Episode 336: "Why I Write" by George Orwell - Short Story Summer Remix

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast, Episode 336:

"Why I Write" by George Orwell — Short Story Summer Remix

Released: July 7, 2026
Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, Thomas Banks

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Overview

This episode delves deeply into George Orwell’s celebrated essay, “Why I Write,” exploring the motivations, early influences, and essential truths underpinning the writer’s craft. Hosts Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins share personal reflections and literary insights as they engage with Orwell’s ideas—connecting them to their own journeys as readers, writers, and teachers. This conversation is both an accessible entryway for newcomers to literary analysis and a thoughtful meditation on vocation, the pains and joys of creativity, and the tension between ambition and calling.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Personal Reflections and Commonplace Quotes (14:00–18:30)

• Cindy shares a poignant excerpt from Kristin Lavransdatter, relating it to “launching” her children into the world:

  "Never had she seen it so clearly...with her seven sons, over and over again, joy had quickened the beat of her heart. Fear on their behalf had rent it in two...They were hers, just as they had been..."
  (11:38)

• Angelina offers a quote about Orwell from C.M. Woodhouse, noting his "poetic vision" in prose.

2. Imaginations Born of Solitude (24:00–26:30)

• Orwell describes early childhood loneliness—absent siblings and parents—and the compensating creation of imaginary worlds; the hosts relate this to their own (and their children’s) experience of imagination as a product of solitude.
• Angelina:

  “I just made up a bunch of friends. I would talk about them so realistically...they were so real to me.”
  (20:29)

• Being “lonely children” as a common thread among writers.

3. Vocation vs. Ambition: The Pull to Storytelling (33:10–37:30)

• Orwell distinguishes between being called to writing and the ambition to be a writer, often resisting this compulsion.
• Angelina:

  “He feels at a young age that this is the calling, but it’s not his ambition because he resists it.”
  (33:24)

• Compulsion to write as a quasi-mystical burden rather than a purely ego-driven goal.

4. The Imitative Origins of Literary Craft (29:40–32:10)

• Early writing as imitation; hosts recall their own childhood attempts at poetry and story-making—affirming Orwell's point that "almost all of our early work is going to be plagiarism."
• Importance of giving children exposure to great literature, narration, and “the habit of attention.”

5. Leisure, Craft, and Growth (37:34–41:26)

• The need for unstructured “leisure” time for creativity to blossom; parents and students must allow quiet for true vocation to surface.
• Cindy:

  “You have to have the leisure, the quiet, to find out what it is that blossoms out of you in those quiet moments.”
  (37:41)

6. Ego, Purpose, and the Four Reasons Writers Write (55:35–62:56)

Orwell’s Four Motives (55:35ff):

• Sheer Egoism
• Aesthetic Enthusiasm
• Historical Impulse
• Political Purpose
• Each motive is always mixed, varying by person and project.
• Hosts self-identify mostly with Aesthetic Enthusiasm: desire to share a valuable experience or insight.
• Notable Quote | Orwell:

  “It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one.”
  (55:42 on Egoism)

7. The Struggles and Joys of the Writing Life (74:43–78:12)

• The writer’s dissatisfaction with their own finished work; craft is a constant, evolving struggle.
• Perpetual growth; by the time one perfects a style, one has outgrown it.
• Orwell:

  “By the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. ... My next book is bound to be a failure.”
  (74:43)

• Writing as compulsion; the “demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
• Orwell:

  “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
  (76:35)

8. Truth, Humility, and the Writer’s Task (71:41–77:32)

• Orwell’s commitment: not to advance a cause, but to "tell the truth as I see it."
• Reluctant “political” writer; refuses to act as propagandist.
• Angelina:

  “He’s not a political writer in the sense that he’s trying to persuade everybody to become a socialist. … he’s just trying to tell the truth as he saw it.” (66:07–66:12)

• Good prose as "a window pane"—the writing should not call attention to itself, but to the truth.

9. The Experience of Criticism and the Need for Humility (41:51–44:37, 53:00–54:05)

• Authors are vulnerable to criticism; learning to disregard both excessive praise and sharp criticism is necessary.
• Sharing writing creates exposure and demands humility.

10. The “Emperor’s New Clothes” Reality (67:57–69:59)

• Real-world whistleblowers (truth-tellers) are rarely applauded, often ignored or ostracized.
• Experience and age bring perspective—recognizing the cyclical nature of errors and the difficulty of awakening others.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Angelina:

  “Motherhood is full of hard joys.”
  (13:12)

• Cindy:

  “To fail. To be good at something, you have to be the person who fails at it a lot.”
  (41:26)

• Orwell (as paraphrased/discussed):

  “You can write nothing readable unless you constantly struggle to efface your own personality.”
  (77:22)

• Angelina:

  “Good prose is like a window pane. ... You should be seeing through me to the truth I’m trying to illuminate.”
  (77:51)

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Timestamps Guide

• Commonplace Quotes & Personal Reflections: 14:00–18:30
• Childhood Solitude & Imagination: 24:00–26:30
• Vocation vs. Ambition: 33:10–37:30
• Early Imitative Craft: 29:40–32:10
• Leisure & Craft Development: 37:34–41:26
• Failure, Criticism, and Craft: 41:51–44:37, 53:00–54:05
• Four Reasons for Writing: 55:35–62:56
• Truth-Telling & Politics: 66:07–71:41
• The Writer’s Dissatisfaction & Growth: 74:43–78:12

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Memorable Moments & Humor

• Angelina recalls her imaginary friends Sixy and Johnny Cavett, and family jokes around them. (20:29–21:57)
• Playful banter about awkwardness and small talk:

  “I’m not aloof. I’m just awkward.” (27:25–27:28)
  and
  “If you have a conversation with me, it’s going to be very, very awkward until we get...deeper. It’s just going to be painful. And it’s okay.” (27:28–28:01)

• Cindy’s anecdote about writing poems in middle school at a classmate’s request and burning them after her mother read them. (39:53–40:29)

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Final Reflection

This episode of The Literary Life Podcast offers listeners an intimate exploration of George Orwell’s motivations and challenges as a writer, weaving in personal anecdotes, philosophical depth, and vibrant literary analysis. The discussion is accessible and understanding, inviting both writers and non-writers to examine the sources of creativity, the necessity of humility, and the persistent pursuit of truth and beauty through story.

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For book recommendations, further discussion, and bonus content, listeners are invited to join the Literary Life Podcast community on Patreon or Facebook. Watch for next week’s episode on E. M. Forster’s “The Celestial Omnibus.”

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life Podcast.

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome to episode 16 of the Literary Life Podcast with me, Angelina Stanford and my partner in crime, Cindy Rollins. Hey, Cindy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Hi.

[Angelina Stanford]

