S. M. Dunning is the author of The Perilous Times Saga, a trilogy for young adult readers. Its first volume—Suzy and the Magic Turnip—released earlier this year. More importantly, to me at least, Stephen was my long-suffering advisor in grad school. I was thrilled to work on these novels with him, and I’m just as thrilled to share this conversation. It’s quintessential Stephen: full of literary references, thoughtful interactions with the Inklings, and a healthy dose of humour.
Frank Ewert: To start, tell us a little bit about yourself, pre-Suzy / pre-Perilous Times Saga.
Stephen Dunning: I was an English instructor at Douglas College for many years, maybe 25 years, and I was an English prof at Trinity Western University for about 10 years. Before that, I was fortunate to do my PhD at Cambridge. I happened to be in the same college as C. S. Lewis was when he was at Cambridge and met people who knew Lewis, so that was pretty cool.
I am the founder, along with Monica Hilder, of the Inklings Institute of Canada, where we study all things Inklings. And I’d like to think that some of those studies have had some influence on what I’ve written.
Now, I’m basically retired. Being a grandfather mostly seems to be my main job, along with writing.
What inspired you to write the Perilous Times Saga?
I suppose I’d like to say it was the divine afflatus. That’s certainly true at some level, but I can cite some more mundane causes that I’m aware of.
The first one is the fact that I read literature for so many years and taught it and enjoyed it so much. At the back of my mind, I always had this sort of question about whether I ought to try my hand at it. But it sort of just hung around back there and didn’t amount to much.
The second thing had to do with the time of life I’ve found myself in. If you study the Inklings, you realize how productive they were. Owen Barfield had a full-time career as a solicitor. Lewis was a full-time lecturer and academic, as was Tolkien. And Charles Williams—I suppose what he did at the Oxford University Press could be called work, but that would be a euphemistic description. Mostly I think he just went around and had fun and wrote things. But the point is that I didn’t manage my time really well enough, I think, to be able to have an academic career and to write at the same time. I tend to like blocks of time to do things in. When I retired, that really opened up, and I had the time. I didn’t have any more excuses, I suppose.
The third thing I might point to would be one of our Inklings Institute of Canada events. We watched a film on the legacy of C.S. Lewis, and towards the end of it, the narrator issued a challenge of sorts—a challenge for those who love the Inklings to be willing to follow in their footsteps. It was then I realized that the best way to honor the Inklings wasn’t to write more academic papers, but to try to do what they had done and offer something creative to the world. Now, not that I’m disparaging academic enterprises, which can also be creative. I certainly did enough of that. But there is great deal of difference between writing something fictional and writing an academic paper. So, I really took that challenge to heart. I thought, Well, if you really value these folks, why not try to do what they did at some level?
And the fourth thing—probably the biggest thing—was my grandchildren. I told stories to my own two boys when they were growing up. From them, we’ve ended up with six grandchildren, which is wonderful. But while my own boys liked stories, my grandchildren are insatiable and unreasonable and very demanding. [laughs] They really did demand stories, and they really seemed to enjoy them. Sometimes I’d read others’ stories to them or look at some of the books they were reading themselves, and I’d think, My goodness, I can’t be this bad. Anything I’m going to write has got to be at least this good. Which is kind of an odd thing to say, but it was true. So, I thought, Why not? That’s what prompted me to start writing in a more systematic, consistent way.
I want go back to your third point first. You spent years studying and reading literature. But it can be very daunting to go from being a great reader and a great lover of literature to someone who’s willing to put the pen to the page. What was it like going from the seat of a critic / teacher to the seat of an author?
That’s a very good question and daunting is a good word.
As you suggest, if you study literature for long enough, you really do come to recognize what makes certain books work really well. I won’t call it “mechanics” because that is too mechanical, and writing a story is not really a mechanical process. I’ll just say that when you know why a great book is great and works well, that gives you an advantage.
But it’s daunting because you also know what you’re going to be measured against. In fact, what you will measure yourself against. And you have to get past that in a way. I came to the point where I began to see what I was going to do, in my own small way, as a kind of offering. And I think you have to do it that way.
You used the word “mechanics,” recognizing that term might be not quite apt for describing a story. But what would you say about that? What did you learn from your reading that you were able to bring into your works?
One of the works that helped me to think about what I was experiencing was The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers. I used to teach it in my Inklings class, and it had quite an effect on me. As I began my own process of creation, I discovered that what she claimed was largely true.
The first thing she argues is that humans are most like God, not in their rationality, but in their creativity. (I would also point out that people like Tolkien, especially with his idea of sub-creation, would certainly agree with that.) Where Sayers is unique is in her suggestion that that the creative process is theologically analogous to the doctrine of the Trinity.
