It’s WZRD’s 5th anniversary celebration and I’m your hostwitch Bess! Here’s a little gift from WZRD to you: an interview with the incredible hosts of Harry Potter after 2020. They’re so insightful, even when thinking about their—surely inevitable—wizard rock band.
We’ve got so much to talk about but first, how about some music? Here’s Draco and the Malfoys and “First Year Haircut.”
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That was Draco and the Malfoys with “First Year Haircut,” “Stars in Your Tea” from Totally Knuts, and “Stop It” by Pansy and the Gossip Queens.
Now, how about that chat?
Welcome to a very special extra bonus episode with some of my new podcast friends, Lorrie and JC! We have talked on your podcast–I don’t know if that’ll be out yet–but this is your first time on my feed, so would you be good enough to introduce yourself to WZRD?
Lorrie: I’m Lorrie Kim with JC. I do the podcast, Harry Potter After 2020. And I also wrote a book called Snape: The Definitive Analysis. I was on the organizing team for MISTI-Con 2023, and I entered the fandom between Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince.
JC: I am JC, I am also part of the Harry Potter After 2020 podcast. I guess I was in the Harry Potter fandom for about a decade from 2004-ish to about 2013-14? Somewhere in there. I’m an educator, um, based in Austin, Texas. And uh, I guess we’ll be talking a little bit more about that maybe too coming up. But yeah, that’s me.
I’ve got Snape:The Definitive reading up there next to Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore.
Lorrie: Oh, thank you.
I’m slowly growing my Harry Potter academic texts.
Lorrie: Mm.
Now what got you into the Harry Potter fandom? Like for me it was my mom buying me the books ’cause she heard that they were cool and for, for kids who like fantasy.
Lorrie: I was sick. I spent a week in bed and my husband said, “here, you know, read these.” And so I ate a book a day for a while and by the end of it I really wanted to know why this character Snape kept getting shoved in reader’s faces at every plot turn. So yeah, I was hooked.
JC: <laugh> I was a grad student in the late nineties and some of the other grad students I knew were reading the books as they came out. And I wanted to, but I was like, “I, I do not have time.” I was writing my dissertation. I was in the middle of the hell that is a PhD program. So I, it was always in the back of my head to come back to it later. And a few years later in, I think right around 2004 or whenever the fifth book came out, whenever Order of The Phoenix came out, I decided that I wanted to be ready to read that book when it was published along with a lot of other people I knew who were excited about it. So I bought the first four and I read them, just kind of devoured them, like Lorrie said, managed to do that just around the time that Order of the Phoenix came out so I could read Order of the Phoenix at the same time as everybody else. And then I have this really distinct memory of getting to the end of it and going, “wait a minute, I have to wait how long for the next part of the story?” And then, yeah.
Lorrie: Oops.
JC: And it went on from there.
Lorrie: Yeah.
So you both got involved about the same time, I think you both said.
JC: Mhm <affirmative>.
Lorrie: Yeah, mine was after Order. I got to be part of the excitement for Half-Blood Prince.
That’s really cool. And I think Melissa Anelli also got engaged in grad school.
Lorrie: Hmm.
And was reading the books about then. So you’ve both sort of been in the Harry Potter fandom for a while, but you’re newer comers to Harry Potter podcasting and you’re not just doing a reread or you know, playing music. Y’all are doing something entirely different.
Lorrie: It’s somewhat different and somewhat the same. We’re we are in many ways a chapter reread podcast like many others in that same genre. We do do an episode per chapter and you know, we do frequently have that realization of, “wow, this is a really long series” <laugh>. Uh, but we also are doing it being conscious of how different it feels to be reading this series as re-readers post 2020. Some of it is actually post 2016. Some of it is after the part of the world that we’re part of, in the US, started to take a turn toward fascism and how the stories read differently to us now because of that. And some of it is after the pandemic and a lot of it is after TERFpocalypse. But because after Rowling started being so anti-trans, people were wondering, “what is our relationship to the series now?”
I thought, you know what, let’s go back to the series and find out. Because the words that we read at first that made us fall in love are exactly the same. They haven’t changed at all. So let’s delve in. And sometimes it’s, I love it when we get to forget that we’re looking at this from this kind of political perspective and we just get really lost in the storytelling because this is a damn good series. It’s well written. And I know there are people who say, “oh, it’s not that good,” or “it was never that good”. I disagree. I’ve been finding that it’s really well written and I love when it’s so successful on that score that I can forget the critical lens I’m using. But then there are other times where it just hits you. Like, oh, I remember how I felt reading this the first time and how different it is now and not necessarily for the better. And what does that mean about the times we’re living in? And it’s something that I’m, I’m glad I’m doing it. ’cause otherwise I wouldn’t really know, you know, am I remembering this series correctly? Was I right to love it the first time? Is there something wrong with me that I loved it the first time and what should I do with the place that it holds in my mind now?
