Episode 141. The Story Behind C.S. Lewis with Patti Callahan Henry

Unedited Transcript

Patty. I am so excited to have you. Thank you for being with me. I am so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. This is so fun. People might recognize your voice, you and your sister have very similar voices. It was really funny. I think you do, because when we talked a couple of months ago, so your sister is Jeannie Kenyon, um, author we know and love around here as well.

And she released. A new book about the holy spirit that totally just has rocked my socks off. I loved it so much. And when we were talking about that book, she told me all about you. She was just gushing about your latest fiction book. That hay came out when I was asking her. What books she was talking about and telling people to read right now.

And so I immediately went and did a little bit more homework on you, and I'm so excited to have you today, just to talk a little bit about your career and your writing, um, and kind of dig into that a little bit. So I'll read a little bit of a little bit of your rap sheet. When people do that to me, that always feels like, Ooh, what's going to, I won't be able to know who you are.

So Patty, yeah. You are the New York times and USA today. Bestselling author of 16 novels. I want to know. Did you always dream about being a writer and like when did you see that kind of gift start to bubble up in you? I want you to tell us a little bit. Well, first of all, Rebecca, I'm so happy to be here.

And I think I always knew I needed to do that thing, but in hindsight, I always wanted to be a writer, but it didn't seem possible. It seemed like the dream of saying, oh, I want to be an astronaut. Um, it seemed too big to say when I was young. So I went to college to be a nurse. I'm actually a nurse by education.

My master's degree is in nursing, but always on the side I was scribbling and writing and always on the side, I was telling stories and always on the side, I was. Wondering, I wonder why this, or wonder why that, or I wonder what would happen if, and then in my late thirties, I sat down and said, I just want to try and write one book.

I just wanted to do. Try to make the one thing that has sustained me for most of my life, which is reading and books. And I was a bookworm nerd. I actually used to get in trouble for reading. My kids do not get in trouble for reading and I sat down and that was 16 books ago. So I think sometimes, and you probably hear this a lot with women.

Finally opening up to whatever their gifts might be is that you always knew, but you were afraid to admit to yourself that this was a gift you wanted to try and use because it felt too big. Yeah, that's so good. And I think what I find, not only in myself, but in all of my peers is. Nothing about the path is linear.

And I think sometimes we expect it to be right. Like we expect a do a plus B and it's going to equal C and that's so often not what our calling or our purpose or all of these weighty words that we like to throw around. It's it's often not what, um, that actually lived in. Looks like, and I mean, I know even for me, I started dreaming about writing seven or eight years ago, and I'm just now, you know, God's opening the doors to allow that to happen in a traditional format, but I've been writing for like a long time, you know?

And so I think there's power in, in the idea of like, we can do what we're called to do, and we can pursue those ways that we're gifted and called by God. Along the way to like, get our reps in as God opens those doors. And so, I mean, I don't know your entire story to your first book, but I would imagine it's probably similar in that it was not.

Yes. I also think that there's this really interesting. If we can stop and look back and, and not have regrets, like, oh, I should have gone to journalism school instead of nursing school, or because here I am an author, is that. There isn't a traditional path to these kinds of things. And so I don't regret a single, the, the re the skills I learned as a nurse.

I was pediatrics and being with families and the empathy and the watching the human drama, what, watching what it means to be human and broken and sick. And like that opened up a wellspring for me that I can tap into when I write. That maybe I wouldn't have tapped into in a classroom. So there's no point in saying like, can't be a writer or an author of novels or a fiction writer or a non-fiction writer or anything at all, really, because I didn't go to school for it.

Or you have to go to school to be a doctor, but you know, for these kinds of creative endeavors, we put ourself in a box and say, I didn't go to school for that. That's not who, that's not what I'm supposed to do. And if we'll just listen to all these little. For me, it was about listening to all these little hints and clues of what I was constantly curious about.

And if we pay attention to what we're constantly curious about and care about, they're like these little breadcrumbs that will take us to, to, to where, you know, there's a different place. Yeah. That's so good. And I think there's sort of a general curiosity. That, that keeps coming up, right. That, that sort of led you to this path, which I love.

So I am not a fiction writer. Maybe, maybe I will do that one day. I don't know, but I would love to hear sort of your process of like developing stories. Like what does it look like for you to fall in love with a story or a period of time in history. Um, and then sort of build a book off of that. I want to hear sort of.

Your process. Wow. So it's changed. My process has changed through the years as I've, you know, I've been writing novels for about 23 years or so. Um, once upon a wardrobe, which we'll talk about in a minute, this is my 16th or 17th, depending how you count novellas. I don't know. The general process, if I'm going to boil it down to some kind of nutshell, is that, like I said, a second ago, I get curious about something.

