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

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

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  Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
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  creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding, I'm
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  an author but I'm also director of the Centre and today I am joined by my good friend and
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  collaborator Brian Boyd for an episode all about how the Oxford Centre for Fantasy came to be
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  and I look behind the scenes really as to who we are, what are we doing, what are we getting up to
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  because we've had a couple of people saying tell us more about yourself so this podcast is our answer
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  to that. So first of all all organisations start with people rather than the structures so I'm
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  going to let Brian sort of gently, I hope, interrogate me about my role in this project that we've
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  been developing together. So over to you Brian, say hi. That's good. Well thank you for the
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  introduction. It's been great to spend the last few years working with you and your team and
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  for those of you watching and listening at home, this is a very virtual organisation.
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  You know, Julia is located in England, UK and I'm located in New York City and we have support
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  team in South Africa and in Asia and in the west coast of the United States. There's a lot of time
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  zones involved and we're doing a pretty good job of keeping everything straight. I got to say
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  Julia, so that's good. So Julia, let's go back in time. Before we talk about Oxford and it's
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  other name, it's first starting name project Northmore, there was Julia Golding. So who's Julia Golding?
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  Well, that's a really good question that one. So I'm best known in the UK and where I started
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  was back in 2006. I started my career as a children's novelist and I had something,
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  I often call it like a rock star beginning because very getting publishers really tough as many
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  people listening to this will know. But I was very fortunate in the I don't know the star of the
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  line or whatever. My first book hit a lot of good critical feedback and it won two big awards and
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  sort of was on the short list for one of the other major awards. And so within my first year,
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  I went from being an unknown to being a well known children's writer. And I ended up publishing,
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  I think it was four books in my first year and six in my second because I had two publishers I was
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  working with, which is very, very, that's not standard. And these were big, you know, big novels,
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  they weren't like little things. So more of those books were the titles of those.
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  Yeah. So it started off with, there was a historical series by a girl called Cat Royal living
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  in a theatre in London called The Diamond of Jury Lane. That series eventually grew to have
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  six parts to it. And the reason I wrote that is I've got a doctorate from Oxford University
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  in that period. And it was a sort of working out of all this wonderful literary world that I had
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  immersed myself in for many years. And then the other one, which is more relevant to my current job,
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  I suppose, is a quartet, a fantasy quartet for kids about children who belong to the secret
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  society for the protection of mythical creatures. So it's that today and it has an environmental
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  message just humming underneath, but it's really about an adventure story about how to protect
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  wonderful magical creatures. And that was very much written for my own children who were
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  infants at the time. So it was, it was started off as a bedtime story, just as the Hobbit
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  started off as a bedtime story. So that was where I began. And I've written an awful lot of books
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  since, well, over 60. And behind your shoulder, is that? Yeah. If I look behind your shoulder there.
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  Yeah, some of them. I've recently moved out. So I've lost some of them. There is at least
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  believe me. There's at least 60 out there. They're in a box somewhere. They're in a moving house.
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  Oh, it's such a nightmare. And anyway, so as my own family grew up and the reality of a writing
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  life is that you get attention as a debut. And then after that, sometimes people hit massive
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  like a JK Rowling or somebody like that. And that's what they are. But for majority of people,
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  it's a question of keep on reinventing yourself. Having different phases, a bit like a singer might
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  have different periods, Taylor Swift had her country period and then her later period. It's sometimes
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  a bit like that as a writer. Otherwise, you get stuck doing the same thing. And as my own family grew
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  up, I then started writing for the YA audience. And I span off another two pen names to do this.
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  One was Josh Sterling and the other was Eve Edwards. Josh Sterling, they both exist as pen names
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  still. Josh Sterling was doing fantasy of a kind. It was the paranormal contemporary romance type
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  fantasy. It was in the era when everything was dominated by twilight. So I wrote a book that
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  wasn't about vampires, but was about extra sensory perception and a group of young people who
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  had this, which has got a massive, probably one of my biggest fandoms is that one. And then
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  Eve Edwards was doing historical teen. And then in about, probably about 20, yeah, in 2015, I won
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  an award as Josh Sterling, which was an adult award. It was the romantic novelist association award.
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  And for anyone who's interested, romantic novels are the biggest part of the market.
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  Forget literary novels, forget sci-fi. It's romance. That's where the money is.
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  As far as publishers are concerned. So it's not an insignificant thing to win. And introduce me to
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  a number of adult publishers. And I started writing for Harper Collins at that point, who I'm still
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  writing for. And I've been doing a number of adult novels for them, psychological thrillers,
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  a detective series, my next book. Hopefully, I don't know when it's coming out, but I've written a
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  historical puzzle thriller for them recently, which I've just delivered. So the writing life
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  very much carries on. And then more recently, and I think this is where our lives start to
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  converges during lockdown. I started thinking, yeah, I've got this writing experience, these novels.