JC: Yeah, I think it’s been a, an amazing experience for me to reread this with Lorrie. So first of all, Lorrie has thought very deeply about these books in a way that I have not, <laugh> has reread them multiple times, has given many talks on them. Most of these books I think I read twice at the most, but I haven’t reread them in a decade. At the point that we are recording, we just finished Goblet of Fire. And I don’t think I had read Goblet of Fire since what, 2004? Like whenever, right before, I can’t remember exactly when Order of the Phoenix came out. I know I only read Order of the Phoenix once. So–
Lorrie: <laugh>
JC: I was in a completely different place in my life when I read these books for the first time. The world is different. Um, and I’ve already had so many experiences within our episodes when we’re talking about things that are happening and how it feels so relevant to the current world and the political situation that we’re in the United States.
And I am shocked at how relevant it feels. And every time Lorrie says “this is what, this is what reading is, this is what literature does; the words on the page stay the same but we change.” So our interpretation of them and our relationship to them in our lives, in our world changes. And that’s part of the power of literature. I am not a literature person. My PhD is in math. I think the Harry Potter books are probably the only works of fiction that I have read in the last 20 years of my life. I’m not a big reader– Uh, it just is not something, I’m not a big reader of fiction I should say. It’s just not something I have a heck of a lot of time for in my life. But it’s been a really eye-opening experience, um, going through this reread with Lorrie.
Your podcast is so thoughtful and insightful that I got really nervous. Uh, ’cause I had sort of made like a tongue in cheek joke about, uh, y”eah, let me know if you want me to come on and just uncritically appreciate the Great Ship Viktory when you get to book four.”
Lorrie: Mhm! Love it <laugh>.
But it was very nice that you all made space, uh, for me just to be like, “I just think they’re neat.” Your podcast does both creates the framework and also the, the space to be a little silly.
Lorrie: We have to be silly, especially now. Silliness is what’s gonna help us survive. In fact, the chapter we just recorded about the last chapter of Goblet of Fire is when Harry funds the twins’ joke shop because he says, considering what’s about to happen, we’re gonna need this. So yeah, we need silly <laugh> plus Viktor is the best boyfriend ever.
JC: I have to say that is a ship that I don’t remember thinking very hard about the first time through. I think because I was rushing through to get to the next thing. And then, you know, when Viktor Krum was gone from book four, I was like, “alright,” <laugh> like it didn’t even occur to me, but rereading it with that– after having talked to you about it, Bess as well– rereading it and really taking a good look at Viktor Krum and who he is in the series. I was surprised at how much I shipped it <laugh>. I was like, “you know, Hermione, you kinda let that one get away.” Oh…
Ron is great, Ron is fine, but Viktor! Now another community that needs to consider Hermione/Victor more closely,–and I am working on it–this is a subject that comes so frequently is wizard rock, which is my main engagement with the Harry Potter fandom. And I wanna know what you all know about my favorite music genre.
Lorrie: The first thing I tell people about wizard rock the community. It’s not true, but it’s true. I tell people it’s 99% trans. Now, this is totally not true mathematically speaking, but when I was writing the second edition of my Snape book after TERFpocalypse, and I needed trans sensitivity readers, both professional and from the community, people told me, put out the word within wizard rock communities, if you want–which I did–if you wanna cast a net for just several different community members to just tell you their feedback, their everyday responses, what their lived experiences are, and wizard rock provided <laugh>. So that’s the first thing I tell people about it. I love that the wizard rock genre specializes in low barriers to entry, whether you’re a performer or a composer or a fan, or just wanna be friends with people that access and community are the central tenets.
And that wizard rock is an essential part of any Harry Potter gathering. Uh, I think the band I’ve listened to the most is Draco and the Malfoys because I like meta. That’s my thing. And their character analysis of Draco became completely my head canon. Uh, I also love the meta that Kalysta Flame puts into some of her lyrics. And of course her voice is just glorious. And she did a duet with Dream Quaffle at MISTI-Con of Deathly Hallows to the song Shallow. And it was so beautiful that I still replay it in my head often. I really miss Nigel Taylor of Platform One who I worked with a bit on some Snape things, and I love everything that my friend Libby of Potterwatch does because she is such a clever lyricist. So that’s kind of wizard rock’s place in my everyday life.
JC: So I was first introduced to wizard rock, um, in 2006. Um, HPEF had a, a Harry Potter convention in Las Vegas called Lumos. And over the course of Lumos, there was like, at some point there was a wizard rock concert and it was Harry and the Potters, Draco and the Malfoys, and I’m pretty sure the Whomping Willows. And I had never really, I’d heard of wizard rock because okay, this was going back really far in time, but like MySpace was kind of a fandom thing. But the wizard rock folks were the ones who populated like the fandom part of, um, of, uh, MySpace. And so like if you went to MySpace, it was because you were looking for wizard rock. And I kind of knew of it, but I hadn’t really listened that much until that night at Lumos and to be in this space where every, like, there were all these people in cosplay, right?
