Ten Post Projects: Vote Your Preference

I have been working on thesis tasks the last six months but that effort is finally at the stage of awaiting judgment from the external and internal readers. My  unforced sabbatical from posting at HogwartsProfessor did not mean that I wasn’t thinking about articles I would be working on except for the need to review and revise work I had already written.

Today I sketched out the ideas that have most been haunting me and tried to figure out where to begin; my preference is with the Troubled Blood subjects but a writer is obliged to think of his audience. Hence the question of this post: What do you want to read?

Let me know by email, contact page, or in the comment boxes below which posts from the following list or about which topics of your own interest you would most be interested in reading. I’ll consider your votes, believe me, as I try to catch up from half a year of neglected posting. [Read more…]

BBC Strike MoNoMama Montage and a Burke ‘Troubled Blood’ Interview

And something extra for the Tom Burke fans out there:

Strike & Ellacott Files: ‘Epigraph Misattribution in Ink Black Heart’

Louise Freeman has her finger on the pulse of Cormoran Strike fandom and relays on the HogwartsProfessor staff backchannels news of any important discoveries out there. Today she wrote us a note with the subject line ‘Some Gaffes We Never Caught’ about a post by Lindsay Land at the Strike and Ellacott Files. That post, titled ‘Epigraph Misattribution in Ink Black Heart.’ reveals they “found five misattributed epigraphs. Four of them are the correct author but the wrong title, while one has the incorrect author and title.” The article does not discuss the meaning (or lack of meaning) in these “misattributions” but it very helpfully details the mistaken allusions and provides links to the poems and authors in play.

Professor Freeman’s subject line is in reference to the HogwartsProfessor staff and readership collective collection of mistakes in the Strike novels, mistakes we usually call “gaffes” or “Flints.” The thread of finds for Ink Black Heart is a long one (you can check it out here), but it, as Louise noted, does not include the epigraph mistakes that the ‘Strike and Ellacott Files’ podcast crew has found. Lindsay Land wrote in response to Prof Freeman’s comment after the post that “I guess with so many, it’s going to happen.” The six mistakes — Beatrice Groves had found another misattribution in the epigraph to chapter 51 – are indeed six out of one hundred and eight, but isn’t a 5.5% error rate still extraordinary, as Louise Freeman put it, “with a writer as meticulous as Rowling”?

I don’t know if she is being sarcastic given her awareness of Rowling’s many mistakes in continuity and finer points (as in the difference, say, between Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.), but it’s still a question worth asking: “What, if anything, are we to make of these mistakes?” Join me after the jump for some shameless brainstorming and speculation consequent to this great find at Strike & Ellacott Files. [Read more…]

The Rowling Library #75 is Out! ‘What We Can Expect of the Wizarding Almanac’

As noted the day before yesterday, The Rowling Library‘s March issue has as its cover story Patricio Tarantino’s article on The Wizarding Almanac to be published this October by Bloomsbury. I’m pretty sure it’s the best coverage of this story done to date; he notes the shortcomings of the volume that are evident from the few pages readers have been shown in publicity materials while admiring the concept and the beautiful illustrations. Read the whole thing at TheRowlingLibrary.com, available to be read online or to download as a pdf.

There’s more to that issue, of course, my favorite being the re-visit to the conversation about a film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Warner Brothers, for obvious reasons, really wants it to happen and to cast the original films’ trio of Radcliffe, Grint, and Watson. The TRL writers explain why that isn’t going to happen, reasons that might not occur to everyone, and I enjoyed it very much. I think you will, too!

Laurie Halse Anderson Wins Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award

I have written and presented lots about psychology within the Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike series, both at fan events and scholarly conferences.  However, neither J.K. Rowling or Robert Galbraith ever turned up in the audience to hear my talk. However, in 2018, at the UNLV Summit on Young Adult Literature, I was privileged to give a talk on PTSD in Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and in the works of Laurie Halse Anderson, one of the conference keynote authors. I was both honored and frankly terrified to see Ms. Anderson herself turn up as part of the relatively small audience for my talk, but it turned out to be one of the highlights of my professional life. Ms. Anderson was very gracious and appreciative of what I said, and quite supportive of the work I was doing on YAL and empathy.

Ms. Anderson has just been awarded one of the top prizes in children’s literature, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.  I am very excited to see this news and offer my heartiest congratulations.  If any Hogpro readers would like to start a discussion of Speak, Wintergirls or The Impossible Knife of Memory, please chime it!