Behind the Scenes at the Oxford Centre for Fantasy – Part 1: How We Got Here

[Music]Hello and welcome to Myth Makers. Myth Makers is the podcast for fantasy fansand fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.My name is Julia Golding, I'm an author but I'm alsoDirector of the Centre and today I am joined by my good friend and collaboratorBrian Boyd for an episode all about how the Oxford Centre for Fantasy came to be.me and a look behind the scenes really as to who we are, what are we doing, what arewe getting up to, because we've had a couple of people saying, tell us more about yourself.So this podcast is our answer to that.So first of all, all organisations start with people rather than the structures.So I'm going to let Brian sort of gently, I hope, interrogate me about my role in thisproject that we've been developing together.So over to you, Brian, say hi.- That's good.Well, thank you for the introduction.It's been great to spend the last few yearsworking with you and your team.And for those of you watching and listening at home,this is a very virtual organization.You know, Julia is located in England, UK,and I'm located in New York City.And we have support team in South Africa and in Asia.Asia, and in the West Coast of the United States.There's a lot of time zones involved.And we're doing a pretty good jobof keeping everything straight,I gotta say, Julia, so that's good.So Julia, let's go back in time.Before we talk about Oxford and its other name,its first starting name, Project Northmore,there was Julia Golding.So who's Julia Golding?Well, that's a really good question, that one. So I'm best known in the UK and whereI started was back in 2006. I had, I started my career as a children's novelist and I hadsomething, I often call it like a rock star beginning because very, getting publishedis really tough as many people listening to this will know. But I was very fortunate inthat, I don't know, the stars aligned or whatever.My first book hit a lot of good critical feedbackand it won two big awards and sort of was on the shortlistfor one of the other major awards.And so within my first year, I went from being an unknownto being a well-known children's writer.And I ended up publishing, I think it was four booksin my first year and six in my second,I had two publishers I was working with, which is very, very, that's not standard. And these werebig, you know, big novels. They weren't like little things. So...- And what are those books? What are the titles of those books?- Yeah, so it started off with, there was a historical series about a girl called Cat Royalliving in a theatre in London called The Diamond of Drury Lane. That series eventually grew to havesix parts to it. And the reason I wrote that is I've got a doctorate from Oxford University inthat period. It was a sort of working out of all this wonderful literary world that I hadimmersed myself in for many years. Then the other one, which is more relevant to my current job,I suppose, is a fantasy quartet for kids about children who belong to the secret society forthe protection of mythical creatures. It's set today and it has an environmental message justjust humming underneath, but it's really aboutan adventurous story about how to protectwonderful magical creatures.And that was very much written for my own childrenwho were infants at the time.So it was started off as a bedtime story,just as "The Hobbit" started off as a bedtime story.So that was where I began.And I've written an awful lot of books since well over 60.- I think behind your shoulder, is that?- Yeah.-You look behind your shoulder there. -Yeah, that's some of them.I've recently moved house, so I've lost some of them.There is at least, believe me, there's at least 60 out there.They're in a box somewhere.Then a moving house. Oh, it's such a nightmare.Anyway, so as my own family grew up,and the reality of a writing lifeis that you get attention as a debut.And then after that,Sometimes people hit it massive, like a J.K. Rowling or somebody like that, and that's whatthey are. But for the majority of people, it's a question of keep on reinventing yourself.Having different phases, a bit like a singer might have different periods. Taylor Swift hadher country period and then her later period. It's sometimes a bit like that as a writer.Otherwise, you get stuck doing the same thing. As my own family grew up, I then started writingfor the YA audience and I span off another two pen names to do this. One was Joss Stirlingand the other was Eve Edwards. They both exist as pen names still. Joss Stirling was doingfantasy of a kind. It was the paranormal, contemporary romance type fantasy. It wasin the era when everything was dominated by Twilight. So I wrote a book that wasn't aboutvampires but was about extrasensory perception and a group of young people who had this,which has got a massive - that's got probably one of my biggest fandoms is that one.and then Eve Edwards was doing Historical Teen. In 2015, I won an award as Joss Stirling,which was an adult award. It was the Romantic Novelist Association Award.For anyone who's interested, romantic novels are the biggest part of the market.Forget literary novels, forget sci-fi, it's romance. That's where the money is,as far as publishers are concerned. So it's not an insignificant thing to win. It introduced me to anumber of adult publishers and I started writing for HarperCollins at that point, who I'm stillwriting for. I've been doing a number of adult novels for them, psychological thrillers, adetective series and my next book, hopefully, I don't know when it's coming out, but I've writtena historical puzzle thriller for them recently, which I've just