We were at a Harry Potter convention. It was like, we were kind of feeling this feeling of ‘I’m at Hogwarts’ for this weekend, right, was going on. And I think that probably for those bands, this is one of the most incredible concerts they had ever given up until this point because people were screaming and singing along and you, they were rock stars, right? It was like really incredible. And so after that concert that night, I just thought, “wow, this is like incredible. I had no idea <laugh>, this was this good.” And so I started listening to some of it. Um, when the groups would come through where I live in Austin, Texas, I would –usually like playing at bookshops and things like that– I would go to like a concert, a couple of like local area friends who were also into fandom would go. There’s a couple of big memories that I have associated with wizard rock.
Uh, the first one is that I found out I was pregnant with my son while I was at a, I think a Draco and the Malfoys concert. And, um, I had struggled with infertility for a long time and I had done IVF and this was right before the very last book came out. And so I was in this kind of situation where if I wasn’t pregnant, I was gonna actually fly to London for the book release and go to a convention that was gonna be held there. And if I was pregnant, I was gonna stay at home and appreciate the fact that I had finally, um, achieved <laugh> gotten pregnant, right? Um, but I was at a Draco and the Malfoys concert when I got the phone call from the clinic telling me that I was pregnant. And so I had to step away from the concert and take this message <laugh>.
So it’s always like in my head that I was at a wizard rock concert when this happened. So there’s that. And then the second thing is that in the, I dunno if it was in the fall of that year or the spring of the next year, it was in, uh, no, I think it was, it was in the, no, it had to have been <laugh> I wasn’t pregnant for that long. Uh, it was in the fall of 2007, I went to the very first Wrockstock, which was like at this like campground kind of place in the middle of, I think it was in Missouri. And it was like literally cabins in the woods and there was like a lake. And I think that we were, we were the only people there. And so it was just like all of the Wrockstock fans were there.
And we had, we were all in cabins with our friends and it was like going off to camp and everybody was cosplaying. And then there were concerts every night and there were like, you know, the groups, like little groups would like hold like little informal shows in their cabins and people would crowd in and it was incredible. So I remember that as well. Um, and then after that I kind of lost, um, I had a few years where I had a small child and I didn’t go to a lot of conventions and it kind of fell off for me. And then I think that was around the time when wizard rock really took off and it was so big and there were so many groups that I couldn’t keep up anymore. So that’s, but that’s kind of <laugh> like that 2006, 2007 era of wizard rock really is something that I hold very dear.
I love hearing about Wrockstock. That sounds like the most amazing experience. And you’re actually in the same town, JC as, uh, one of our new wizard rockstars, the Galleon Guy.
JC: Ooh, really? I’ll have to keep an eye out for that.
Yeah, he’s put out I think three or four albums and some singles and he just started in the fall.
JC: Very cool. Yeah, there’s a lot of live music here, <laugh>. And so that’s like, oh, this is a great place to have a wizard rock group.
Lorrie, you’d said you don’t know a lot about wizard rock, but you seem pretty on top of things, including contemporary bands like Potterwatch and ERWA.
Lorrie: Well, there are a lot of bands that I have not listened to live and I can’t do the thing where people go to one band’s concert after another and scream out all the lyrics to every song because, you know, there are levels and there are levels of being into wizard rock. I, I can’t do that, but like my kids could <laugh>.
I can’t keep track of them all either. Uh, one of our wizard rockers, Dots and Lines, runs a Random Wrock game in the Wizard Rock Discord where they post lyric snippets.
Lorrie: Mhm <affirmative>.
And the more they do that, the more I go, “I do not know enough wizard rock.”
Lorrie: Mhm. <Laugh>.
It’s time for a little more music. Here’s Jayce Benton Greenleaf with “Ravenclaw Socialite.”
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That was Jayce Benton Greenleaf with “Ravenclaw Socialite,” The Muggle Spell Theory and “Heartbreak/Denial,” with Gadding With Ghouls rounding out the block with their “Delores Delores.”
Here’s some more of my chat with JC and Lorrie!
So you two have worked on Harry Potter After 2020 for a while now, so you know each other’s vibes, you work together well as a team. You’re a wizard rock band now, what’s your band name? What’s your music?
Lorrie: <laugh> JC do you wanna go first?
JC: Okay, we actually did spend some time, um, thinking about this. So our wizard rock band is called Correspondingly Huger. And this is a reference to something that Dumbledore says in like the sixth book, right, Lorrie?