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  I've done loads of festivals and children's school visits, all that stuff. What else can I do?
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  Well, I've got this experience. And part of this was that feeling of I cannot say at my age now
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  that I've got imposter syndrome because I've done it, you know, I've got the track.
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  Claim my experience. It's very hard sometimes to
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  gift from one skill set and think, maybe I can do something else. And so I started exploring
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  screenwriting and that world, which was encouraged by working for a year at the Royal Institution,
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  which is a Centre for Science in the UK. And I'm interested in that history of science. So I started
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  writing screenplays about figures from history of science. And this has brought me into contact
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  with a whole new range of people. So I'm working with a couple of producers on a variety of projects.
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  Who knows? Who knows if any of these will get made? But I'm enjoying working with people who do
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  get things made. And one of my hopes for the next 10 years is something I do get put through
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  in that kind of to be on the screen somewhere.
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  Let me ask you this, is your audience just UK based? Do you feel like your audience for your writing
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  career? Before we start talking about the next thing, do you feel like it's a global audience?
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  Definitely global. So my books have been put into, I did count it up the other day, it was well
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  over 20 languages, it's like 30 languages, I think. So there's been books in, well you name a language,
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  it's probably been in that. I've got, for example, my latest children series, the Jane Austin
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  Investigate series is being translated into French, which is great because French was one of my
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  holdout languages. I had lots of Spanish and Russian and Greek and, you know, this stonian,
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  but I was really pleased to see the French have decided they like something I've written.
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  But when I was talking about fandoms, the fandom for the Saturn series, which is the first
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  just sterling series, is incredibly international. And in fact, I'd rather than neglected it, and the
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  other day, I've been a bit put off social media recently, partly watching all the Twitter
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  stuff happening. Of course, yes. But I went back in a personal capacity as opposed to the Oxford
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  Centre for Fantasy capacity into Instagram and put out something to that group who followed
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  me. And suddenly, they were all back again. So I've started writing them a new novel because I
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  thought, hey, they're still hanging around. So let's write that fan base a new novel and I lost
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  it enough from the Americas, Central and Southern America, because these books were translated
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  in Mexico and Argentina as well as Spain. So I would say that that fan base is pretty much
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  anglophone and Spanish. Not so much. I think it's not I think I've got a market to find in America
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  with these books. So that would be fun if that happens. But I think I think a tour of the
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  States. Yeah, Brian, you can. I think it's a nice tour for me. We'll do that. So yeah, so I
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  move up to the work internationally. That's very much the way I think. So let's move up to 2020
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  approximately. And you're living where at the time? Where are you living in 2020? Centre of Oxford.
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  So we were thinking about this yesterday. That is when COVID started, wasn't it? Yeah, March of 2020.
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  So you're living in Oxford. Tell me to give me a short what's Oxford like? What's it like to live
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  there? So Oxford has been many things to me. I think the thing to understand about Oxford is it
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  people interact with it differently. So if you come as a tourist, you see incredible old buildings
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  and behind those buildings are lots of secret gardens and chapels and great halls
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  and students doing amazing work and cycling around with their robes and it all looks quite
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  picturesque and it's been like that for, you know, centuries, a thousand years of, well, obviously
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  the women are a new arrival, but roughly a thousand years of people doing that kind of thing,
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  lectures and stimulating conversation. So there's that side of it and I say it's a great place
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  to visit as for a couple of days. If you live there, it obviously feels different again. I
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  did my doctorate there. So I had a high level interaction with it where I was both teaching and
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  receiving teaching and researching. So then it becomes about the libraries and the colleges and
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  the teaching women's students. I had very small children at the time. I mean, babies. So it then
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  becomes about childcare. People coming taking a baby off so you could teach students. They're
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  very sort of practical nuts and bolts life and then it became about families and friends.
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  So we're blessed in Oxford with great schools and playing fields and lots of wonderful people around
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  and a nice environment to go walking and riding for cycle rides. So it became about that.
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  And then it also is about Oxfam for me. So the International Eye NGO Oxfam was originally called
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  the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief. It was set up during the war, the Second World War,
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  to relieve famine victims in Greece. It was an appeal and incidentally, Priscilla Tolkien
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  was one of the very first volunteers that was involved in the early days. I think she donated
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  a coat and was involved all the water in her life. So thank you, Priscilla.
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  And it grew from that local initiative to be a massive NGO and at one stage I worked for
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  Oxfam back before the writing career. And my husband works for Oxfam. So that is another way I think
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  about Oxford because working for an international organisation that has its headquarters in Oxford
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  means that there's the throughput of international visitors, people talking about real problems,
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  for all survival problems, keeps your feet on the ground. So you're not living in the ivory tower,
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  you're living and considering what it's like to be a pastoralist in more than Kenya.