delivered. So, the writing lifevery much carries on. And then more recently, and I think this is where our lives start toconverge, is during lockdown. I started thinking, yeah, I've got this writing experience, thesenovels I've done, loads of festivals and children's school visits, all that stuff.what else can I do? I've got this experience. And part of this was that feeling of, I cannotsay at my age now that I've got imposter syndrome, because I've done it. I've got the track.Claim my experience. It's very hard sometimes to shift from one skill set and think,"Maybe I can do something else." And so I started exploring screenwriting and that world,which was encouraged by working for a year at the Royal Institution, which is a centre for sciencein the UK. I'm interested in that history of science. So I started writing screenplays aboutfigures from the history of science. This has brought me into contact with a whole new rangeof people. I'm working with a couple of producers on a variety of projects. Who knows if any ofof these will get made, but I'm enjoying working with people who do get things made.And one of my hopes for the next 10 years is something I do get put through in that kind of,to be on a screen somewhere.Let me ask you this, is your audience just UK based? Do you feel like your audience for yourwriting career, before we start talking about the next thing, do you feel like it's a globalaudience?Definitely global. My books have been put into - I did count it up the other day - it was wellover 20 languages. It's like 30 languages, I think. So there's been books in - well,you name a language, it's probably been in that. I've got, for example, my latest children's series,the Jane Austen Investigate series is being translated into French, which is great becauseFrench was one of my holdout languages. I had lots of Spanish and Russian and Greek and,you know, Estonian, but I was really pleased to see the French have decided they like somethingI've written. But when I was talking about fandoms, the fandom for the Savant series,which is the first Joss Sterling series, is incredibly international. In fact, I'd ratherneglected it. And the other day, I've been a bit put off social media recently, partly watchingall the Twitter stuff happening. But I went back in a personal capacity as opposed to the OxfordCentre of Fantasy capacity into Instagram and put out something to that group who followed me.And suddenly they were all back again. So I've started writing them a new novel because I thought,"Hey, they're still hanging around. So let's write that fan base a new novel." And a lot of them arefrom the Americas, Central and Southern America, because these books were translated in Mexico andArgentina, as well as Spain. So I would say that that fan base is pretty much Anglophone andSpanish. Not so much. I think I've got a market to find in America with these books, so that'll befun if that happens. I think a tour of the States would be a good idea. Yeah, Brian, you canorganize a tour for me. We'll do that. I definitely work internationally. That's very much the way Ithink. So let's move up to 2020 approximately. And you're living where at the time? Where areyou living in 2020? Center of Oxford. So, um, we, we were thinking about this yesterday. That iswhen COVID started, wasn't it? Yeah. March of 2020. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so you're living in Oxford.Tell me, just give me a short, what's Oxford like, what's it like to live there? So Oxford has beenmany things to me. I think the thing to understand about Oxford is it people interact with itdifferently. So if you come as a tourist, you see incredible old buildings. Behind those buildingsare lots of secret gardens and chapels and great halls and students doing amazing work and cyclingaround with their robes and it all looks quite picturesque. It's been like that for centuries,a thousand years of - well, obviously the women are a new arrival - but roughly a thousand yearsof people doing that kind of thing. Lectures and stimulating conversations. So there's that sideof it. It's a great place to visit for a couple of days. If you live there, it obviously feelsdifferent again. I did my doctorate there, so I had a high level interaction with it where I wasboth teaching and receiving teaching and researching. So then it becomes about the librariesand the colleges and the teaching room and the students. I had very small children at the time,I mean babies. So it then becomes about child care. People coming, taking your baby off soyou could teach students. A very sort of practical nuts and bolts life.And then it became about families and friends. So we're blessed in Oxford with great schoolsand playing fields and lots of wonderful people around and a nice environment to go walking andriding for cycle rides. So it became about that. Then it also is about Oxfam for me.The international NGO Oxfam was originally called the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief.It was set up during the war, the Second World War, to relieve famine victims in Greece.There was an appeal and incidentally Priscilla Tolkien was one of the very first volunteersand was involved in the early days. I think she donated a coat and was involved all through herlife. So thank you Priscilla. And it grew from that local initiative to be a massive NGO.and at one stage I worked for Oxfam, back before the writing career, and my husband works for Oxfam.That is another way I think about Oxford, because working for an international organization thathas its headquarters in Oxford means that there's the throughput of international visitors, peopletalking about real problems, real survival problems. It