Lorrie:
Mhm <affirmative>. Where he says that “being rather cleverer than most men, his mistakes are correspondingly huger”. And I always thought, “Ooh, Dumbledore correspondingly huger” that I always thought that would be a great wizard rock name.
JC: <laugh>. So that’s it. So our thing is, is that we are like Hogwarts faculty and this is like Hogwarts faculty secret band. The students suspect that this is happening, but they’ve never heard <laugh>, one of our, they’ve never heard us play. That’s because our songs tend to be about, um, releasing sort of the stress and frustrations of what it would be like to be a faculty member at Hogwarts. So, um, our album is called Songs from the Staff Room and we’ve got some songs that we thought of that could be kind of fun. Uh, one of them is called, the title is “You Want Me to What?” Which is a song about stupid educational policy that comes down from the Ministry. We have a song called “PDA in the Library,” which is how annoying it is when you’re trying to do research in the library and there are just students making out everywhere.
Lorrie: Ugh. So annoying.
JC: Yeah <Laugh>. We have a song called “Detention Blues,” which is, uh, that feeling of having to give detention to a student you really don’t like, but that means that you’re gonna have to spend more time with them. And oh God, that’s the worst part of giving people detention. And then we also have a song called “Third Door.” Lorrie, do you wanna talk about what that means?
Lorrie: You know how in the books there’s a door that goes to the girls’ dormitory and a door that goes to the boys’ dormitory. There is a third door. Not everybody knows about it, but the faculty knows about it. And if you’re somebody who, that’s where you’re gonna sleep, you’re not gonna sleep in the girls’ or the boys’ dormitory? Yeah, the third door’s gonna open for you.
JC: So a play on, again, on this idea that the castle, there’s something about the magic of Hogwarts and the castle that knows who you are and lets you be your true self. So third door. So we try, I also had to imagine who we would be in Hogwarts faculty. And so I decided that, um, <laugh> not straying too far from my real life, I thought, well, I guess I could teach Arithmancy except I’d probably actually just teach them math because I’m very concerned that wizards just don’t know enough math to be getting on with. And so I think that’s what I would do.
Lorrie: Yeah, I thought about it, I thought, you know, I would have to just teach literature and writing because these kids have to learn Beedle the Bard from somewhere. You know, we see the terrible things that happen when you don’t know your own literature. And magical literature is also what muggles call religion and folklore. But these are texts written by their peers and they also have to know, you know, eventually they’re gonna get jobs and they’re gonna have to write work reports. How are they gonna write? Somebody’s gotta teach them to write <laugh>. So honestly, it would just be, I think the way that readers have often thought, wait, we know the special classes that these students take, but where are they getting their basics? Isn’t anyone worried about them?
JC: <laugh>.
Lorrie: Yeah, I was kind of worried.
JC: So worried about them. I mean like, are they homeschooled? Like what up until the age of 11, what do they know? When they come into Hogwarts, do they get some kind of placement exam? Like, I have so many questions about how Hogwarts is run as an educational institution. Anyway, that’s getting away from our wizard rock band. But these are the kinds of things that we would be writing songs about for sure. It’s like, do you know how to read?
Lorrie: <laugh>
JC: There might be a song about that.
Lorrie: Oh yeah. For me, a lot of the songs I would write– this is why the students have heard wild, wild rumors about this band, that they will never know if those rumors are true or not. But some of the songs are about them <laugh> like about individual students. What I would do is I would take quotes from their homework and put them in the songs and the other faculty members would have to guess which students they are. And then there’s also songs where I take quotes from horrible comments that my peers, the other faculty, have written on the scrolls of the various students and then people have to guess who they are. Dumbledore is not allowed to participate in any way. He’s not allowed to write any songs or sing, but he is bound and gagged and put in the staff room to listen to these concerts. Of course, at any time he could just free himself, but he understands, you know, that when we sing about him, he’s not allowed to do anything but just accept being roasted.
JC: The last detail we should add here is that we were trying to decide what instruments we play and between Lorrie and I, we don’t play any instruments. So we decided that what we would play are, um, slightly cursed, confiscated instruments that Filch provides us. So the instruments vary depending on what, what he’s got this week. So you never know exactly what this is gonna sound like, but we do our best.
Lorrie: Our bassist is McGonagall.
This sounds amazing and I need you to make it happen!
JC: <Laugh>
Lorrie: Yeah. And we were thinking, would Snape be into this or would he just turn up his nose at it? Oh, he wouldn’t miss a concert. He’s the lead singer.
JC: I don’t even know what that would sound like, but yeah.
I had so many related, uh– I just in February played a song by Madam Pince and the Librarians about catching students making out in the library.