Today we are going to talk about George Orwell's essay, why I Write. But before we get to that, just want to remind our listeners of a few things we've got going on. We've got Cindy Rollins hosting a Back to School online conference that's happening August 22nd through the 29th. You've got four speakers, six sessions, lifetime access to watch live or later. If you'd like some more information about that, you can head over to cindyrollins.net and check out what we've got going on there. She's speaking, I'm speaking, Thomas Banks is speaking, and Adrienne Fries are speaking. And we are hoping to inspire you, encourage you, and equip you for this school year repairing the ruins. Right. One story at a time. We've also got a real special treat coming up. You heard in our last podcast that we're going to be doing a special Patreon exclusive event. This is going to be August 22nd at 7pm Cindy and I are going to do a live discussion of Flannery o' Connor's story, A Good man is Hard to Find. And we will have your questions. We'll attempt to answer your questions, I should say, as we wrestle through this beast of a story that we both just really love. So this is a Patreon Fellows exclusive event. If you're one of our Patreons, be sure to log in and get the link for that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I'm super excited about that.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's going to be so much fun. If you're not a Patreon, you've been on the fence and you think, ah, you know, I really like this podcast and I'd like to support it and I'd really like access to these bonus features. Hop on over there and get in before the 22nd so you can join it. Cindy, I know you've loved Flannery o' Connor a long time.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I have. And I didn't like her a long time. So I've kind of really had she's grown on me. But that story was one I loved handing to my, like, older boys. And I just got such a kick out of them saying, this is what you wanted me to read. So there's I have some fun stories about this book.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I'm excited to hear that. Good man is Hard to Find is the first story that I read and I'm especially, I'm interested in finding out about your journey to love Flannery o'. Connor. I was smitten with her immediately, as was my son, who is just like me. Good man was hard to find as it was his first story. He read of her in college and he, he texted me and was kind of like this, what did I just read? And then, but then, but then kept texting me all through the night as he sort of like, you know, settled in on him and he was like, oh, man, I think there's something great here. He thought it was good to be disturbed by her. Which of course is the exact right response. We've got that going again. Again, Those dates are August 22nd, and that's gonna be at 7pm and you can head over to patreon.com theliterarylife to get that link for that session. Today's episode is also brought to you by another event that we've got going on. If you've been enjoying the poems at the end of our episodes read by Thomas Banks, you can get more of that. So Thomas Banks is a published poet, a lifetime lover of poetry, and a classical teacher for the last decade. And I have talked him into doing a webinar for us. So this is going to be September 19th from 5 to 6, 30 eastern. And this webinar is going to be called how to Love An Introduction to the Fundamentals of Poetry. It's one of those things where I keep hearing people say, okay, all right, Cindy has convinced us in her books, right, that we should be reading poetry, but I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing with that? I don't know. I don't know what I'm looking at. There's so much mystery and confusion about what is a poem and how do I read it. So I asked. I happened to ask the poet that I live with if he would be interested in kind of leading us by the hand. And he was very eager to do that. I'm so excited about this webinar. He's going to answer questions such as what is a poem? And how do you read a poem? And why should you read a poem? He's going to go through all the fundamentals of form and meter and rhyme scheme. He's going to lead you by the hand through several poems and model how it is that you approach a poem. I am so excited about this. This is the first of many poetry instructional projects I have planned with him. So if you are somebody who has been thinking, yes, I want more poetry. In fact, quite a few people have said just listening to him read the poems at the end of each episode has inspired them to want more. Now is your chance. Now is your chance. So if you're interested in this webinar, it's only $15 for jam packed instruction. You can head over to my website, Angelina Stanford.com you can click on webinars and you can read the whole description and you can register again. This is one of these live or later events. The power of the Internet means you can watch this at your convenience. So you can. If you can't make the live session, don't worry, register and you'll get access to the videos.

[Cindy Rollins]

I plan on signing up. I could not wait to hear this.

[Angelina Stanford]

Awesome. I am gonna totally be in the room and. But I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna photobomb him, I promise. But I am not missing this either. Every time. And you and I remember we're lifetime lovers of poetry. But every time I hear him talk about poetry, I lear. So this is. I'm very excited about this. He's very excited about this. So again, that's a How to Love poetry webinar on September 19th. Hi, me again. I already told you about our summer

[Thomas Banks]

classes, but I simply cannot contain myself. And I must tell you about some really special treats we have coming up. This school year we have two semester long classes by visiting professors. In the fall, we've got a fantastic class by Dr. Jason Baxter. If you read why Literature Still Matters. And you thought, yes, you have convinced me. The literary life is for me. Where do I start? He designed this class for you, it's called where do we Go from Reading for Life. This is going to be a six week long class, potentially 12 weeks. You can take six weeks of lectures or you can have the six week add on for some discussion with Dr. Baxter about some scholarly articles getting really deeper into this stuff. But he's going to take us through myth, epic tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry and the novel and help us to understand how to approach reading for life again. That's on Tuesdays, starting in the fall. Now, in the spring of 2027, having yet another pinch me moment, we've got Dr. Michael Drought, who has just topped charts with his new book on Tolkien called the Tower and the Ruin. And he is giving us a class on the works of Tolkien on Thursdays from January to May. The spring semester coming up, he's going to be leading us in a class called Tolkien's Creation. Not only is he going to cover the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion, he's going to get into things like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Pearl and all of the works that make up Tolkien's imagination and Tolkien's creation. This is the that he teaches at a university and we are offering it for pennies. Anybody can take it. There's no written work. We have found that literally everyone from 12 years old to 78 is in that class and having the time of their lives. So Dr. Baxter in the fall, Dr. Drought in the spring. I'm just too excited to be able to offer these top notch teachers to

[Angelina Stanford]

you guys for a low, low cost.

[Thomas Banks]

Houseofhumaneletters.com Register now.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, Cindy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, that was great.

[Angelina Stanford]

You ready to open with George Orwell? Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Let's do our commonplace quotes.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right. Why don't you go first because my commonplace quote is actually about George Orwell.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay. So my commonplace quote is really just about where I am in life right now. So I'm reading Kristen, rereading Kristen Laugh's Daugh. And of course I wrote a book called Mere Motherhood. And I am now in the middle of it all. I'm in the middle of the culmination of my life as a mother in some ways and it's been interesting. I'm a very stoic person. I sent out my newsletter yesterday about some of the life things that happened to me in the last couple couple days. And one of the things is that I found out my son who is going to college and was going to be living at home now, has been offered a place to stay at a dorm. So today he moves out and he's moving into a dorm, a very cheap, cheaply Christian ministry dorm. And my nest, as of this evening, my nest will be kind of empty because I know what happens when people go to college. They never, I mean, they might come home for the summer here and there, but you know, it's kind of the beginning of the end not to be. So I have this quote from Kristin and she was a mother of sons. And it just really hit me hard, this quote. Many, many passages in this book I relate to so well. But here's the, here's the quote. Never had she seen it so clearly as on this evening, what destiny had demanded of her and what it had given her in return. With her seven sons, over and over again, joy had quickened the beat of her heart. Fear on their behalf had rented in two. They were her children, these big sons with their lean, bony boys, bodies just as they had been when they were small and so plump that they barely hurt themselves when they tumbled down on their way between the bench and her knee. They were hers, just as they had been back when she lifted them out of the cradle to her milk filled breast and had to support their heads, which wobbled on their frail necks the way a bluebell nods on its stalk whenever they ended up, wherever they ended up in the world, wherever they journeyed. Forgetting their mother, she thought that for her their lives would be like a current in her own life. They would be one with her, just as they had been when she alone on this earth knew about the new life hidden inside, drinking from her blood and making her cheeks pale.

[Angelina Stanford]

So well, now that I got a phoenix.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm sorry, that's me. This is me right now. So I couldn't come up with a better quote than that, but I just thought so. This week also, as Alex is leaving to college, within minutes of hearing the gender of my one son's new baby child that will be born in December, which it will be a boy. And having Alex go to school. A few minutes later, I got a call from another one of my sons who said his wife is also expecting a baby. So just, it's just like this whole cycle of life is just like in my throat right now. And that described it just perfectly.

[Angelina Stanford]

It strikes me that motherhood is full of hard joys.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes, absolutely. And that's why a lot of times people read Kristen Lover's Daughter and they don't like it at first because it does not shy away from this concept of the joy is there, but your joy as being a mother is not the same as the joy your children have in you. They. I mean, they have joy in you, but not. Not the joy of someone who has given every. Every. You know, that your life's bloody for them, so.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, yeah, no, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right.

[Cindy Rollins]

So anyway, that was my quote, and that's my life. And pray for me, people.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, well, I'll pop a bottle of champagne. I'm like, cheers to Cindy. Another one launched into the world. I mean, that's the thing, right? You talk about this all the time, right? If you do a good job raising your kids, they're gonna leave you as they should. Yes. That's a hard job.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, no. I'm really, really proud of Alex, and I'm proud of all my kids. But as Alex is leaving and just re. Looking over how God's worked in his life, I feel good for his future.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's so good. That's so good. I'm sure there's a lot of people listening who are facing that same sort of thing. I mean, every milestone. I mean, the going to college is a big milestone, but every milestone. Getting the driver's license, learning to walk, weaning the child, every little thing that says they need you a little less.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. From the moment they're born, they're moving away from you. Mm. What. What does Orwell say? Does he have anything cheery?

[Angelina Stanford]

He doesn't have anything to say about motherhood. Not a thing. Really?

Whoa.

Good. Because, frankly, I don't want to hear what a man has to say about motherhood.

[Cindy Rollins]

Amen. Boom. Said it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, really?

[Angelina Stanford]

Men have lots of things to teach us. They do not have motherhood as one of those topics. That is not. That is not the mission God has given men, nor would I presume to speak about being a father.

[Cindy Rollins]

Amen.