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  And I like that because Oxford could be a little bit precious if you didn't have that exposure
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  to a world with bigger problems. So you're living in a normal neighbourhood, you've got
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  houses, streets, normal for oxfam. Well, you know, that's a neighbourhood. We all live in
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  neighbouring by, you know, we have that. So I know you're on time, you're on Leckford street.
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  And down the street from you, there's another notable home. Tell me about that.
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  But yeah, Leckford Road, you're living in a...
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  You're living in a...
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  Leckford Road, you're in a normal, you know, kind of home, I mean a standard two or three level
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  home, whatever. But down the street there's something that's kind of important. Tell me about that.
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  I have said four levels, by the way. Four levels, yeah, but we've left there since I'm now in a
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  normal two level house. And yeah, a short walk away or really short cycle ride away.
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  And on a route I used to go past a lot was 20 Northmore Road, which is where Tolkien lived
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  for really the main part of his family is growing up. So the 30s and 40s.
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  And he got it from... he bought the house from Basil Blackwell, who's a well-known
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  Oxford figure because he set up the Blackwell's books chain and publishing. He published Tolkien's
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  first poem, for example. And this house was where he wrote the Hobbit. He started it by telling it
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  because he lived next door before he moved into number 20. He started telling it as a story next door,
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  but when he got published he was in 20. And he also started and pretty much wrote most of
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  the Lord of the Rings. So it is the house of those two books if you're looking for a house.
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  After that his family were moving on and so he moved to a smaller house with his wife and daughter.
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  So he lived elsewhere in Oxford after, I think it's 1947. So we go on Google, if we go on Google maps
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  right now we can punch in 20 Northmore Road, Oxford, you can zoom in and see that. It comes up,
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  last time I looked, it comes up as Tolkien's house. Interesting. So this is so this is right down the
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  road from you. And you've had this career as a writer, you have a career as a writer.
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  Covid sets in lockdown. And as I understand it, the owner of the house decides to put it up
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  for sale. Yeah. And that gets you thinking. So tell me what happened there.
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  So I really gave it my all folks. So initially I thought can I afford it myself? And I quickly
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  took the maps and thought no, I can't. There's no way. I mean, it was just too much money. It was
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  sort of I think it was four million. So at least four million, which is an awful lot of dollars.
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  Well, over five million dollars. So I thought well, the only way we could possibly get this
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  house for the nation or the world is to try and sort of crowdfund it in a sense by raising
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  the money as a charity and then turning it over to sort of preserve it as the house we're talking
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  wrote these two books. And that's where we happened to meet on a business call for another
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  project. We've got a mutual friend from Singapore, oddly, and this is this is very lockdown,
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  isn't it, that we're brought together by someone I know from Singapore. And on that call,
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  you said, oh, how much you loved CS Lewis and the Narnia stories. And I'd been thinking about
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  this house. It's been on the market for a while. And I thought, well, Brian, you know, what about
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  this? And you got very excited about the idea. And so we thought, right, let's give it a go. We
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  had no guarantee of success, obviously, because we did not know what the world appetite would be
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  to buy this house. But also it's not a bad thing to try and do. We see just see if people would
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  back it. But we had to have a plan B because the way when you're raising charitable money and
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  someone gives it a sort of irrevocable for a charitable purpose, which is how it works here.
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  And we obviously had to have another thing that we could do with that. So the idea was to establish
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  a creative centre in honour of the inklings. And so that was plan B, which of course Oxford has
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  not really, not really celebrated. It's odd. There is a bit for gap. If you come to Oxford,
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  there is nowhere to go to sort of say, what about talking? It's just there's a gap.
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  Right. Well, there's the cafe that the inklings met at. That's reopened recently, right? But
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  that's not it's just literally just like. No, the England child is closed, actually. They
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  did. The inklings did meet in a number of pubs around the city. It's one that has reopened
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  recently as a community pub called the Lamb and Flag. So if you come to Oxford, do go and support
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  that initiative. The one that was most closely associated to them is currently in a sort of development
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  black hole. It's called the England child. So if anyone listening has an awful lot of money
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  and wants to contact St John's College, I think there is a development opportunity.
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  There you go. So there's that opportunity to purchase the home. Project Northmore is born
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  a crowdfunding effort in Sioux's. And I got to say, it was pretty successful. I mean,
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  we had press from around the world coverage. Yeah. It was on TV, radio, blogs. Many people
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  talked about it. Even the folks at Kickstarter reached out and said, we want to highlight you
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  because this this story is amazing. So they hired at us. We had an executive from Reddit
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  contact us and they covered it on Reddit. But simply I did the project just kind of ran out of time.