Lorrie: Yeah, her life is hard. <laugh>
And uh, Neville’s Diary actually has an album of songs using inspiration from his students ’cause he’s a teacher in the muggle world.
JC: Ah!
Sounds very similar to what you all would be doing.
JC: I love how we’ve tapped into like something that that already exists that’s really cool. That’s fun.
So when can I expect to hear some Correspondingly Huger songs? Maybe for the Sampler, maybe with some help from ERWA?
JC: Oh Lord. Neither of us are songwriters. We know a composer, but– <laugh>
Lorrie: We do know a composer.
JC: He’s studying for his AP exams. So <laugh>
Lorrie:
On the other hand, Dream Quaffle is our social media manager.
JC: Oh, uh-huh.
Lorrie: And I think we have been underusing Dream Quaffle.
JC: <laugh>.
Lorrie: Compared compared to how much enthusiasm they have for all things in life. <laugh>.
JC: Mhm.
I mean the Sampler comes out, you know, starts work in the Summer. So you got some time
JC: In our copious free time <laugh>. Yeah. <laugh>
Teachers! Summers off! That’s how that works, right?
JC: Mm… <laugh>
Lorrie: Considering that teachers are the front line of the resistance–
JC: Yeah, for sure.
Lorrie: There’s no such thing as a summer off anymore.
JC: Oh yeah. Yeah.
Every good movement needs musicians.
JC: Mm. This is true.
You should hear some of the, the union songs that are out there.
JC: Oh my gosh, that’d be amazing.
So we both talked about it and hinted at it that you all do a lot of engaging with the, you called the TERFpocalypse and the real issues in the world and how Harry Potter can be used to examine or or countermand the rise in fascism and difficult social subjects. How do you make space for joy?
JC: I think that just comes from the text as we read it. We both have, have had the experience of having read these books 20 years ago. Um, as I said, Lorrie has read them a lot more than I have, but they brought joy to us. And so much of the, my memories of the time of an entire decade were tied up in the books and in interacting with other fans and going to conventions. And one thing that Lorrie said very early on was when we’re struggling to think about how, how we engage with these texts now, knowing what we know about the author’s stance about trans people and knowing lots of other things, um, how do we still enjoy them in the same way that we did before? And it’s something that you, you can’t necessarily, you can’t just excise the memories from your life.
This series is tied up with a decade of my life and I can’t just let that go. So when we return back to the text, we’re seeing new things, we are seeing the current world through the lens of the text, but we are also remembering why we fell in love with it in the first place. And that takes us back to those moments 20 years ago when we felt that joy. So it’s like part of my memory of my life is tied up in these texts in a way that I had forgotten or that I wasn’t aware of. That’s been a source of joy for me. Absolutely. Just going back and remembering how I felt the first time I read this, what was happening in my life, um, what incredible memories I have around this.
Lorrie: How I make the room for the joy is thinking about who my relationships are really with. I don’t know the author. I’ve never met the author, I never will. What I know, the people I know are the people who also read the books and are in a fandom community with me. That’s why we have fandom. We can and do often read books and love them on our own. The point of a fandom, of a book fandom, is that you find other people who read them too. And then you have the shared story to discuss, to find out that, actually, you responded to completely different things in the books in different ways. This is how we get to know each other better. And knowing that there’s a story that is emotional that we all experienced and then responded to different elements of that’s how we love each other better.
We know more about each other that way. And that’s the, that’s what originally got this fandom to be a lasting thing for me. And that has not changed. And the people that I found this way and the things I learned about them and why I love them and still want them in my life, that’s only grown more important. And some of the things that they felt joy in and that I felt joy in, you know, back in 2004 or whatever are from the books. And I find the joy still every– there are lines and passages from the books that I read now and I love them now and I loved them then. We just read about Hermione explaining to, uh, Ron and Harry what the bug in the jar is. And my mind is still blown now the same way it was when I first read that. And, you know, the debates that I have with other people about whether that was an ethical thing for her to do… you know, that’s, I’m still learning things about people that I know who can think something completely different from me, very reasonably, you know, based on really understandable, relatable, moral beliefs that they have with completely opposite conclusions that, you know, I can still do that, I can still know the people in my life better because we share a story.
JC: I think that’s what fandom is in a lot of ways, right? The shared love of a story. So, I mean, I was a Star Wars fan from the age of like six on, and I’ve been to Star Wars conventions and I’ve built friendships through the Star Wars fandom. And there are, there’re people that I, you know, many, many years later that I, I’m still in touch with because we met through the Star Wars fandom. That idea that you’re connecting with other people about something that you love? That’s like one of the big joys of fandom in the first place. And so I really love, Lorrie, that you’re talking about how the experience of reading the Harry Potter books and talking about the Harry Potter books and celebrating them even from 20 years ago, the relationships we built then they haven’t gone anywhere. And we can still use these stories as a medium to expand those relationships and to build relationships with people even though other things have happened that have changed our perspective on the books. So…
That kind of sounds like the perfect segue into, uh, my last question, which is: through the creation of your podcast and all of your time in the fandom, what words of wisdom might you have for, for the fandom at large? What have you learned?