[Angelina Stanford]

I know nothing about being less than nothing about being a father. So I am a big George Orwell fan. Actually love his novels. I'm not a huge fan of modern literature, but he's always been someone I've really, really liked. We talked about the essay last week. He is just one of our finest essayists. In fact, not too long ago, my son's an English major, and he was reading. Actually, a couple of years ago, he was reading an article by Christopher Hitchens. This is right before Christopher Hitchens died, where he said, if you. You're gonna love this. If you want to learn how to write, you should read P.G. wodehouse and George Orwell. So my son went and grabbed all those books and he even bought this copy I have of why I Write by George Orwell. This is my son's copy. I went and got it out of his room, or I should say the box of things that used to be his room, because now it's my office. But speaking of life changes, thinking of life, I preserved the books, though I can't say other childhood memories have survived. But the books are well cared for. So, yeah, my son went and grabbed all the Wodehouse and Orwell and both of them just fantastic writers.

[Cindy Rollins]

So Orwell.

[Angelina Stanford]

Orwell is just premiere. So when I knew I had to have a commonplace quote for today, I knew exactly which one I was gonna get. It's the last time I read Animal form, which it's been a few years. In the introduction to Animal form, the author of the introduction, C.M. woodhouse, said this about Orwell, and I immediately just went and put the semi commonplace book because I thought that. I just loved the way he thought about this. And I think that this comes out in this essay, too. So this is a quote about Orwell as a writer.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Orwell was a poet who happened to find his medium in prose, a poet not so much in his means of expression as in the nature of his vision, which could strip the sprawling tangle of the world around him down to its core with the simplicity of a timeless flash of intuition. I love that. I love that. I love the idea that Orwell has the poetic vision, even if he doesn't have the form of a poet.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay. That is. And one thing Lewis says about Orwell that I found the most interesting, it's not even what he says, but what he doesn't say, which brings it back into the realm of poetry again, don't you think?

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

Not only what you say, but what you don't say that makes people yearn past what you're saying to something else.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, no, that's. That's a really good point. I think Orwell has that economy of style, too, that we were talking about with the Guy de Maupassant story.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's right. Yes. And that's fascinating to watch happen as a writer. And we're gonna. He's talking today about why I write, but. So it's kind of like if watching him at work is a great exercise.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, absolutely. This is a fantastic essay. I really enjoyed reading this. And I have to. I mean, not to make this all about my own personal therapy session, but, man, I Bet you felt the same way. Did you relate to his description?

[Cindy Rollins]

I did. And I thought, well, maybe everybody relates to this. Maybe whether you're not a writer. Like, I've written some. And I don't. I don't. I mean, when I say I've written and George Orwell has written it, I don't mean it like that. But I'm thinking, you know, on my little tiny speck of dust, I related very well to what he was saying. And I wondered if every person who would read this would relate to it, whether they've written anything or not.

[Angelina Stanford]

See, I want to know this too. I'm desperate to hear what our listeners have to say about this. I stopped reading and ran to. My husband was like, this is me. He is describing me.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, me too. I thought the same thing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly what I did. I had my. Understand. Like, all of my siblings are creative, but I was the only one who had imaginary friends. And my imaginary friends are legendary in my family to this day. Okay. To this day. Because they said that I. And I don't even remember this, okay. Because I was a really small child, but I was the oldest, so I didn't have siblings, and I was the oldest grandchild. So I just made up a bunch of friends and I would talk about them. So realistically, even one day, I must have been three years old. I was sitting in the back seat. I was probably standing. This is pre car seat days. I'm aging myself. Pre car seat days. It was the 70s. I stood up in the back seat.

[Cindy Rollins]

Your parents should be in jail.

[Angelina Stanford]

That should totally be in jail. They probably didn't even have have seat belts in cars in 1971, but they

[Cindy Rollins]

were probably up there smoking cigarettes too.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I mean, just all of it, you know, deet and, you know, just my mother fed me formula. It's a wonder I'm alive. Okay, Cindy. It's a wonder.

[Cindy Rollins]

That Mac and cheese, that horrible orange stuff.

[Angelina Stanford]

I watched so much tv. Okay, now that we've just outed myself here. Well, one time just yelling, stop the car. Stop the car. Stop the car. And my dad pulled over and I said, sixy wants a ride. My imaginary friend was hitchhiker. So to this day, at family events, which I gotta say is getting a little annoying now that I'm, you know, entering the middle of my life here, but they will still ask me, well, how's, you know how? And they'll name my friends. How's Sixie doing? How's Johnny Cavett doing? There was a name. 60 and Johnny Cavett 3 year old Angelina came up with that. And they were so real to me. So real to me. I just, oh my gosh. I related so much to this, how I lived in my private world of story. I also had, I narrated. I constantly framed everything that was happening in my life as a story. And I narrated it. It's part of the reason why I'm such a good storyteller. And like Orwell, I really related to that part where he says, I denied that I was that part of myself until I couldn't deny it anymore. I feel that in me. I feel that I am pushing off the destiny that has so obviously called me because I tell stories all the time. I frame everything as a story. So I was actually really encouraged by reading this. Like, okay, okay, yeah, I hear you, God, I hear you. Nudge, nudge.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, and I see that in some of my children who I fully expect to write books someday. Some of them are just storytellers. They look at life as a story. I do too. And that's why I could be. My family has accused me before, romanticizing things, but I look at them as a story. You know, I go to church with my son James one Sunday and to me that's a story that fits in the narrative. I'm not making that up. It's just that's how I look at the world. I look at it as a story. Now I also did that as far as sermons go. I heard so many sermons. I sat in the pew as a little girl and I just trembled and listened to everything the pastor said. And I found myself maybe around 11 and 12, framing everything as a moral lesson, which really got me in trouble after I became a mother, which is why I turn around and tell people, don't do this.

[Angelina Stanford]

Ah, okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's, you know, I'd be out flying a kite and before I knew it, I'd be sitting there going, you know, coming up with some kind of sermon illustration. This is before I realized that I wasn't going to be allowed to be a preacher. And so I took it out on my children. But it's not that I think that's a great way to do it, but that is how I looked at the world. But then that was what I was around. I read a lot and you read a lot and we heard a lot.

[Angelina Stanford]

I wrote and illustrated the lamest short stories and then I'd staple them. And so I had, I had books. I was a published author, very young self published, illustrated with my ridiculously terrible stick figures.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, so he Starts out this essay at 5 or 6, and he talks about this. He goes through these ages, and I found that fascinating, what he said he was doing at different ages. He knew at 5 or 6 that he should be a writer.

[Angelina Stanford]

He tried a long time to step into that. That's what I found so fascinating.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. So he moved away from that between 17 and 24, but he couldn't do it. He barely saw his father before the age of eight. That was another thing. And so he ends up talking about his brothers and sisters are not close in age to him. And so he was a very lonely child. And because of that, he had an active imagination and he had a private world. And we would have to wonder how many writers this is true of.

[Angelina Stanford]

I mean, I can't imagine that this is not. Almost 100% sure.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

So we have a running little conversation in our family. Both my son and my husband are fascinated with this question. And so when we get together, we'll often throw out, like, so what writer would you want to hang out with? And almost 100% the answer is none of them. You know, because for what we're talking about, they're kind of lonely people.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

The active, vibrant world they have is in their imagination.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, then I think that's what makes the Inklings so fascinating to people, because that is an anomaly.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. That you have this group of writers who can actually have the. They can actually set their ego aside to talk to each other about their writing. And they were brutal with each other. So that's a very fascinating. Of course, a lot of great works.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm gonna have to go ask Mr. Banks, because he tells me the story all the time, and I can't remember who the second person is, but he's got a lot of stories about moments when famous authors met, and almost all of them is that they were silent with each other.

[Cindy Rollins]

They didn't have anything to say.

[Angelina Stanford]

Didn't have anything to say. So, like, T.S. eliot famously had a. Had a taxi ride with some other famous writer. Can't think of who it was. It's gonna drive me crazy. I'm at the. Run out there and ask him who it was before this episode ends. But. But I mean, other than just, like, pleasantries about the weather and the directions to where they were going, no conversation.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's interesting.

