Writer, photographer, speaker, & publisher

“Every act of beauty is a defiance of despair.”

Lancia E. Smith is the founder of Cultivating Oaks Press and its fellowship of content creators, The Maker’s Project. With 45 years of sobriety, Lancia has offered long-term support counseling for the bereaved, trauma and abuse survivors, and recovering addicts and alcoholics. She has gratefully served in executive management, church leadership, school boards, and art & faith organizations for over 40 years. Throughout her own recovery process, Lancia has been privileged to mentor and disciple individuals seeking a whole and recovered life rooted in Christ.

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BEARING WITNESS

Conversations with Malcolm Guite

What does it mean to bear witness?

What does it mean to truly look at another human being and see glory veiled beneath the surface; to see someone without caricaturing or commodifying them for one’s own convenience; to stand humbly on common ground with greatness?

For sixteen years, acclaimed English poet Malcolm Guite and American writer-photographer Lancia E. Smith have engaged in a series of interviews and portrait sessions. Through those conversations, threads have repeatedly emerged: meaning and mystery, depression and courage, time and eternity, literature and language, truth and grace, past and poetry, grief and love, and the living quality of words. These realities carry a question with them: in all the aches and wonders of life, how do we faithfully bear witness?

Bearing Witness is a thematic retelling of these conversations, richly illustrated with portraits made over this sixteen year period. Lancia E. Smith offers a deep look at how to understand Malcolm Guite in a way that goes beyond what the public eye can see and what media can show. Deeper still is her universal invitation to see one another in new and truer ways, and to bear witness to the wonder of what it means to be human in our beauty and potential.

Coming Autumn 2026

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"Lancia has the instincts of a mystic, in touch with the seen and unseen at the very same time, and she has the gift of capturing hidden truth on film. There is something revealing and healing in all her work: as an artist, a speaker, a teacher, a writer."

— Diana Pavlac Glyer, author of Bandersnatch,The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, and Write Like You Mean It.
"Lancia's well-chosen questions have certainly drawn from me a better and clearer account of my own vision and vocation as a poet than any other interviewer and her photographs have proved, not only a pleasure to the subject, but an inspiration to other artists.”

— Malcolm Guite
“Lancia is able to perceive the qualities of a person that make them better than who they are – their potential, their goodness. For someone writing about goodness, truth, and beauty, I don’t know of a better ability to have.”

— Steven Elmore, President of the C.S. Lewis Foundation

Don’t write to make a name for yourself.

You already have a name.

TO FIND MORE OF LANCIA’S WORK:

Cultivating Magazine

Cultivating a Writer's Life

Posts & Interviews

The C.S. Lewis Writer’s Conference

MAY 28-30, 2026 (Tickets sold out; livestream option available!)

Once again it is the privilege of C.S. Lewis Foundation and Cultivating Oaks Press to host our extraordinary gathering for those who shepherd words in the magnificent castle of Glen Eyrie in Colorado Springs.

This conference offers a unique perspective among the great constellation of writer’s conferences: we do not address how to build a “platform” or how to get published. We address the why before the how of writing. We attend to the soul-craft of word shepherds.

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