JC: You know, okay, you’re gonna say something much more eloquent than me, so maybe I should go first and then you can like, take it to the depths, to the next level. So hang on. Um, I’ve learned a heck of a lot about how to read and that may sound bizarre, but interestingly enough, because I’m not a big fiction reader, I don’t actually know a heck of a lot about how to break down, I mean, how to read for theme and how to like read across a long series and how to, how to analyze a text. I don’t know a lot about that. I haven’t honestly done much of it since high school. And so going through this process with Lorrie kind of as my guide, I feel like I’ve gotten a course on literature analysis personally. Um, to the extent that it’s helped me help my child do his English homework <laugh>, because I can go, “oh wait, what did Lorrie say about, oh, let’s try this.”
Lorrie: <laugh>
JC: So it’s been really educational for me. Um, you know, once you specialize in something in college and then you, especially if you’re an academic, you kind of go off in a direction. You don’t really go back and revisit other subjects ’cause you just don’t have time and your brain has been trained to do one thing. So it’s been really interesting. I’ve learned a lot from participating in this podcast with Lorrie. So I don’t know if that’s which way you were looking for, but, uh, I feel like I’m a better reader now having gone through this process and this and creating this podcast.
So your advice is listen to Lorrie because she’ll make you better at literary–
JC: I think it’s… Oh, but I think yeah, exactly, that would be my advice. But the other thing is, is that I think that what I would add to that is that I’ve learned that there’s benefit in rereading. I think I never really enjoyed rereading because I loved that first flush of finding out what the story was about, and then I wanted to move on to the next thing. Um, I was never really a big rereader, but this has taught me that there is a lot of value in rereading and going back and looking at a text again and again.
Lorrie: Yeah, one of the most valuable things about the Harry Potter series is that it was written specifically to teach kids how to be readers. You know, when you read literature and there is foreshadowing, there are hints, there are character sketches. And as a reader, if you start putting those together with some emotional truth, then it pays off for you as you read further into the books and as plot lines pay off, as you realize, “oh, that’s where that was going.” And some books do that more overtly than others. The Harry Potter series always did that super overtly. They are mysteries. You know, they are written to dole out reader’s clues chapter by chapter. And then you get the huge big bang payoff. You know, that feeling toward the last few chapters of any Harry Potter book where you just turn the pages faster and faster and faster. <laugh> That is an excellent introduction for any reader into how to be a reader.
And I have found that it’s just as true as rereaders. Rereaders who are coming back to the series in a now very fallen world. This whole feeling of trying warily to come to terms with a corrupted relationship with what had been a much more pure love for a book series. Uh, not only in this fandom, there are other book fandoms where that’s happening. It’s, this world is not getting any less fallen. This is just how it is right now. <laugh> We don’t have a choice about learning this skill. You might not enjoy having to learn it, but event– you can’t, especially during times of political duress, if there’s a story that gives us heart, this is not the time to be purists about cutting that outta your life. No. Take it, take it where you can. So learning how to go back with new perspective toward a now somewhat corrupted source of earlier joy to see what that relationship is now that’s actually been <laugh> an opportunity for personal growth, <laugh>, whatever.
It is what it is. Uh, what I have learned ’cause for, for a few years after TERFpocalypse started, I, and I think a great many Harry Potter fans were stuck wondering what happened to her” How can the person who taught us that who you are on the inside is the magic that has to be respected more than any other magic– How can the person who taught us step by step that even teenagers can resist effectively, how could she turn into this? And one of the answers that I was looking into was what a friend of mine calls Billionaire’s Disease. Something that can happen to somebody who has so much wealth and power that they can’t understand when their very, very strong gut feelings might not actually be the entire truth. So I thought about this exercise for a long time, and I just did it today where I, I drew a line and on one end of the line I wrote zero.
And on the other end I wrote 1 billion. Because I think about rich people, I think about millionaires, I think about people who have a hundred million dollars. What’s a billionaire? And I think, you know, to understand the vast difference in the mentality of someone who’s a billionaire, I think maybe most– how would, how would most of us even know this? So on the number line, I try to find, here’s a, here’s how much money a billionaire has. How much money does somebody have who has $1 million? And I try to find the spot on the number line, that’s 1 million. There wasn’t room. The dots, the distance between having $0 and $1 million compared to having a billion. Those dots were so close together that I couldn’t make the two dots on the page. On a regular sheet of paper. I could get to 10 million. And the $10 million, you know, what it looks like to have $10 million as opposed to $0 in the bank?