[Angelina Stanford]

Again, I think it's this idea that having this lively imagination, your own private world, that's not the same thing as engaging in a conversation with somebody, because that's having to make your private world Public. Right. As a writer, you can invite it in, but at a distance. Like you buy my book and you go read it in your private world, but you haven't. You've gotten a glimpse into my private world, but you haven't really entered it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. I think that is also why, like, I find it much easier to talk anonymously to people who, like, as a speaker, it's easier for me to get up and speak to people I don't know than it is to just have a conversation with somebody I do know. It's very difficult for me to just talk about the weather or make small talk. As a matter of fact, it's so difficult that it causes me anxiety when I know I'm going to be in a small talk situation.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, me too. Same.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Meet me and you think, oh, she's so aloof and wouldn't talk to me. That is not what's happening. I'm just feeling really awkward and I

[Cindy Rollins]

don't know what to say. Yes. I had to learn to make a few comments about things like wallpaper and, and the color I paint in my room. The whole time it's like I'm just making this stuff up because I don't even know how to talk like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. I'm not aloof. I'm just awkward.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And honestly, I've learned to embrace. This is one thing with age. I just decided this is what's made it a little bit easier for me. And I think this goes back to what we talked about before. The worst case scenario thing is I just say to myself, I'm awkward. It's okay if you have a conversation with me. It's going to be very, very awkward until we get past this first part of the brain and get down into the deeper part. It's just going to be painful. And it's okay. It's okay to have painful, awkward conversations with people. It is.

[Angelina Stanford]

You're so right. I have to tell you, like, when you're really young, you only see getting older as like the losses. Right. I'm not going to be as, you know, fast or strong or energetic or whatever are beautiful. But there are so many just pluses to getting older. One of the things is you can embrace your awkwardness.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Just like you're saying so when I was younger, I'm just desperately trying not to look awkward. So I'm not saying anything because I'm so afraid of saying the wrong thing. Now when I'm in a situation like that, I'll just turn to the person next to me and say, I'm feeling really awkward. I don't know how to make small talk. And then they'll often say, I'm feeling really awkward too. And then we have a real moment.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah. So. So, yeah. So if you are one of these awkward introverts, and I have a feeling it's a. Or you're an extrovert, though.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, I'm an introvert.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, you're an introvert. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

You're extroverted. Because I'm talkative.

[Cindy Rollins]

But no, many people think I'm an extrovert also. And I'm. I have. When I test on the introvert extrovert scale, I come out 100% introvert. I mean, I'm not even close to being an extrovert. But.

[Angelina Stanford]

But Lynn Bruce says I'm an ambivert. I actually think that's more correct what I am.

[Cindy Rollins]

So I have some traits of both. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

But I don't know anybody. I'm all introvert in the corner. Awkward watching you.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, Right. So. So back to Orwell here. He said. So I like this part too. He said, I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five and his mother took it down to dictation. Now, I'm sure we have lots of moments in the audience who have done that very thing.

[Angelina Stanford]

I have totally done that with my kids.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. I mean, I could even quote my oldest son's early poem. It was about turkeys. And we still quote it in our family. But I will not ruin all my family relationships by quoting that poem here. Let's just say turkeys trot fast.

[Angelina Stanford]

But, you know, that's. It's wonderful encouragement to read something like that. To read that he remembers it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

He considers it part of his literary education.

[Cindy Rollins]

And I can tell his children. I can quote the poem to his children, and then they like it. They want to be poets because they're, you know, Daw Dawes a poet. I mean, I like to think that. But anyway, that's adorable. And he brings out the point that he had chair like teeth, which he said was a good enough phrase. And it really was. He already knew was turning a good phrase. And he recognizes that as an adult. Mm. Mm. But of course, he says he was. You know, obviously almost all of our early work is going to be plagiarism because imitation is how we learn, you know?

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely. I think he's getting at something really profound here. Well, it's riding a bike with training wheels. Right. You go through that until you can take the training wheels off. It's. It's okay if your kid is channeling the poem he read that morning and the story he tells.

[Cindy Rollins]

As a matter of fact, it's very good for.

[Angelina Stanford]

Very good. Yes. And then eventually, because, you know, what's Orwell learning there? He's learning to recognize a good turn of phrase. He's trying to imitate, thinking about language in that way.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. Yeah. I definitely think that this imitation is far more likely to produce a writer, and that's where narration is so important, than just like, let's all, you know, write this way. And this is how you write. And first you put it, you know, and then you add it, some adverbs, and then you do this. Those kind of things are not really. You can't imagine Shakespeare learning to write that way. You imagine him learning to write, imitating other people and other things. And I think most writers are really. But what it. What is really going on, besides the imitation is. And is that they're paying attention, they are seeing things. Yes, we all are going to imitate, but the really great imitators are the people who are paying attention and know what to imitate.

[Angelina Stanford]

And obviously he's being exposed to good literature as a child.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, absolutely. He's reading Blake. So we find out, as many of those children in that time period, well, at least probably upper class children would have been introduced to Blake. So.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So we see here so many essential things about education. Right. So exposure to good literature, narration, learning the habit of attention, learning to imitate.

[Cindy Rollins]

And then he comes along once again. And of course, World War I broke out. I think he said he's 11 at the time, and he starts writing, writing patriotic poetry, which is very much what a lot of people did during. At the beginning of World War I. We see extremely patriotic poetry. And then of course, at the end we see that we've talked about this before, but we just see that unpatriotic poetry, the death of patriotism and the whole dolce et decorum est pro patri amore, that, you know, making fun of the patriotism in a way, or scorning it, or what would Lewis call it? Debunking. Debunking it.

[Angelina Stanford]

I want to make sure we pull out a couple of things that I'm seeing in these paragraphs that really were interesting to me, especially given last week's conversation about ambition and calling. He feels at a young age that this is the calling, but it's not his ambition because he resists it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. He does not. That is a Very important distinction. He. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

He doesn't just decide, at five years old, I'm gonna be a writer.

[Cindy Rollins]

And then he pushes through and pushes through.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, it's his true. He keeps saying, I outraged my nature. So he feels like by nature he's been created to be a writer, but he keeps trying to run away from it. He also says that it feels like it's happening against my will under a kind of compulsion from outside.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely. I relate to that, too.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think that most writers can relate to that, but I also. And I want to get to that. He mentions it a few other places about how hard it is and how being a writer makes you. Makes you so. So ill. It reminded me of Flannery o' Connor's quote. Writing is the situation in which the teeth rot and the hair falls out.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And you hear people say that. You hear people say, well, writing that book was a miserable experience.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, it's giving birth, isn't it? It's gotta have pain.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And. And, And. And you think, well, why would anybody write a book? And it's because you have to. You have to write the book.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is the story I have to tell. And he basically says that later when he was up against some critics, saying, why'd you put that in there? Well, because that's the story I had to tell.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, exactly. This is. This is the story churning away in me that had to be told.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mm.

[Angelina Stanford]

So I just. Yeah, I. It's interesting because he admits right up the front, writers of vain. We have egos. Right. So it's not like we're all saints and we're just writing.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, no, no. We're just.

[Angelina Stanford]

We're just filled with the Holy Spirit. We see the same thing we talked about last week. The vocation versus the ambition. He is telling the story of. I was created to be a writer, but it took me a long time to step into that and embrace calling. That's not the story of a 5 years old. I looked around, decided I want to be a writer. And so I forced myself to be a writer. And I kept pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing until I published something.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I think we. I mean, we're parents of adult children. I mean, you.

[Cindy Rollins]

It.

[Angelina Stanford]

It becomes so apparent that a kid is called to one thing and not another.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

If my daughter came to me and said, I've decided I want to be an opera singer, I would say, you need to think. Rethink that.

[Cindy Rollins]

I mean, like I said, I look at some of my children and they don't say, I'm a writer. I've been called to be a writer. But I look at them and I think, they are a writer. They will be a writer. It will be. It is inevitable. At the very least, if they never write it down. It's the way they speak. It's the way they go about their life. Well.

[Angelina Stanford]

And you hear the same thing about people who are musically inclined. Right. They make music because they have to make music. It's what they do all the time. So my favorite singer songwriter actually said this, which, again, I think goes to this.

[Cindy Rollins]

That guy. What, Gregory.

[Angelina Stanford]

Gregory Allen Isaacov.

[Thomas Banks]

That's my.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's my boy. Not to be confused with my man, which is Thomas Banks, but nonetheless. Oh, yeah. So he's just. Yeah, he's Wendell Berry with the guitar. Now everybody's gonna have to go look him up. Yeah. He's a organic farmer who's also a folk singer. And he told a story about how when he was a kid, he wanted to be a drummer in a punk rock band.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

Which is really laughable when you think about what his career is now. And then he said, at some point, I had to realize that's not who I was. And he said, I had to realize that the kind of music you make is the kind that you're supposed to make is the kind of music you make when you're by yourself. And so he realized, for all that he had this dream of I'm gonna be a punk rock drummer, he was really a folk singer who wrote folk songs. And he stepped into that. And I think that really gets at that distinction we're making between vocation and ambition. So the idea he had of himself was not. It wasn't a proper vision. Proper in the sense of. It wasn't true. It wasn't accurate. He did not know who he was. It took him a while to figure out, I'm actually not a punk rock drummer. I'm actually a folk singer.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, not to beat a dead horse, but this is why leisure is the basis of culture.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yep.