In her articulation, the general idea of a created work is like the Father: it’s eternal, it’s complete, it’s outside of time, it’s the thing behind everything that happens.
The Son, meanwhile, proceeds from the Father, from the idea. He’s analogous to the creative agent that incarnates the idea in our physical world, in time. Depending on the type of art, it has to reckon with things like punctuation, your skill with language, the amount of time you have, how your digestion is that day—in other words, all the complications of incarnating an idea. People can have great ideas, but if they don’t have the capacity, if they don’t have the skills, they don’t have the agency to bring those ideas to life.
With Suzy, I had a sense that the idea was kind of complete when I started it. What I mean by that is that as I would be working on the idea, there would be certain parts that would feel right and that would reveal more of the idea. There’s this paradox in Plato that I actually experienced. Plato says, “How can you go looking for something unless you already know what it is?” Because if you don’t already know what it is, you won’t recognize it when you find it. Thus, as we work to try to incarnate our idea, in whatever medium, we’ll be discovering more about the idea. But not discovering something new, in a sense: it’s just the revealing of something that’s there. For example, I think of Tolkien’s story about writing the scene when the hobbits got to Bree and run into Strider. Tolkien had no idea who this guy was sitting in the pub, but wouldn’t go away, and he ends up being integral to the whole of the Lord of the Rings.
Margaret Laurence, a great Canadian writer of the last generation, said that when she was writing, it felt like she was following her characters through a crowded marketplace, desperately trying to keep up with them. And I can say I actually did experience that. As you write and try to incarnate, it’s almost like the idea is reaching down into time so you can catch and draw those things.
To return to Sayers’s analogy, there’s still the third member of the Trinity: the Spirit. Sayers suggests that it’s creative analogue is what she calls “the energy.” It’s this energy that not only goes into the creation of the thing, but that returns really to the creator through the response of the audience. And I really sensed that when I had a reader who appreciated my story. When I could see someone who got joy out of what I’d written, it was tremendously fulfilling. In fact, it was one of the great motivations to keep going. And that energy is vital: there has to be an audience for a work. A book that’s unread by anybody isn’t really a book at that point.
I found that the most satisfying part of the process. Indeed, it’ was the thing that inspired me to write a trilogy. I was maybe two-thirds of the way through the draft of the first book, and I was telling my grandson Thomas about it. “How close are you?” he asked me. And I said, “Well, I’ve got about another third to go.” And he said, “Oh, no. It’s got to be at least a trilogy.” [laughs]
This might sound like a self-serving question, but I’m genuinely curious what you learned and what changed in your work as you went through through the editing process ?
Well the first thing I thought of was T.S. Eliot who was a great consolation to me. He has a couple of great lines in the Four Quartets where he says that every act of writing is “a raid on the inarticulate.” But he also says that one of the lessons of wisdom is humility. And then he adds: “humility is endless.”
Now, it was quite interesting that you were first my student. And we worked together and you, I mean, you were always a very fine writer. It was just getting you to write.
[chuckles] It’s true.
That was the nature of our relationship. But when you became my editor, then that changed completely. And that’s instructive. It’s very, very good experience to be in the position of the neophyte, needing help and guidance. It’s a good exercise. It’s even worse because my wife is a copy editor, and she also did a lot of the copy editing. So it’s bad enough a former student and it’s even worse when your wife!
When I was teaching, I found that with students, you can insult their mother and their political party, but if you talk about their writing in a certain way, they do not take this kindly. And it’s true, you know, it’s a tough thing.
Think about the fact that we all need correction and guidance, and that’s something that you have to get past. If you can’t handle that, you don’t want an editor. You just don’t. But on the other hand, even when you recognize a good editor—I remember something Margaret Atwood said when I heard her speak at the Chan Centre in Vancouver. She was talking about the experience of editors, and she said, “My editor is essential to me.” But she also said, “In the end, it’s my responsibility.”
And I think you’ve written about this before as well. It is the writer’s responsibility in the end to decide what to take and what not to take. That, boy, that’s a tough one too, right? Because you can be perverse. You can just say, “Screw this person. What do they know.” But you don’t. Yet, you need to practice a kind of openness and discernment. So that’s part of that process. You have to try to get your ego out of the way.
What’s surprised you the most about the process of writing, editing, and then publishing the books?
The immense pleasure I take in watching people read the book and enjoy it.
I had no idea that it would feel like it does. You know, I wrote a decent academic book, and I’ve written lots of articles, and I’ve given papers at conferences, and that’s okay. But watching somebody light up after reading something and realizing that you brought that pleasure? There’s nothing like it really. I think it’s just the greatest pleasure that I’ve experienced in many ways. Sounds weird, but I think it’s true. I really do. I really enjoy that. So that’s been the thing that surprised me the most, I suppose, was how much I enjoyed that part of it.
