My Work for Gilbert! Magazine, Part Two

 My Work for Gilbert! Magazine, Part Two

 

Picking up where I left off last week, during the first term of my senior year of college, I stopped by a used book sale and discovered an anthology of Nobel Prize for Literature laureates.  In the introductory essay for the 1936 Prize (Eugene O’Neill) there was an comment about how G.K. Chesterton was nominated for the 1935 prize.  I wondered if Mr. Dale Ahlquist, the President of the American Chesterton Society, knew any more about it. 

 

I wrote to him, and this was the first he’d heard about it.  He wrote to a friend in Sweden who was able to access the files and translate the assessment of Chesterton’s work.  This led to my writing an article on Chesterton’s Nobel nomination, which led to being asked to speak at the annual Chesterton Conference in the Twin Cities that summer.  A few months later, I joined Gilbert! as a contributing editor, and I’ve been writing for them ever since.  In the past sixteen-plus years, I’ve written over two hundred fifty articles for Gilbert!

 

I started by writing a column called “Manalive,” which focused on literary theory.  After a few years, I started writing more TV, movie, and book reviews, and after “Manalive” was discontinued, and focused on reviews, mainly in a column titled “Fear of Film.”  More recently, there was another change of assignment, leading to a column titled “Chesterton’s Great Characters.”  That lasted for a couple of years, with plenty of book reviews along the way.  For the last two years, I’ve been writing a column titled “The Debater,” focusing on the many prominent figures Chesterton debated over the years. 

 

Hopefully, I’ll be writing columns for Gilbert! for many years to come.

 

–Chris Chan

 

Chris Chan’s first book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” was released on August 27^thfrom MX Publishing, and is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.