[Cindy Rollins]

You have to have the leisure, the quiet, to find out what it is. She blossoms out of you in those quiet moments. Yeah. You could be. You could spend all your lifeless pursuing the rock. The rock star dream. Because that's fun. And it's just, you know, you go out and you play the drum. How cool is that? But you haven't ever given yourself the quiet ability to find out who you really are, what really is waiting to blossom out of you.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, it's true. You're absolutely right. I hadn't even made that connection. That's absolutely. You have. So. So we have to then give ourselves and our children quiet space.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. I have two children who. If you give them quiet space, they draw.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

This would never occur to me. This is not how I use my quiet time. Because I'm not an artist.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

But because they have lots of parts of their day. I mean, if you just. They will. They will draw on anything. They'll draw on a napkin on the table. So you're absolutely. You're absolutely right. You have that. That's such a good point. That's such a good point.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. So I really related then to this next part greatly where he talks about. He started to produce made to order stuff. So. Verse d' occasion, which I. I'm sorry. Where's Thomas when you need him? Semi comic poems. So in seventh grade and eighth grade, I sat in a class in front of the. This guy. Other kid. I won't even say his name lest he ever listened to this. But it wasn't a romantic situation. But he would always. I would write poetry day and night, day and night. I wrote all these little short poems and he would throw out a topic and then I would write a poem about it. And he would. So all day long in class, we'd sit there and he'd hand me a piece of paper with a word on it and then I would write a poem. And I had this huge body of poetry that I was writing at about 12, 13 and 14, which eventually I burned because my mother read them. And that upset me so much, that

[Angelina Stanford]

adolescent pain, Cindy.

[Cindy Rollins]

And praise God that I did. So I don't have to be confronted with the fact that. How terrible they were. But anyway, I certainly related to the. This poetry writing phase he went through where you're putting out all this, you know, junk stuff that's the cheapest journalism, you know, the worst poetry. But. But you're practicing. You just can't help it. I mean, why would it. Why would somebody in seventh grade do something like that? I don't know. I don't know. Like you said, I had quiet. That's what I did.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think that you're hitting on something really, really important, you know. So Mr. Banks is a. He's a published poet, right. And he. By the time he was 20 years old, he had written a hundred sonnets. And he said. None of which are readable. Like he just. I disavow the poetry of my youth. And every writer talks like that. And I. And I think what we're seeing is to develop this craft, you got to be bad for a long time.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

And not give up. You got it. You got to keep developing the craft. So the long period of just, you know, even writers that sort of burst out of the scene and overnight success. They have been writing every day their whole life. They've been writing a long, long time. Or cultivating literary mindset. Morville talks about that, which I really appreciated. So even when he wasn't writing, he was being literary.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So it takes a long time. It takes a long time to cultivate this craft.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And I think you had a good point about failure, and I think we've made that before. But we have to be. To fail. To be. To be good at something, you have to be the person who fails at it a lot.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. And that's hard because he's right. Writers do have egos. I mean, writers are so sensitive. I mean, you feel like you've put your heart on the page and you hand it to someone and they're like, yeah, I don't really like it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

It feels like they've said, I don't like you.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, it's. I don't even read the reviews of my books. I remember last year, someone came to me and said, oh, man, I. Have you read all the reviews of your book? The real upbeat, positive businessman said this to me. And I'm like, no, I haven't read any. I can't. I've read a couple of negative. I couldn't take it. Overwhelmingly positive reviews.

[Angelina Stanford]

But it doesn't matter that one negative. I know. The same thing happens to me. I can get all the, oh, we love you, blah, blah, blah. And then the one. The one negative thing. That's. That's the thing I can't get out of my mind. So. So that's. I mean, that's another principle. I think that if you're gonna be committed to the craft of writing, you've got to push all those other voices. You've got to push.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. Yeah. And it's made me.

[Angelina Stanford]

A little praise can go to your head too. Like, you absolutely can't listen to that either.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, you shouldn't. I don't. And I. That's the other thing. Reason I don't read the reviews. But there is a sense where it's made me nicer to other authors. I have stopped writing nasty or ye. Too negative every review. Mm.

[Angelina Stanford]

There's a person on the other side.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. It's a human being. On the other side of this, of course, you know, people say, well, if you put something out there publicly, you have to take. Take what you get. And I agree with that. But it. I also think there's. Where I'm a little harsh, is when people are wanting to. People to spend a lot of money on a product and. And that I'm more likely to give a very harsh review of something that is.

[Angelina Stanford]

But I think that's different because you're trying to tell people, don't feel the anxiety to buy this. Don't feel pressured. I'll be suckered into giving your money. That's not exact. That's not what's going on. If someone wrote a novel, you wouldn't be going around trashing this novelist. Even if you didn't like it. You'd say, well, I didn't care for the book. I don't recommend it.

[Cindy Rollins]

It.

[Angelina Stanford]

But you're not gonna.

[Cindy Rollins]

And a lot of times you can say, well, a lot of people like this. It wasn't my favorite. You know, you can coach it in the fact that. Couch it. Couch it in the fact that. That it is a book that, you know, it's gonna appeal to different people. But so. So anyway, he talks about this part of his. His life, his childhood, where he's making up stories in his head. He's carrying out, like you said, literary exercises that he's making up himself. He's not actually being given literary exercises by his teachers. He doesn't mention his schooling here, but he's actually making up literary exercises for himself. And I found that to be super interesting.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, it goes back to what we've been saying. Right. What does he do in his leisure time? He's. He's crafting stories.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And he's using the stories he already knows, like Robin Hood or these kind of stories. So.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mm.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And I like this. You know, he says he had a narrative going. He pushed the door open and entered the room, a yellow beam of sunlight filtering through the muslin curtain, slanted onto the table, where the matchbox, half open, lay beside the ink pot. And I'm sure. I know I've practiced those kind of things before, too. How would this sound in a book? Or what would. The thing that gets me is conversation. So I try to think, how would this conversation.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yep.

[Cindy Rollins]

Sitting in the doctor's office and these people are talking. I think, how would I write this?

[Angelina Stanford]

How would I do the same? How would I. How would I describe this tone? How would I describe that laugh?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. How would I get Actually what is really going on on paper. And I'm not good at that. So that's, that's something that challenges me.

[Angelina Stanford]

I like to. How he says that, you know, all of the use. That's when he was acquiring his emotional attitude toward writing. I thought that was an interesting way to put that. So with the books that we're reading as children or giving our children the way we talk about them, all of that is shaping a perspective about what is the craft of a writer, what's the purpose of a writer, what are they trying to do? So like. So your, your emphasis about, you know, don't, don't slap a moral on there. You've been shaping your kids all this time with that, with that emotional attitude toward literature that it's not to. Not, not to produce a catchy little moral.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right, exactly. There's something else going on. And then he moves on to just the weird, weirder words that, that captured his attention, like, like Paradise Lost. So he. And that grabbed his imagination. And I find that to be true too. There are, you know, so many words grab your mind that you don't know what they are and they're just sounds and what do they mean? And you can get. And your mind is trying to make sense out of. This is the very art of thinking. Your mind is trying to make sense of the inexplicable. And it's such an important part of education and it's so important that we read things that are harder for our children than their grade level, so that their mind is, you know, this is why poetry is so important. There's this weird word in Paradise Lost, and your mind is going to just take that word and play with it and try to figure it out.

[Angelina Stanford]

All of my kids went through phases where they sounded like they were 19th century people because of all the things that we read. That's that weird homeschool moment. That day my daughter furiously marched into the living room and told her brother, if you do that one more time, I will box your ears.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes. Laughing hysterically.

[Angelina Stanford]

And she was so upset.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, my goodness. Yeah, yeah. Why are you laughing at this? But, yeah, my kids, I would say we use the word yonder way more than appropriate. Just regular conversation.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yonder.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. So what is purple? He talks a lot about purple passages. And I thought you could tell us about that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Purple prose is when you're just being highly decorative for the point of being highly.

