are more neurological connections, because God has made us for connection. So, I think that that's a really important thing.

But the project changes, too. And so, when I sit down and I'm talking with a collaborator, and we're trying to set a vision for what we're doing, as we collaborate together, that goal often changes. It's not the way that just I was able to conceive of it. It becomes the best part of both of our insights. So, the vocabulary of collaboration means that we do a better job of identifying what we need and asking specifically for that.

So, let me give you a really dumb example: When I was in college, I had a roommate, and I rearranged the furniture in the living room one day. And when Joy came to the door, I met her there, and I said to her, “Joy, I spent the entire day rearranging the living room. Today, I just need you to encourage me. Tomorrow, we can talk about whether it works or not.”

Well done! Yes, yes, yes.

She walked in, looked around, and said, “Wow! This is a big change!”

Meaning, “I'm going to have a lot to say tomorrow when we do the critiquing.”

That’s good. That’s fine. But I knew what I needed. I was exhausted, and I was hopeful. And the next day, we tweaked the design. But I am telling you, if she'd come in and given me a critique at that point, I wouldn't have had it. It would not have been a pretty day. So, learning what we need. Do we need encouragement? Do we need practical help? Do we need that kind of expectation or pressure? Do we need advice? Do you find that people are really quick with advice and slow to listen?

I'm so tempted right now to say, “Yes, and let me tell you why that is, and there are four reasons, and I can tell you how to handle that.” No, I'm not going to do that. Sorry. I’ll stop.

But just the idea that sometimes we need advice. But I think we're too quick to give advice before we really truly understand. And so one of the words… If you read anything of my work, you know that I come back time and time again to what I think is one of the most powerful roles that we can play for each other. And that's the role of a resonator. To resonate means to vibrate at the same frequency. To resonate means that I pick up that small sound, and I amplify it.

Good.

So when I'm listening to someone, I'm trying to be an active listener, and I'm trying to say again and again in various ways, “I think this is what you're saying. Are you trying to say this? Is this your point? Am I understanding you accurately?” We resonate one another's meanings, just like we talked about when we get feedback on our writing, but also in our conversation. But I think we need to resonate with more than just meaning. We also need to resonate with hopes, with dreams, with goals, with possibilities. Because a lot of times when we're trying something that's new or scary or overwhelming, we just need someone to say to us, “I hear what you're saying. I see what you want to do. I think it's really worth doing, and I'm going to stay with you in the process of getting there.”

Right. So very, very important and so crucial. As you're speaking. I'm also thinking there's a tremendous need for this in our churches, in small groups. My wife and I are part of a community group, and the other night we were meeting and just sharing and talking about things, and I expressed some frustration. And one of the women in the group who's very different than me, just different on so many levels, she did exactly what you said. She resonated at first, which was, “Well, this sounds really stressful. It sounds like your family is going through a really stressful time.” And I said, “Oh, yeah.” And then she said, “Well, we tend to handle stress differently. It sounds to me like your brother is handling it very differently than you would.” And that's what I needed. I needed both the resonance and the gentle push back, because I was really whining and griping about my brother. But she didn't start with, “Don’t talk that way about your brother. He’s your brother. Don't do that.” No, it was, “This sounds really stressful.” “Uh-huh.” “Well, you know, we handle stress differently” “Got it. Yes.”

Well, so once again, I find myself at the end of our time thinking, “Oh, I wish we had another hour, but I have a feeling that maybe our listeners may not be saying that.” They may be saying, “Oh, that was a good conversation. Time to stop.” So, Diana, thank you so much for spending time with us and for collaborating with us on this podcast. I do recommend Diana's books to you, especially those of you who want to explore further of collaboration. Anything else you want to just add at the end here of our time? Any other things you want to go after?

I just really want to say thank you for a fine conversation. It's fun to have a conversation as far ranging and practical as this one. So thank you for letting us have the adventure of collaborating together in this way.

Oh, great! Thanks. And to our listeners, we want to invite you to check out our website, cslewisinstitute.org, and we have a newly designed website with easier access to all of our many, many resources. We hope that all of that helps you pursue discipleship of the heart and mind. Thanks.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman.

COPYRIGHT: This publication is published by C.S. Lewis Institute; 8001 Braddock Road, Suite 301; Springfield, VA 22151. Portions of the publication may be reproduced for noncommercial, local church or ministry use without prior permission. Electronic copies of the PDF files may be duplicated and transmitted via e-mail for personal and church use. Articles may not be modified without prior written permission of the Institute. For questions, contact the Institute: 703.914.5602 or email us.

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