keeps your feet on the ground.you're not living in the ivory tower. You're living and considering what it's like to be apastoralist in northern Kenya. And I like that because Oxford could be a little bit preciousif you didn't have that exposure to a world with bigger problems.So you're living in a normal neighborhood. You've got houses, you've got streets.Normal for Oxford.Yeah. Well, that's the neighborhood. We all live in neighborhoods like, you know, we haveSo I know you're on, time you're on Leckford Street and down the street from you, there'sanother notable home.Tell me about that.Yeah, Leckford Road.I used to live there, yeah.Leckford Road.You're in a normal, you know, kind of home, I mean, a standard two or three level home,whatever.But down the street, there's something that's kind of important.Tell me about that.Our house had four levels, by the way.Four levels, yeah.Yeah, that's, but we've left there since.I'm now in a normal two level house. And yeah, a short walkaway or really short cycle ride away. And on a route I used togo past a lot was 20 Northmore Road, which is where Tolkienlived for really the main part of his family's growing up. Sothe 30s and 40s. He bought the house from Basil Blackwell, who is a well-known Oxford figurebecause he set up the Blackwell's books chain and publishing. He published Tolkien's first poem,for example. This house was where he wrote The Hobbit. He started it by telling it,because he lived next door before he moved into number 20. He started telling it as a story nextdoor, but when it got published he was in 20. He also started and pretty much wrote most ofThe Lord of the Rings. So it is the house of those two books, if you're looking for a house.After that his family were moving on and so he moved to a smaller housewith his wife and daughter. So he lived elsewhere in Oxford after. I think it's 1947.So we go on Google.If we go on Google Maps right now, we can punch in 20 Northmore Road, Oxford.Yeah.You can zoom in and see that.It comes up.Last time I looked, it comes up as Tolkien's house.Interesting.So this is, so this is right down the road from you and you, you've had this career asa writer.You have a career as a writer.COVID sets in lockdown.And and I, as I understand it, the house is the owner of the house decides to put it upfor sale.Yeah.And that gets you thinking.So tell me what happened there.So I really gave it my all, folks.So initially I thought, can I afford it myself?And I quickly took the maths and thought, no, I can't.There's no way.I mean, it was just too much money.It was sort of, I think it was 4 million.So at least 4 million, which is an awful lot of dollars.over five million dollars. So I thought, well, the only way we could possibly get this housefor the nation, the world, is to try and crowdfund it in a sense by raising the money as a charityand then turning it over to preserve it as the house where Tolkien wrote these two books.And that's where we happened to meet on a business call for another project.We got a mutual friend from Singapore, oddly.And this is very lockdown, isn't it?That we're brought together by someone I know from Singapore.And on that call, you said, "Oh, how much you loved C.S. Lewis and the Narnia stories."And I'd been thinking about this house.It'd been on the market for a while.And I thought, "Well, Brian, you know, what about this?"got very excited about the idea. And so we thought, "Right, let's give it a go." We had noguarantee of success, obviously, because we did not know what the world appetite would be to buythis house. But also, it's not a bad thing to try and do. Just see if people would back it.But we had to have a plan B, because when you're raising charitable money and someone gives itirrevocable for a charitable purpose, which is how it works here. We obviously had to have anotherthing that we could do with that. So the idea was to establish a creative center in honor of theInklings. And so that was plan B. Oxford has not really celebrated...it's odd. There's a bit of agap. If you come to Oxford, there is nowhere to go to sort of say, "What about Tolkien?"It's just there's a gap.>> CHANIN: Right. Well, there's the cafe that the Inklings met at. That's reopened recently,right? But that's not a...it's just...literally, it's just a cafe.>> BAKER: No, the Eagle and Child is closed, actually.The Inklings did meet in a number of pubs around the city. There's one that has reopened recentlyas a community pub called the Lamb and Flag. So if you come to Oxford, do go and support thatinitiative. But the one that was most closely associated to them is currently in a sort ofdevelopment black hole. It's called the Eagle and Child. So if anyone listening has an awful lot ofmoney and wants to contact St John's College, I think there is a development opportunity.So there's this opportunity to purchase the home,Project Northmoor is born, a crowdfunding effort ensues.And I gotta say, it was pretty successful.I mean, we had press from around the world cover it.It was on TV, radio, blogs, many people talked about it.Even the folks at Kickstarter reached out and said,"We wanna highlight you because this story is amazing."amazing. So they hired us. We had an executive from Reddit contact us and they covered it on Reddit.But simply, the project just kind of ran out of time. And we don't need to talk about how muchwas raised, but quite a bit was raised. But the time ran out. And then there was an opportunity.The time ran out in that obviously we had a private individual on the other side of thiswho was selling this house. So they had a certain amount of time.we were doing this and had an agreement with us that we would do this. But when somebody