Those dots are practically right next to each other compared to having a billion. The enormity of how much influence you have as a single individual if you’re a billionaire, this is not the same life as the richly imaginative person who gave us a million words of fiction based on what it’s like to love people and lose people and be on welfare and be sad and not have things that you desperately need. And, you know, things that are closer to the experience of anybody I know personally, it’s not the same person. And I okay, but that I’m, I’m saying this just to illustrate that this is one way in which Harry Potter fans have been left thinking what happened? We need a story, an answer. How did she get from the author that we formed an image of from her books to something that we don’t recognize? That is an active threat to us.
So, you know, I, that’s one thing that I thought was, I don’t know what stories people can find to help them make sense of that change, but looking for a story and looking for an answer turned out to be enlightening. Uh, another thing that I feel from Harry Potter fans after TERFpocalypse is this strange fear that if she turned out to be a monster now, and we loved her books then, was there something dirty inside of us all along that we didn’t even know? Should we– if we were better human beings, if we were <laugh> somehow more sensitive, would we have sensed this enough so that we would’ve rejected the Harry Potter series from the beginning? Because you can tell, you know, what’s wrong with us, that we loved somebody’s work that turned out to be this kind of person? Well, I would love to encourage as many Harry Potter fans as possible not to be scared of yourself and of the books, they’re just words.
You can go back and look at the words, go back and remember who you were then, what the world was like then, what’s changed since then. What you’ve learned since then, who we all are now. Think about that change and from any moment in your life, from that moment on, do what feels right for your life now to affirm the people you love now and to uphold the truths that you know are true now. And give yourself permission at any point to change tactics, to best honor what you know is right for you and your loved ones and what gives you the most sanity and the most strength. And, uh, keep making art and doing things with other people. That’s, that’s how you’ll keep checking in with yourself and with your own truths. That’s the privilege and the joy of being in a fandom together is, you know, we can use the common stories we have to be with each other better.
That was amazing.
JC: There’s a a math task that I do a lot with students that’s kind of a popular one, which is that if you imagine that you take $1 bills and just stack them, how tall would a stack of a million be? How tall would a stack of a billion be? And it turns out that the stack of a million, you can put that inside of a football field. The stack of a billion goes to the moon multiple times. And that’s usually a shock for people when they– ’cause we don’t understand large numbers, like we just don’t have a, you know, a solid understanding of it. So when I do that with students, they’re always shocked. And then we say, okay, now think about someone who has a billion dollars <laugh>.
Lorrie: Yeah.
JC: Right? Yeah. So anyway, I wanna throw that out there for, and you cut that out because it’s not that relevant. But that’s what made me think of.
Lorrie: But no, it is, it is relevant because we are wondering how does somebody who felt like, like she knew the same emotions that we do turn into somebody where we don’t recognize her emotions.
JC: Mhm
Lorrie: And well, it’s not the same world and not the same life <laugh>.
JC: For sure. I think one thing that I’ve really, I struggle with, and I still do struggle with it a lot, is what it’s like to call yourself a Harry Potter fan now. Because there are lots of people who I know, who have said things like, “if you were really an ally, you wouldn’t engage with this anymore. You would throw the books out, you would never think about it again.” And “just by engaging with this, by rereading them, by being part of this podcast, you’re, you’re showing that you’re not an ally.” And I think I struggled with that for a long time. Um, and so typically when I run across this comment, I just don’t engage <laugh>. It doesn’t seem like there’s any point <laugh> in engaging with it. Um, people are gonna, you know, not believe, uh, the emotions that I’m bringing to this or, you know, whatever. But I think that Lorrie, you had a really good take on that, that I would love to hear you share.
Lorrie: I have so many different feelings about that on different days. I still don’t know which one, which, which of my rants on that you’ve–
JC: Ah hmm. When you approached me about working on this podcast.
Lorrie: Mhm <affirmative>
JC: I expressed this as a fear.
Lorrie: Mhm <affirmative>.
JC: And said, you know, I don’t want friends who feel that strongly, like they don’t even wanna mention of Harry Potter, like.
Lorrie: Mhm.
JC: You know, they don’t wanna see it. They don’t want, you know, I, I can’t tell them that I’m doing this thing, or if they find out that I’m doing this thing, are they gonna think that I’ve betrayed them in some way, you know?
Lorrie: Mhm <affirmative>.
JC: We had talked about the fact that, um, I used to use like Hogwarts houses in my classes as like a way to, you know, talk about, you know, students sorting themselves or sort of like a, you know, personality test. And I stopped doing that altogether.
Lorrie: Mhm <affirmative>.
JC: Um, so like, I became very careful about how I even mentioned Harry Potter in public.