[Cindy Rollins]

Ah, yes. And that is easily done.

[Angelina Stanford]

You can see that's not Orwell's style.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, no. He does not have that.

[Angelina Stanford]

But that's something that you can see kids doing when they're learning how to write. Because they're supposed to sound fancy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. Yeah. They think good writing is going to be very. Yeah. Flowery.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yes. I've had to deal with a lot of that with students where it's all this flowery stuff and it doesn't actually say anything.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. You can't even find what's going on. Now as he's talking about this, he talks about his first novel. And I found it fascinating what he said. So he said, I completed my first novel, Burmese Days, when. When I wrote. Which I wrote when I was 30. And he's saying it, and he goes on to talk about the book as if he was. That it. 30 was not a mature age. Almost as if 30 was for writing. 30 was almost being a teenager, not something he wrote as mature writer. Whereas nowadays we would. You know, lots of people who are 30 are putting out books and people are raving about them. And sometimes you read them, I think, you know, sometimes you read them and you think, yeah, they're missing something.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, that's really interesting. So I've been reading a bunch of books on Paradise Lost because I'm getting ready to teach it, and. And I can't remember which book said this, but one of them made the point that pretty much by definition, an epic poem has to be written by someone at the end of their career. And I thought, well, that's true. That's true of Virgil. That's true of Milton, you know, on and on. And the point was that what is expressed in an epic is an encyclopedic knowledge of a culture that's much more than just the story, like you're expressing. You're writing the statement about your culture. That's not something you can do at the beginning of your life. You haven't lived long enough. You haven't cultivated your craft long enough. That was the first time I ever thought of it that way. I've been. I've been chewing on it since then. There are some artistic endeavors that can only be made by a mature person at the end of their life, looking back.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. So at that young age, it's good he wrote that book. That book was great work practice for him, and it probably helped. I mean, you can't become a good writer without writing and writing and writing and writing. So we're not. I'm not saying, oh, people under 30, you know, shouldn't write. They should write, they should write.

[Angelina Stanford]

I Think it also has to do with form. So what this book was saying is that so. So a poet. So they could write tragedies when they were younger, they could write lyric poems, but the epic, that's for a mature

[Cindy Rollins]

writer, and that's why sometimes they're never finished.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right.

And so I think that there's a lot of, like. There's a lot of, like, you know, look, I'm just. I'm gonna get. This is a hill to die on for Angelina. If you're in your 30s and you're writing a memoir. No. Memoir is a form for the end of your life. When you're looking back, if you're in your 30s, you haven't even barely lived yet. There might be lots. There are some. There are lots of things someone in their 30s can write. A memoir is not one of them.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mm.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because that's a form that requires the position of the writer as someone at the end of their life looking back.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Don't write a parenting book if your oldest child is 7 years old. But if your oldest child is 7 years old, you might. Could write some fabulous other things. Right. So it has to do with. Certain forms require a certain maturity. There are other. There are other things you can only write when you're young.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. Right. You know, Dorothy Sayers, was it. I don't know if we talked about this before. I think you and I talked about it privately. But Dorothy. Isn't it Dorothy Sayers who says that? She does. Yes. She doesn't like when people hand her books to critique. Oh, she says that in Gaudy Night. Yeah. That she doesn't. And that's such a painful thing when someone gives you something for. To critique. That's. How do you get through something like that?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, no, I had to just get to the point where I told people, I don't have time to read it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah. I. And I don't have time. So that's good. I'm gonna just go with that, because I really don't. But my husband.

[Angelina Stanford]

That just outed ourselves on air. Yes, but. But it's the same. Well, I'm not. I'm. Well, there's a whole other thing. I mean, being a literary critic and a literary editor, it's just. Look, I'm not cut out for that. Don't. Don't give me your manuscript, because if it's not good, I'm not going to be able to tell you.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. So that's for a different. A whole different set of. And I guess people often think, well, You're a writer. You could be a critique, a critic, but you're not a writer and a critic are two different things. Or a reader and a critic are two different things. You're not an editor is two different things. Yeah, an editor. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

A really skilled editor could come and look at your manuscript and say, here's what's great, great. Here's what you need to change. I don't have that skill.

[Cindy Rollins]

But also, an editor sometimes looks at it in a very sterilized way, and that can be a problem. So you have. The writer has a certain skill and the editor has a certain skill. And there's not a lot of overlap between those two things.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, there is not. There are very few literary figures who have been both editors and writers, or both critics and writers. T.S. eliot is one that comes to mind who's both a critic and a writer and an editor and a writer. Typically, though it is not the same person. It's very, very different skills. It's not bad editor. There's very few things worse than a bad editor because they don't know what their skill set is. And they come and try to write that manuscript and they take your.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. The problem is when the editor thinks they're the writer. And it's. It's. I have a great copy editor. If you want her name, write me and I will send it to you. And she will be overwhelmed with work to do. She. I need a copy editor. I need someone. I sent out my. Yesterday without sending it to her, and it had several typos. They were genuine typos. But you know what? She wouldn't have let that happen, but I did.

[Angelina Stanford]

That can help you find your own voice, can make you sound more like you. Can you express what it was you were actually trying to express. And so, yeah, that. That's a whole other skill set, though.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Editor. That's. That's a gift.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, it is. So I have great admiration for her. And I, you know, I. I sent her a mess of something I wrote last week, and I said, I don't know what this is. Fix it. And she did. And I sent it to the person I was sending it to, and they said, oh, this is so good. And I thought, oh, my goodness, she helped me so much. But so speaking of that, he says there are four types of writers.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is fantastic. Four reasons for writing.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And the first one is painful. Sheer egoism.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I love that he says, look, it's humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a Strong one.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, what makes a person think? I mean, I write because I feel like I have to sometimes. And I really, I really do enjoy getting up and saying I have to write today. And that's a good process for me now. Then when I have to rewrite, you know, I get all those words on paper now I've got to make sense of them. I got to put them in a better order. That is the painful part where, okay, the words are there, but they're all messed up. Up. But there is a truth, I guess. And people can look from the outside and say, well, you're just, that's just your ego that makes you think someone wants to hear what you have to say.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, he says that they're all four mixed, all four reasons.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And different people, different things will be emphasized and I would imagine even in the same person, different projects.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Might be there. I mean, I think I definitely fall under number two. I think when I feel a deep responsibility and joy to help people see whatever it is I see like about. I want to share with you the awesome thing I saw in this story.

[Cindy Rollins]

For me. I wanted to reach out to moms and say, motherhood is way more complicated than people have led us to believe. So if it's feeling complicated to you, let's just join hands and realize that's the way it is. It's not. You haven't. It doesn't mean you have failed because it turned out to be complicated.

[Angelina Stanford]

What do you think about what he said about. Okay, so he going back to the first one.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right? Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Sheer egoism. Right. He says that the great mass of human beings are not actually selfish. After the age of about 30, they abandoned individual ambition in many cases. Indeed, they almost abandoned the system being individuals at all and live chiefly for others or simply smothered under drudgery.

[Cindy Rollins]

I thought that was really good. I thought that was so insightful. What are you in your 20s if you're not an individual who has your whole life before you and it's going to be made in your image and you've got it figured out and as you should. I think that's God given 20 year olds. But then you get to your 30s and you have to make some adaptations because life is turning out to be a little different than what you expected. This is where the 30 year old thing comes in that, that people think, oh, I've arrived, I'm not an individual. I'm not 20 anymore. I'm 30 now. So. So I'm not that person. Anymore. And I think that can get kind of complicated.

[Angelina Stanford]

And you're a little more settled in your 30s. You've got the family, you've got the job.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And you have. Like I said, what I like to say is, in your 30s, you have just enough experience under your belt to be intoxicated by it. By the time you hit 40, you realize, okay, that was a train wreck. I didn't know what I was doing when I thought I was like, I've got this parenting thing. Boom, curve ball. And no, I don't have it. Not at all.

[Cindy Rollins]

But I do think he's right. You have to decide either it's gonna be all about me or not all about others. And, of course, many people are smothered under drudgery. I mean, life can be very, very, very hard. And money and all those things can change your life, you know? Yeah. It's one thing to think, oh, I'm 20 years old. I'm gonna travel the world and see everything. And then to wake up and be 35 years old and think, oh, I haven't gone anywhere because I didn't have the money.

