I wrote what is called a ‘Lead Magnet’ for an online course I planned to give — Wizard Reading Formula at PotterPundits.com — in the summer of 2017. I’m pretty sure of the date for this longish piece, though I haven’t checked it, because I put it up in a drop-box on the HogwartsProfessor home page the week I received my reader’s copy of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter, a landmark event. It helps with my memory, too, because one of the things I wrote about the Jane Austen book I chose for this Top Twelve Tomes list was exactly what Bea Groves had written about that same novel, Northanger Abbey. I added a link to her book in addition to a comment she had posted about The Tiger in the Smoke.
I wanted to reference in my thesis something I’d written about Austen and another about Shakespeare from this 72 page booklet — don’t worry, it’s written in large type and comes with many illustrations and chapter cover sheets — but it no longer existed anywhere on the internet. I am obliged to post it here as a pdf via url for that ‘Works Cited’ reference (Granger 2017b) in the PhD dissertation currently preoccupying me.
Much of it, of course, is out of date; there is, for example, no Wizard Reading Formula course on offer at PotterPundits.com and we’ve learned a lot more about Rowling’s favorite books since I assembled this (thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Professor Groves mentioned above). That being said, there are quite a few gems in the collection; I was especially delighted to find a link to a PhD thesis written on the literary alchemy of Shakespeare (see the ‘Macbeth’ pages). A golden key!
Let me know what you think of this lost treasure found at the back of the HogwartsProfessor vault shared here for the first time in years: 12 Rowling Story Sources for Potter Pundits.
During yesterday’s ‘Seven Keys’ live webinar, I offered those in attendance what I have shared with the Potter Pundits Summer School students and the Roanoke Festival friends about ‘Wizard Reading Formula,’ the seven week online course I am teaching this September and October. Every week we will have three talks, office hours, and a live webinar from the platform we tested in Summer School, one we demonstrated was interactive, accessible, affordable, and, most important, conducive to transformative learning.
This is the first time I’ve offered the class online so I have priced it at the cost of the lowest price of an overnight stay at Universal Studios in Orlando, the price of one night in ‘the room beneath the stairs’ for seven weeks of dialogue and instruction about the Seven Keys to Harry Potter: three talks, office hours, a live webinar, and a new bonus package every week. Did I mention the ‘How To’ course in diagramming a story ring? For readers and writers, this is an avenue to a lifetime of greater reading pleasure and writing power.
As my swan song to Potter Pundits Summer School, I’ll be giving a free talk on the Seven Keys to Harry Potter tonight at 7 pm Central time via WebinarJam.
Have you signed up for the Potter Pundits Summer School yet? It’s free for the asking, but 
“What’s the Point, John?”
The Potter Pundits Summer School, in which I am giving away for free several talks I get paid thousands of dollars to give, is my attempt to invent and test a method of sharing a coherent program of Hogwarts study that anyone, anywhere, at anytime, can afford to plug into — and from which that serious reader will take-away a coherent, cohesive introduction to the best in Potter scholarship.
The third point is related to it. I hear the question all the time in conversations with fans in letters and in person, the question I’ve been trying to answer for fifteen years. “What is it about these stories that make us love them more than other stories?” Which brings up in turn the issue, “What is it about story-telling that makes it a defining species trait?” Because whatever Rowling is doing seems to be scratching that itch better than what anyone else has on offer.
For the hundreds of you who have signed up at PotterPundits.com to join me on this adventure to invent a method for sharing the best ideas about the Hogwarts Saga conveniently, affordably, personally, and profoundly, thank you very much. Your participation and support means the world to me, more than you could know. Thanks, too, for sharing this one week opportunity with as many friends as you have via social media like FaceBook. The word is spreading.
Recent Conversation