Lorrie: Mhm <affirmative>.
JC: I have, I have house scarves that I used to wear all the time. I have a Hufflepuff scarf that was one of my favorites. I stopped wearing it, you know? <Laugh>. So things like that. So like to not feel like I, the idea of thinking if I publicly engage with this property, what message am I sending to people? And that I had to think really hard about that when we talked about doing this podcast. What would that mean?
Lorrie: Mhm <affirmative>.
JC: Um, and I think that, you know, we talked about it a lot at the beginning before we even started about what it means to, to engage with this again.
Lorrie: Mhm <affirmative>.
JC: So I think you brought up the point early on that if, if when someone says “cut this thing out of your life, or we’re not friends anymore,” like you can cut it out of your life, but who, who <laugh> there’s not really a benefit from that, for you. That you, at the end of the day, you’re the one who’s cutting out memories and cutting out things that you loved and denying a part of yourself that is still there. Um, and for what?
Lorrie: And, which is different from respecting how people need–
JC: Mhm.
Lorrie: To be protected from triggering surprise ambushes of transphobia here and there. And yeah, I do have friends who, if they’re in a space and suddenly they see some, you know, very communally enjoyable Harry Potter thing, they’re like, “oh, I do not trust that these people are safe for me.” Yeah. That is something that I absolutely respect. And also anyone who has to stop talking to me because it’s just really too horrible? I totally respect– do what you need to do when I am given ultimatums that, you know, unless I do exactly this and that and this and that then I am proving that I’m against the person? That that strikes at what it means to have friendships. Do I wanna be friends with someone who’s gonna give me that kind of ultimatum? Especially at a time when our bonds with each other are more important than ever for survival? Every year of TERFpocalypse has been a little bit different. What we need stories for and the ways that we need to resist and fight transphobia is a little bit different every year. So, so far I have gotten a lot of strength out of dealing with our fallen relationship with this series by wading back in. And I do know that there are enough other people who have the same concern that it’s, it’s been worthwhile to me to have that conversation and know that there are other people who wanna have the conversation at the same time.
JC: And I do think it’s important also to go back and to take a critical perspective. It’s important to go back and to look at the text again. But I think that when we see things in the text that suddenly remind us of the author’s stance on trans folks, they read differently now. And that has also been interesting. And it’s not that the author put them in there with that intention in the first place. Like, that’s not kind of the point. The point is it reads differently now. There are things, there are subjects I don’t trust the author on anymore, and when it comes up in the text, it pulls me out and I have to stop and think, what, what do I trust here? <laugh> How much thought am I gonna put into this? Um, but that’s, that’s what reading is, right? I mean, you’re, you’re interacting with a text and Lorrie, what was it that you said a while back about how it’s two biographies meeting when you read something and how that, how valuable that is?
Lorrie: Yeah. What Claire Dederer says in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is that it’s not that the author makes all the meaning. And it’s definitely not that the story belongs only to the reader. It’s not about death of the author that when you read something or when you engage with any piece of art, it’s a meeting of your biography and the biography of the person who created the art. And yeah. So what we know about the author changes how we feel about the art. As Harry found out when he talked to 16-year-old Tom Riddle, whose diary he had been interacting with. <laugh>
JC: <laugh>
I know you’re enjoying the convo, but it’s music time. This is The Secret Keepers and “Secrets Revealed.”
~*~
That was “Secrets Revealed” by The Secret Keepers, “We Will Kill You” from Green Hats and Red Ties, and The Potterwatch Project with “Keep It Alive.”
Now back to Harry Potter after 2020.
Thank you so much for coming and talking with me today. This has been amazing. Uh, I’m sure my listeners will have a lot of conversations start just from here. Uh, if they wanna continue the conversation with you, where can WZRD listeners find you all online?
Lorrie: Well, our podcast is at HPAfter2020.com. You can find it wherever you stream your podcasts. It comes out once a week. By the time this episode is airing, we’ll still be, I think– I guess we’ll be around the middle of Goblet of Fire so people can hear Bess talk about the Good Ship Viktory.
JC: <laugh> How about your book, Lorrie?
Lorrie: <laugh> Um, my author website where you can read all about Snape: The Definitive Analysis is at LorrieKim.com. L-O-R-R-I-E-K-I-M.
JC: I will second the plug for Snape: The Definitive Analysis. It’s– obviously, I’ve known Lorrie for, oh my gosh, 13, 13 years I think, I think we officially met in 2012, so 13 years. And, uh, I knew of her fondness for Snape and never really understood it until I read the first version of her book, which blew my mind, second version even better. And I frequently recommend it to people who need to dig in and think about Snape a little more <laugh>. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a fantastic book and I highly recommend it.
Until next time, magical friends: The words on the page don’t change. But the reader changes. And that changes the story.
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