The Foundling Goes Home

The Foundling Goes Home is a romance for guitar and orchestra. I've not yet written the orchestrations for it, but I think it stands on its own as a solo piece quite well.

The title was inspired by the character, Shasta, in—The Horse And His Boy—a children's novel by CS Lewis and part of the Narnia collection.

"The Horse And His Boy" Inspired by Turkey's Fairy Chimneys?

I always thought it would be cool to carve out a home in one of the Fairy Chimneys in Turkey. I'm convinced that CS Lewis was inspired by these when he wrote of the "tombs" in The Horse And His Boy calling them, "...great masses of mouldering stone shaped like gigantic beehives, but a little narrower."

Here is the best web page on Turkey's Fairy Chimneys you will ever see.

"Till We Have Faces" St. Louis Stage Play

This is a review of the recent stage production of CS Lewis' story—Till We Have Faces—that played here a couple of weeks ago. I've never been to a play before but might have made an exception for this had I known it was running.

Finishing up on "Till We Have Faces"

I've been re-reading the old CS Lewis classic lately and should finish it in a day or two. There are some places where the writing seems a bit clumsy to me this time. Certain phrases he uses that don't read particularly well or that sound a bit corny. And I must say that I've always felt that the second book the queen writes seems a little outlandish, and I find myself thinking she couldn't have been so wrong about things in the first book. Her second youngest sister really is a selfish trouble maker. Lewis wrote her that way, and now he wants us to believe the queen was just terribly confused. But her sister did taunt her and say terrible things to her. There's no mistaking that. She truly did mistreat her queen-sister. I tend to believe now that Lewis wrote the queen's second book almost on a lark--that he changed direction from something else he had originally planned, and so, the queen's two books don't always make sense when comparing them. At least it's my only explanation. I still like the story very much. But I now consider Perelandra to be his masterpiece of fiction. I don't think there's a word in it I would change.

Tomorrow I will try to put into thought the kinds of things I like to see in writing, and why these things work for me. Of course I'll also exemplify things I don't like. I've been thinking about this a lot lately.