I wonder what. I wonder, look, I'll use a very concrete example. My novel becoming Mrs. Lewis. I wonder what her story is. We only hear his story. What's her story, right? His story is story hived in, in, in a million different books and in a movie called shatter lands. What's her story. And then there's something very numinous or something that's hard to explain.

And. Often trying to explain where a story idea comes from is kind of a fool's errand, because it's very hard to pinpoint exactly when you decide a story is worth telling. But for me, it's a combination of. What I can only describe as like this knowing a little bit of a tingle on the back of the neck, a little like, yes, this kind of spidey sense, this knowing that this is a story that might be worth pursuing and then doing the research, trying to decide if it is.

And sometimes it's not sometimes, you know, I've abandoned many stores. You know, in the beginning phases, but then what's the most important to me is to know what the character wants and what their moral arc is going to be in this story. So once I know what they want. Why they can't get what they want, what they're pursuing, what their journey is going to be and what their transformation is going to be.

Then I can really start writing in earnest and for my historical books. It's, it's also this braiding together, this confluence of, of research and imagination where my other novels, um, my contemporary ones are completely imagined, but the historical ones. Constant braiding together. Yeah. And never-ending research while I'm writing, I'm researching before I'm writing and researching after I'm done and about to edit I research.

So there's this braiding together of imagination and research. Yeah. That's so good. You know, you mentioned becoming Mrs. Lewis a few minutes ago and it released year or two ago, I think, uh, 2018. Gosh, it's been almost three years. That's crazy. It's so crazy. Everybody went nuts over that book. And I think for the exact reason that you just said, we all know the story of CS Lewis, but it's so interesting.

And even I remember just reading the description of it and I was like, man, I've never thought of it about her. Like I want to know about her. And so I'm curious without like anything away for people who have not read the book yet. Something that maybe surprised you the most is you explored their story, her story, um, as you wrote the book, so many things surprised me when I was doing the research for that book.

And, you know, I don't believe it's a spoiler to say that, you know, She dies and breaks Lewis his heart because he has fallen in love with her and married her. But their marriage is very short, only three years because she passes away. That's what shadow lands is about. That's what a grief observed is about.

So I knew I wanted to. What everybody calls their improbable love story. Here was a New York born and bred poet, novelist mother, married woman, living in New York. And then this Oxford, Don in England. He had never left England or Ireland for his whole life, except for the six months in world war one when he was in France and she had never left New York except for six months that she wrote screenplays in Hollywood.

How were these two people to have ever met much less, become friends, much less fallen in love and married. And that was the question I wanted to answer was how did this improbable love story happen? What was the impetus? You know, they were pen pals for three years, but what surprised me? The most were two things.

One what? An absolute genius she was she. Why had nobody been talking about that? She had won the Gail younger poets award. When they tested her as a child, she broke the IQ chart, like tested as high as she could go. She was a McDowell artists' colony. Protege she could read when she was three years old, she graduated from high school when she was 14 years old.

These, these amazing things about this woman, she was a sight memorizer. She was a genius with reviews. She wrote novels, poetry, essays. Why? All I ever knew about her was that she was a woman from America who was dying for most of Shadowlands. And the second thing that surprised me and the one thing I really hope I portrayed with, and this isn't a spoiler, but the, the last 10 years of Lewis's work have her fingerprints all over it.

She deeply influenced the last decade of his work. He only lived three. After she passed. Yeah. Wow. That's unbelievable. I I've been saving the book for my next vacation where I get to just so I here's my thing with fiction. I. I need to read more fiction, period. I mean, full stop. I just, I just do, but the most fun time for me to read fiction is when I'm just like totally unplugged from everything about my life.

And I can just let my brain imagine and dream and go to that place. And so, um, I have a copy, but I have been saving it for my neck. Space when I'm in that space. You know what I mean? So I just, I can't wait to hear what I know. I can't wait to read it, but I am really excited. Really. The reason we have you on today is to share a little bit about your next novel that comes out on October 9th.

I believe. Episode, we'll release pretty close to your release date, which is really fun for people. So when they're hearing this and they're going to be able to go grab once upon a wardrobe, but I want you to tell a little bit about, uh, just kind of what makes you excited about this, this new book? So once upon a wardrobe stems from, we talked a little bit about where the stories come from stems from this idea that.

It's nearly impossible to pin down where a story came from. And when I was doing research for becoming Mrs. Lewis, I did see some breadcrumbs of Louis' life that I could tell were part of Narnia because I'm a huge Narnia fan. I've been since I was a child and it kept, I kept thinking about that. I wrote another book in the meantime, came out last March.

It's called surviving Savannah historical fiction, but this idea kept bubbling up. Where, where did Narnia come from? How did he imagine this world that has impacted generations? It has become part of our psyche. When you say Aslan or Narnia or the white ones. Everybody knows what you're talking about.