camealong with an uncomplicated buyer came along with the money, he that was obviously in his interestto do that. Right. Which we'd always explained to gave us a window to do it. Right. I think we ranit from December until beginning of March when we thought, well, we can't do this. I remember,I have to look back. It was about mid-March. So it was a huge shame becauseI suppose we all thought we would do it and initially it looked as though we would.The initial giving period in that December was when we were on the right trajectoryand people were very generous with their time. We had all sorts of peopleappear in our videos. It was great. But we got a couple of side winds, I think, that made it gooff track. So there was this odd pushback from some people who, I don't know, they thought wewere going to turn it into some religious commune or something. I have no idea what that was aboutbecause we're a literary charity and my career is very much firmly in the mainstream offictions. I never really understood where that came from other than some knee-jerk reaction.No, people don't read all the information. They read the headlines and then that's it.We've got a bit of nasty stuff coming our way, which I think happens to everyone who goes outout on social media, you can be offering to, to, to, you know,sell mother, mother's love and apple pie and someone will takeagainst you.Yeah, it's well, but a majority, an overwhelming majority of theworld thought this was incredible. And the fact thatthe home was for sale, it was an opportunity to pick it up, turnit into a center. I mean, I think 98 99% of the people whowrote in were incredibly in favor. So you're always gonnahave that 1%.But to your point about some of the 1% thought this was a religious center or something,faith was important to the Inklings.It was a part of who they were.You can't say it's completely not in the picture.So the Inklings were all Christians, but they were Christians from very different backgrounds.So you've got Tolkien, who obviously is Roman Catholic.got C.S. Lewis who is Protestant. He was going to the Anglican church but he'd grown up inNorthern Ireland, so the Northern Irish Protestantism background. You've got CharlesWilliams who is a Londoner who had his own very esoteric version of Christianity andothers, Owen Barfield and others. So there was a range of different sorts of Christian experience.And what brought them together in their faith is that they used it as part of their inspiration.And all of those people turned into very fascinating forms of writing. So, Lord of the Rings,Tolkien thought long and hard about his approach to faith when he wrote that. He keeps faithas a structure and if you read about his letters on this, he mentions it as a Christianwork, but he doesn't mean it's proselytizing. He means it's informed by his faith and hisunderstanding of that. C.S. Lewis is much more in your face about that, clearly, because that's howhe was as a person. He was much more definite. But Charles Williams, again, he's meditating onthese ideas in a philosophic way. He's also writing plays for the Canterbury festival inthe same way that T.S. Eliot does. So if you think about him and T.S. Eliot, they're quite similar.You probably know more about T.S. Eliot than you do about Charles Williams.So yes, faith was absolutely important and for me, that's one of the really attractive things aboutthem because I am also a Christian in a kind of really Anglican church way. Nothing too shocking.So what I'm interested in in terms of faith is this is values andpositivity and hope and love. How do you put those wonderfulfeelings and convictions into what you write? How can you be creative? How can yourecognize your potential as a human? I'm sure there are people of other faiths who will findthings in their background, which they will be looking for ways of putting into their writing.I think the way the Inklings talked about these issues, the way they wrote about them,is very inspiring and continues to inspire. So that was what I'm interested in.But there we go. I don't want to apologize for having a face, but also I wasn't trying to ramit down anybody's throat. No, but it's part of, it's a part of who they were. Again, and I thinkthe percentage of folks who had something to complain about was small, but the press andeverything was amazing. So, so that project kind of came to a close. There was a, there was amethodology per, per the charity contract to, to either refund people or to apply it to the cause.and that was very, very, very well done.And that led you into a slight rebranding into the Oxford Center for Fantasy.Yeah. So this is where we knew that Plan B was, wasalways there, was there.It was always on there from the beginning, right up front.And what I'm so delighted to say is that we haveactually done far more than I thought.Yes. So the original thought, oh,wouldn't it be nice to buy the house? You know, it wasn't really very, it was that,that was where I started. But actually what I've ended up doing is forming a literarycentre which has all sorts of things going on around it. As you can see, Brian and Iare quite capable of chatting for a long time. So having looked at where we came from andbrought together the initiative for Project Northmoor, we're going to pause it there andAnd you can join us again for part two where we talk about our current activities and wherewe'd like to go in the future.Thanks for listening to Myth Makers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun.Find out about our online courses, in-person stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for greatgifts.Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide.[MUSIC PLAYING]