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  And we don't need to talk about how much has raised, but quite and it was raised. But the time
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  ran out. And then there was the time runner in that obviously we had a private individual on the
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  other side of this. Exactly. So they only they have to do this and have an agreement with us
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  that we would do this. But when somebody came along with an uncomplicated buyer came along with
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  the money he that was obviously in his interest to do that. Which we'd always explained to
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  gave us a window to do it. I think we ran it from December until beginning of March when we
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  thought, well, we can't do this. I've got to look back. It was about mid-March. Yeah. Yeah.
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  So it was a huge shame because I suppose we all thought we would do it. And initially it looked
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  as though we would. The initial giving period in that December was was we were on the right
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  trajectory. And people were very generous at their time. We had all sorts of people, you know,
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  appearing our videos. And you know, it was it was great. And then but we got a couple of
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  side wins I think that made it go off track. So there was this odd pushback from some people who
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  I don't know. They thought we were going to turn it into some religious commune or something.
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  I don't know. I don't know what that was about because we're literally we're a literary charity.
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  My career is very much, you know, firmly in the mainstream of
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  fiction. I never really understood where that came from other than some knee-jerk reaction.
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  No, people don't read all the different. They read the headlines and then that's it, you know,
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  at least you have a social media. But we got a bit of nasty stuff coming our way, which I think
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  happens to everyone who goes out on social media. You can be offering to to, you know, sell mother's
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  love and apple pie and someone will take against you. Yeah. Well, a majority, an overwhelming
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  majority of the world thought this was incredible. And the fact that the home was for sale,
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  it was an opportunity to pick it up, turn it into a center. I mean, I think 98, 99% of the people
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  who wrote in were incredibly in favor. So you're always going to have that 1%. But to your point,
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  about some of the one percent thought this is a religious center or something, faith was
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  important to the Inklings. You can't say it's completely not in the picture. So the Inklings were
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  all questions. So, but they were questions from very different backgrounds. So you've got
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  Tolkien, who obviously is Roman Catholic. You've got CS Lewis, who is a Protestant. He was going
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  to the Anglican church, but he'd grown up in Northern Ireland, so the Northern Irish Protestantism
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  background. You've got Charles Williams, who is a Londoner, who had his own very esoteric
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  version of Christianity and others, Owen Barfield and others. So there was a range of different
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  sorts of Christian experience. And what brought them together in their faith is that they used it
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  as part of their inspiration and all of those people turned into very fascinating forms of writing.
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  So Lord the Rings, Tolkien thought long and hard about his approach to faith. When he wrote that,
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  he keeps faith as a structure. And he talked, if you read about his letters on this, he will,
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  he mentions it as a Christian work, but he doesn't mean it's proselytizing. He means it's informed
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  by his faith and his understanding of that. CS Lewis is much more in your face about that,
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  clearly, because that's how he was as a person. He was much more definite. But Charles Williams,
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  again, he's meditating on these ideas in a philosophic way. He's also writing plays for the
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  Canterbury festival in the same way that T.S. Eliot does. So if you think about him and T.S. Eliot,
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  they're quite similar. You probably know more about T.S. Eliot than you do about Charles Williams.
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  So yes, faith was absolutely important. And for me, that's one of the really attractive things
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  about them, because I am also a Christian in a kind of really jangling and church way, nothing
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  too shocking. So what I'm interested in in terms of a faith is this is values and positive
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  positivity and hope and love. How do you put those wonderful feelings and convictions into what
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  you write? How can you be creative? How can you recognise your potential as a human? And I'm sure
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  there are people of other faiths who will find things in their background, which they will be looking
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  for ways of putting into their writing. And I think the way the inklings talked about these issues,
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  the way they wrote about them, is very inspiring and continues to inspire.
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  So that was what I'm interested in. But there we go. I don't want to apologise for having a
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  faith, but also I wasn't trying to ram it down, anybody's throat. No, it's a part of it's a part
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  of who they were. Again, I think the percentage of folks who had something to complain about
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  the small, but the press and everything was amazing. So that project kind of came to a close.
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  There was a methodology per the charity contract to either refund people or to apply it to the
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  cause and that was very, very well done. And that led you into a slight rebranding into the Oxford
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  Centre for Fantasy. Yeah, so this is where we knew that Plan B was always there. It was always
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  on the very beginning right up front. And what I'm so delighted to say is that we have actually
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  done far more than I thought. Yes. So the original thought, oh, I wouldn't it be nice to buy the house.
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  It wasn't really very, it was that. That was where I started. But actually what I've ended up
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  doing is forming a literary centre which has all sorts of things going on around it.
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  As you can see Brian and I are quite capable of chatting for a long time. So having looked at
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  where we came from and brought together the initiative for Project Northmore, we're going to
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  pause it there and you can join us again for part two where we talk about our current activities
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  and where we like to go in the future.