It's not like, oh, Hey, have you ever heard of Narnia? Well, let me tell you, right. There's it would be difficult to find that person. So how did this story until the universal consciousness in this way? What did he do? That, that this was able to happen. And I, as an author and U2 and almost all authors get asked that unanswerable question.

Where did this come from? So I started looking around and there were loads and loads. I have most of them on my bookshelf over here, about theories, about where Narnia came from. Um, there's textbooks, there's a bridge versions. There's, you know, it's cyclopedia is of Narnia. And they're all really interesting.

But for me, I started thinking about if that was his purpose. You know it, did he want us to pick it apart in that way? And so, well, I imagined a little boy named George and a little girl. Who's 17 named mags who live in a small town in England called Warsh. Sure. And George is ill and it is November of 1950, which is the month.

The lion, the witch and the wardrobe burst onto the scene. No one knew there would be more Narnia. So it was just this one book that has burst onto the scene. He reads it nonstop. He hides in his wardrobe and his sister is a student at Oxford. She is a math and physics student, and she's obsessed only with numbers and equations and logic.

And he asks her. To track down the author of this book. Because he teaches at her college at her university and ask him where Narnia came from, because he's very ill. And he, he desperately wants to know if there's something more and she says, that's ridiculous. It's just imagination. And she's not going to bother the professor, but she loves her brother.

So she does track down Louis and asks him outright. Where did Narnia come from? My brother needs to know. And. Instead of answering her, he gives her more stories, stories that are true and stories that are from his life stories that are dark and light and sad and uplifting to show me and the reader and all of us that, um, there are certain parts of stories source that can't be explained and yet our lives.

It's part of those stories. And I wanted to show that about Lewis without making another encyclopedia of what I guess he means, because I don't know none of us know. So that is where the story came from. So mags and George had these great adventures and every story he tells them set some off on a new, she changes, he changes.

And that's what the book is about. Patty. I cannot wait. This is so fun. I cannot wait to read both of them. Okay. I know what I'm going to be over the next couple of months. I know what I'm going to be reading fiction wise. You've um, you've spurred me on and that today, because I tell my husband all the time, I'm like, I know it's good for my brain and I know it's just like good.

It's just good for your soul to read more fiction. And it's just something that sometimes. I, I just find it hard to like totally disengage with my work and allow myself to do that in like normal life. That is something that I'm going to work on. So you've inspired me in that today and I'm, I can't wait to pick up once upon a wardrobe.

I, I think it's such an interesting way to unpack a story that we're all curious about. If we're being honest and it is such a part of, like you said, like our psyche, nobody doesn't know the story of, um, of Narnia and of that series. Goodness. I cannot wait. Well, I, before we go over to our Patrion community and our people get to know you a little better, I want to give you the opportunity to sort of tell people.

Um, you know, those of us who love, who love fiction, and we, we fall in love with people's writing. Um, some of us want to know, like how can we know that author better? Or what does that, is there a community out there, um, where. People can do that. I want you to tell people where can they connect with you?

Listen to you. You have a podcast that goes along with becoming Mrs. Lewis. And I don't know if you're doing that with the new book as well, but just share a little bit about where can people connect with you and know you. So I have a website, Patty callahan.com. And you will find more than you want to know on that website.

Um, I'm very active on Instagram and Facebook. The, I do have a podcast for becoming Mrs. Lewis, which is called behind the scenes of the improbable love story of joy. David . And I interview the seven most fascinating experts that I interviewed from the book, including her son, CS Lewis, to stepson. So you can hear him tell stories, um, and, um, very, very active, like I said on Instagram and I'm not very active on Twitter.

I hate Twitter. I find that to be kind of a. Not very uplifting place. Um, the, yeah. And then the, um, I am part of a group called friends and fiction. It is five New York times bestselling authors. It's me and Kristy Woodson, Harvey, Mary Kay, Andrews, Mary Alice, Monroe, and Kristin Hormel. And we have a weekly live Facebook and YouTube show.

And every week we interview a different one. And we have interviewed everyone from Kristin Hamad, Delia Owens to William Kent, Krueger to it. We have now have 90 episodes, I think 85 episodes. And then we also have a Friday podcast. Where we interview the authors and their subjects like origin stories or cookbooks, or we just interviewed a librarian.

So that's more about the publishing industry and craft, but we're easy to find friends and fiction. Awesome. Those are all the places you can find me. Awesome. I love that. Well, I have loved this conversation. I'm so excited about once upon a wardrobe and. How do you are just, you're so talented and you're so gifted and so creative and I am just so excited for people to get their hands on your work and to get to know you a little better over on our Patrion community.

So for friends who are subscribed to that, make sure that you don't miss the extra bonus conversation that we have with Patty. And so we're going to go do that now, but for this part of the conversation, Patty, I just want to thank you so much for being with me today. Thank you. You're so. Easy and fun to talk to you.

That seemed like two minutes. I know, right? Yeah.