[Angelina Stanford]

So how many of us at 20 are so determined not to be our parents, only to end up in your 30s and hear your parents coming out of your mouth constantly?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. I love those commercials that show that. The mom, you know, the man or the woman and becoming his dad, and

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't know that one, but anyway, we better keep moving. I'm watching. Okay, so that's. That's the sheer egoism. Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

But you said you're more aesthetic enthusiasm. And I would say, me too. That's. Me, too.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think so, too. This. So he says, desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. So for you, when you're saying, I want to talk to mom, and you want to give them a real and true understanding of motherhood in all of its glory and warts.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

So that's the aesthetic desire. And I just feel this intense compulsion to. It's gonna sound so corny, but it's honestly not even about me. Like, so if I'm geekily talking about Edmund Spencer's fairy queen, it's because I want the whole world to fall in love with Edmund Spencer, not because I want them to fall in love with me. I want us to all share in falling in love with Edmund Spencer.

[Cindy Rollins]

And that's why it's easy to step into the background and not be out there like you're you. Once you get your stuff out There. You're not trying to create a personality for yourself. You're. You're just trying to get this information out there.

[Angelina Stanford]

No. And I've said this so many times, and it is the absolute truth. I would be just as happy just saying these things to my husband. Like, look at this cool thing I read. And we'd talk about, like, it's this. It's not whether I'm saying, sharing. Whether I'm sharing the insight with one person or, you know, 500 people in a conference. It's the same experience for me.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm just as excited sharing it with one person as I am with a lot of people. So, I mean, I don't. If I go into retirement and never leave my house again and just have my books, I will still be a very, very happy and fulfilled person.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, Absolutely. So. So there's that aesthetic motive, and he's saying everybody probably hears. Has some of that in them also. And then there's the historical impulse, which I think is there are people that are really good at communicating history.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So his definition of that is the desire to see things as they are and to find out true facts. So I think that for you and I, if we can just make this entire episode about our own therapy. Why not?

[Cindy Rollins]

It's our show.

[Angelina Stanford]

If we can't make it about us, we have a little bit of number one. Right. Sheer egoism. But I think for you and I, it's kind of a combination of two and three. Like, you want to tell the truth about motherhood, and I also want to tell the truth about literature, which I think. I think there's a lot of misinformation about literature. And I. And I want to, so I want to. But. But my decision, I suppose my desire for the truth is really kind of a subset of. You need to know the truth to appreciate the beauty.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. Right. I want you to love this. So here's some. Here's some tools that will help Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right now. But a different kind of writing than one that I write. I can. Like. I could see that a historian. God. God hope. Right. God bless the historian who really just wants to tell the truth about the past and who's not got their own ego mixed up in it or a political purpose, which is reason number four.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mm. Well, you know, we have this ongoing conversation in our family, especially with a couple of my kids, where what is more true? The romantic. How. How sometimes the facts can be skewed just as much. You know, a story can be more true than the facts. It can tell what's really went on. Of course it can also be less true. Both of them have, can be skewed one way or the other. So you're right. It's takes, it's interesting to see someone who can take something. I find these new biographies of things like Salt or you know, some just bland thing that people take something like that and then tell the history of it and suddenly it's a fascinating story.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think the history of ideas and that kind of thing, it's just fascinating. Right. All of these are at play.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. They all work together. And then finally. And he says himself, you know, he's not a political writer and yet that's exactly what he was. In some ways he couldn't help it because some of the things that he was doing had. Had a political attitude.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I think that he, he saw him, from what I understand about his writing, he saw himself primarily as someone trying to tell the truth. Whereas he would, he would say that the political purpose is more trying to persuade people to alter your mind, to push you in a certain direction. So you know, if our listeners haven't read any George Orwell, Lewis was a great admirer of his work and Orwell was a great admirer of Lewis's work. That's a whole other conversation.

[Cindy Rollins]

But

[Angelina Stanford]

Orwell was a committed socialist who wrote anti socialist things and he got in a lot of trouble with his own party. They were very upset with him because essentially they wanted him to write propaganda and he wouldn't do it. He said I have to tell the truth. And so he told the truth. He told the truth about when socialism crosses the line into totalitarianism. He saw the, this up close and personal. He experienced it in the Spanish Civil War. I mean he's the, he, he's, he's this, you know, idealized socialism is going to change the world. And then he see for good and then he sees it up close and, and it just slides into totalitarianism. And, and, and he felt like no one's telling this story, but this is the story I have to tell. I have to tell people that this totalitarianism is happening here. But the party leaders just felt like, no, you need to whitewash the, the ugly parts because the bigger picture here is we have to promote socialism. So George Orwell has the unique position of being a committed socialist till the day he died. And yet having written the two greatest works of fiction against socialism, Animal form in 1984. And that is because as a writer he was primarily committed to telling the truth and not committed to his politics. So I think, think. I think that helps us to understand why he says, look, I'm not a political writer. He's not a political writer in the sense that he's trying to persuade everybody to become a socialist.

[Cindy Rollins]

He's not a propagandist.

[Angelina Stanford]

No. He's just trying to tell the truth as he saw it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. And so when we get to 1984, I mean, to Animal Farm. Okay, so he, so he, when he gets to Animal Farm. And what did Lewis say about Animal Farm? He really.

[Angelina Stanford]

Lewis loved Animals Form. He thought it was perfect because he would. Because it's a fairy story. It says that the title page says Animal Form a fairy story.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. And it just brings out the genius of Orwell who was able to step back and not like you said, I guess in a way he's saving socialism from going over the, over the water.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, that's what he thinks. He thinks he's writing a cautionary tale of, hey, listen, don't slide into. This is what happens. He didn't think it was inevitable. In fact, he hoped what he wrote would cause the leaders of socialism to reject totalitarianism and embrace the more ideal form. Other people might feel like, well, that socialism always goes to totalitarianism and wherever you are on the spectrum of thought about that. What he's trying to do is say all of his books are cautionary tales. This is how you end up in totalitarianism. Let's not go there.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'll tell you what, cautionary tales are so painful because if you see something and you try to tell people like Chicken Little, the sky is falling, the sky is falling and they can't see it. It's really painful to be the person writing Animal Farm and having people not be able to see it. So I'm sure it was painful for him to be writing this book and his friends, who are, you know, the non socialists, love his book, but his friends, the socialists, don't see what he's warning them against.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, right, right. And boy, I mean, this is, this is one of my little kind of pet, pet ideas. I think the fairy tale, the Emperor's New Clothes is a lie. Because the truth is when somebody stands up and says, the emperor has no clothes on, people do not applaud the. That people say, okay, you're crazy, or let's lock you up, or let's get rid of you, or they turn around and stone that kid. That's, that's how I think that fairy tale would really end up in real life, they'd stone that kid or they throw him in a mental hospital.

[Cindy Rollins]

Because that's a very good point.

[Angelina Stanford]

When people stand up and say, the emperor has no clothes, we are all mad because we've been. Because what we're being told is we've been deceived. And we don't. We don't have the humility to face the possibility that we've been deceived.

[Cindy Rollins]

And this is where the age comes in. So you're young and use. The emperor's walking around and he has no clothes on. And eventually everybody has to admit. And you see that happening, and then you get in your 30s and you see it happening again, and you get your 40s and it happens again, and you get in your 50s and you see it coming a mile away, and you say, the emperor has no clothes. And it's just like nobody you're saying something from. It makes me sound like I'm so insightful, but I just. It's just agonizing to see things replay themselves over and over and over again.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, that's the thing. We're. Yes. We're at the age where we can say there's nothing new under the sun. It's not that we're profits. It's just that when you live a long time, you're like, and here we go again.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

But it doesn't seem like that when

[Cindy Rollins]

you're young, and it can make you kind of bitter. And that's the thing. You don't. We don't want to be. We just, you know, it's okay. It's. You know, you can't. You can't always fight every battle. But at least. At the very least, you can say, oh, the emperor has no clothes. If everybody wants to ignore you, you don't have to, like, stomp your feet and cry and rip your clothes and say, the emperor has no clothes. You just have to say it and leave it for what it is.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. And that's what Orwell did in his. Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he said, the emperor has no clothes. And his own party was very upset with him about that. They felt like he was being disloyal. And he just felt like, I'm just trying to tell the truth. How could that be an act of disloyalty?