What’s the most memorable piece of feedback that you’ve had so far?
I think there’s been a number of things. You would look at say the first three paragraphs that I sweated over in a chapter, and you’d say, “You know, you can just get rid of those. Just go right to the action.” And I’m thinking, What?
But you’re focusing on tension—the energy that the reader would sense—and it’s a way of keeping that energy flowing so the reader doesn’t get stopped. I think there’s something to that.
When I started the editing process, I realized that maybe I get in the way of my own story sometimes. I have a lot of patience: I read for a living, and I would have to read all kinds of things. You can look at Richardson’s Clarissa, which is a thousand pages of epistolary things from a woman who’s been kidnapped. I think the abridged version is about 400 or 500 pages, and even that’s intolerable for most people. So for me, having to get through a couple of paragraphs to see what’s going on is no big deal. It was a bit shocking to think about this, and I’m noticing it as I’m editing the third book on my own.
I like how you’re connecting that idea of dramatic tension with the energy you referred to earlier. Recently, I was talking to some other writers about tension, and I suggested that we actually want our readers to be uncomfortable because then they’re invested. And it’s not just that it keeps them reading, although kind of practically speaking, it does. If I’m the reader, my discomfort is actually me telling myself and then telling the author that I care about these characters. Because if I wasn’t uncomfortable when they’re facing danger, then I don’t really care about them. I don’t really love them.
It’s interesting: I realized one of my tendencies is that I don’t like making people uncomfortable. I really don’t. And so that’s a challenge for me. I want to reassure the reader, probably where I shouldn’t.
I’m curious about that. That’s what you want to do for the reader. Do you feel a desire for that when you’re reading fiction?
No. But I think that’s one of the differences between real children’s literature and young adult fiction. I think with the young adult fiction, and this just takes getting used to, you have to be willing to let the readers get uncomfortable and a little bit lost. You have to be willing to take them into thickets and not show them the way out right away.
This is why Natalie Babbitt talks about happy endings and so forth. The fact that things work out will give children in later life a resilience. And the resilience comes from not quitting. Tolkien does it so magnificently in the end of The Lord of the Rings, where you realize that the only way that they could be guaranteed to lose would be to quit—to lie down and stop moving. But when you’ve read through The Lord of the Rings, now your experience has been of the despair that Frodo certainly feels. You can fully acknowledge at some point that this looks like and feels like despair—it feels like you’re completely lost—but there’s this other consciousness too, that says there’s a higher level.
You get glimpses of that as a reader when you share the narrator’s point of view. It really has to do with authority. And I think ultimately for people like Tolkien, it’s the link between God as ultimate author and then the human author. It’s that idea of tension. Without the tension, the book’s not worth reading. The reassurance can’t come from little verbal cues and other things like that. It has to come from a determination not to quit sometimes, to be willing to just live with it and sit with it.
That’s something often said to people who struggle with anxiety. The goal is not to figure out how your life can be anxiety-free, but to be able to sit in that moment and be okay with it not feeling the way you want it to. I think it’s the same principle at play there.
Yep. And reading the right things. The kinds of things people read are very important, and reading can help with that process of allowing people to live with anxiety and, as you say, to sit with it and stay with it. Even like the Romantics, like John Keats, talked about this idea of negative capability. It is being able to sit with uncertainty and not seek a premature closure. Because when you can hold out, usually the closure that one achieves is much better.
But I’m not good at that. My natural instinct is to want to comfort and it’ll be okay.
I think that’s true of most people—or certainly most writers I work with. It’s something I had to learn the hard way. We feel like we have to do that as a responsibility. In some ways, it’s like parenting. Your natural instinct as a parent is to make sure all the really bad stuff stays away. And it’s like, well, OK, there needs to be some boundaries and you need to offer some protection. But if we don’t let our kids have some of those tastes, perhaps through reading, perhaps through their life experiences, probably both, it’s gonna happen at some point.
I won’t name any names, but I have a good friend who taught philosophy for a lot of years. Before he had children of his own, he was happy to take his students into the deepest, darkest thickets he could find and lead them there to find their way out. Indeed, I had a philosophy teacher myself like that, who I think I would say did some damage to students, but the ones who survived got tougher. Yet here’s what’s interesting: when this philosophy prof friend of mine had a child, things changed. He understood that it’s a lot different motivation because he started to realize that the students he’s teaching are somebody’s children.
That’s the tension, right? The tension between the desire to nurture and the desire to stretch.
I’m obviously biased, but I think that Stephen’s novels strike a wonderful balance between those two desires. Suzy and the Magic Turnip is now available wherever fine books are sold. You can also learn more about Stephen on his website. I’d especially recommend “Rowan’s First Tale,” a retold fairy tale that’s referred to (but not included) in his book.
