In Front Of Everyone

Saturday Night, Ollie Jones

Now they finally have a chance to continue.

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We all know the story of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Childhood friends, high school sweethearts, and university rivals.

They showed up at Cambridge with trunks full of typewritten stories featuring talking lions, magical rings, a demon named Screwtape, and a dragon named Smog.

Their Creative Writing professor, James Joyce, famously suffered a fit of apoplexy when he first read their writing. He was so furious over their whimsical stories that he banished them from his classroom and forced them to work as unpaid innkeepers at his pub. He told them they could only come back once they proved they'd learned enough about the "real world" to write stories about "real things, like eagles and children."

Professor Joyce was forced to admit them back into his classroom when Tolkien wrote his eagles into Middle Earth and Lewis created the Pevensie children to visit Narnia. Their contemporary, Bede Griffiths, alleges that Joyce could be heard raging and screeching about how the clever young authors had willfully misinterpreted his assignment as far away as Gertrude Stein's Edinburgh apartment!

I remember this moment in history every time my professors tell me that I need to change my writing--when they try to get me to conform to a dying format. When they tell me that my Land Before Time fanfiction isn't appropriate for a class on Immigration Stories and Travel Narratives. When they tell me that my Babe fics "can't" be considered an essay on Orwell's Animal Farm.

Won't they feel silly in a few decades, when there will be sold-out university courses focused on studying work like mine.

There's a reason James Joyce's work has never been turned into movies. There's a reason his fandom is practically nonexistent.