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. And we see this. I mean, if you read the book, the Inklings, that book by. And I forget who wrote it, it's right up here. But they. They talk about all the Inklings, and they all sort of go through something very similar. They all get disillusioned with different groups, and they all get like. Like, they want to. They want to promote truth in some way that the group can't do. And it becomes kind of a theme with them that the very people that they're very close to, the group they're involved with, then. Then they can't fellowship anymore because they're. They've gone a different way. And I just thought that was so interesting that these. All of these inklings went through almost the same thing. Mm.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think it's. I think that's just got to be one of these, like, poor human experiences, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And that's by the Zaleskis.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right.

[Cindy Rollins]

And it's a great book. It's. It's. It's not an easy read, but it's a great book.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I have that one. I started it, but I need to pick it up again.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I started it, put it down, and I. It took me a couple years to actually get all the way through it, but I just kept plodding away like.

[Angelina Stanford]

Like you do.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so he piggybacks on this idea that, look, I'm just trying to tell the truth. That's all I've been doing is trying to tell the truth as I see it, which I really appreciate that. Humble as I see it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because that's all any of us can do, is tell us, yeah, we can

[Cindy Rollins]

only do what we can, and we have to be humble enough to say, maybe, you know, this is what I see. I. You know, I hope this will help you, but if, you know, if you don't see it, it's. That's the way it is.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. And it means that. That the previous things we've written or said are not hills to die on. Because we can say, well, actually, now that I have 20 years more life experience, I would say it this way. I would qualify it, or I would. I say I'm wrong back then. I have a lot of respect for people who come out and disavow earlier works and say, look, I was young. I didn't know what I was talking about. That's hard, because that hits you in your wallet.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, if you ever watch it, this hit me. When I was really young. We went to a movie called Reds. It was about John. Can't think of his name. He was a journalist. He was. He believed in communists. It was in the time when communism was coming. He was an American journalist, and in the very End of his life, he. He sent to the Soviet Union to live. He's banished to the Soviet Union because, you know, it's like that was his punishment for being a communist. And he looks up one day and he realizes, this is what I was fighting for. This bleak, horrible culture that is just totally lost its way. And there's such a sense of despair at the end of that movie that, you know, this person has been climbing this ladder and when he gets to the top, he realizes it's on the wrong building. And it just very.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so many people, when they get to that point, can't turn around and go back and just say, well, this is the path I've chosen. I'm gonna, you know, right or wrong, I'm gonna keep going. It's much more difficult to say, no, I was wrong. We're gonna start over.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, it is. What, what is he saying? If, when you see, when everything is your life, work is broken, you stoop and build it up with worn out tools to us in life, we often have to stoop and rebuild our thinking with.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I think if that doesn't happen, we're going to be insufferable. We're going to think we've been, you know, everybody should just live. Like me. I got it together. I think it's a great blessing that I am regularly reminded that I do not have it all together.

[Cindy Rollins]

Amen.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so let me. Let's just quickly get through the end here because I know you've got to get going, but I really liked that. He says, look, when I think this is true of all writers, at least all good ones, he says, when I sit down to write, I don't say to myself, I'm gonna make a great work of art. Right? He just says, I'm gonna try to tell the truth.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

And that's, that's what it's got to be. And he wants to make it beautiful. I want to, I want to tell the truth beautifully. But, you know, no, if you're sitting down to make a work, quote, unquote, work of art, you're almost guaranteeing that, that you never will. And then he ends the essay with some things, I mean, all of which just fascinating. By the time you've perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Ah, that's really good. Because you read what you've written and you're like, ugh, I wouldn't do that that way again. Mm.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because you've got to be growing. You've got to Be. So it's always a process. He's always learning and growing in his craft. And I love that he says this, too. My next book is bound to be a failure. Every book is a failure. And I think that that speaks to what we've been talking about. You're going to grow. You're going to move past it. You never look and this. I know you feel the same way. Like, I think every writer has the experience that when I get to the end of whatever I'm writing, I think, get this piece of junk out of my face. This is the worst piece of something that has ever been. I mean, like, I just go, like, burn it. Except that I have a deadline. And so I'm like, oh, fine, just take it. But I never want to look at it again. And then. But. But no one else knows that it didn't measure up in your mind, to which the image you had in your mind, like, we can only perceive. We only can perceive the flaws. Like, oh, I didn't. It didn't live up to what I was trying to say.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, we can't let that stop us. Right?

[Cindy Rollins]

You could go on and write it over and over and over again and try to perfect it, but there. I like to think of C.S. lewis like this. He wrote so much and a lot of it. You get the feeling that he wrote off the cuff. It wasn't a carefully crafted work of art. He was a genius, so he got away with it, and most of us aren't, so we had to work a lot harder than that. But he did leave us the germs of his ideas, and his purpose were always there. And so he, like Orwell saying Lewis was always writing with a purpose and a political purpose, in that sense of the word.

[Angelina Stanford]

Louis. Absolutely.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

He just wants to tell the truth.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah. And he happened to tell it. He happened to have a way with words that was very. It wasn't highly crafted, but it was very compelling.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so he finishes the essay with just some fantastic stuff. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives, there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. And that's it. That's it. All writers talk about that. Dorothy Parker talks about that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Flannery o'.

[Angelina Stanford]

Connor. They all talk about how horrible it is. And again, I think this is. This calling, is this thing put on you this compulsion. I have to get this story out of me. I have to tell this truth or it's not going to leave me alone. And I think that that helps to temper the ego of. Well, I. People should listen to me. I have a lot of important things to say.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he says too, that you can write nothing readable unless you constantly struggle to efface your own personality.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

It can't be about you and your voice. It has to be about the truth you're trying to convey.

[Cindy Rollins]

That is when you turn. Yes. I think the minute you're navel, gazing into your own writing it immediately. If you're not looking outward and you're looking inward, you're. You're really destroying the book.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he says to. Good prose is like a window pane. Right. So it's your sub. You're supposed to see through my words to the truth. That's. That's what you shouldn't be seeing me. It's not about me, the writer. You should be seeing through me to the truth I'm trying to illuminate. So good.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

Such a good essay. I appreciate him saying that, you know, he's a vain and selfish person. I never feel that in his writing.

[Cindy Rollins]

No. No, me either. So we've used this as a little bit of therapy for ourselves about what kind of. I hope that other people out there can just take from this their own message and their own. Maybe they relate to what we're saying and it's not too inward here.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think a lot of what we said is probably pretty universal soul.

[Cindy Rollins]

And get on our. And get on the Literary Life podcast discussion page and tell us, you know, if you're not a writer, if you don't feel like you'll ever be a writer, do you still really relate to this essay? Anyway, I'd love to hear from you.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I would, too. I would love. I'd love. There's so many things. Yes. I would love to hear what you guys have to say. So just to remind you all, next week we're gonna be here with a very special story to me, Ian Forrester's the Celestial Omnibus. I can't wait to jump into that with you guys and. And a special thanks to our Patreon friends and fellows who support this podcast and help us to keep going week after week. And as always, please subscribe, rate and review if you like the podcast. And just to remind you once again, we have our live Flannery O' Connor discussion Aug. 22 at 7pm Eastern Time. Thanks so much for tuning in and we will leave you until next time with a poem read by my husband and favorite poet, Thomas Banks. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member Only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Thanks

Veni Creator Spiritus by Robanus Morris Translated by John Creator Spirit, by whose aid the world's foundations first were laid Come visit every pious mind Come pour thy joys on humankind from sin and sorrow set us free, and make thy temples worthy Thee, O source of uncreated light, the Father's promis'd Paraclete, Thrice holy fount, thrice holy fire, Our hearts with heavenly love inspire Come, and thy sacred unction bring to sanctify us while we sing. Plenteous of grace, descend from high, Rich in Thy sevenfold energy. Thus strength of his almighty Hand, Whose power does Heaven and earth command, Preceding Spirit, our defence, who dost the gift of tongues dispense, and crounts thy gift with eloquence Refine and purge our earthly parts. But oh, inflame and fire our hearts, Our frailties help our vice control, Submit the senses to the soul, and when rebellious they are grown. Then lay thy hand and hold him down. Chase from our minds the infernal foe, and peace the fruit of love bestow and lest our feet should step astray, Protect and guide us in the way, make us eternal truths, Receive and practice all that we believe. Give us Thyself, that we may see the Father and the Son by Thee immortal honor, honour, endless fame Attend the Almighty Father's name, the Saviour's Son be glorified, who for lost man's redemption died in equal adoration Be eternal Paraclete to Thee.