I was communicating on the HogwartsProfessor moderator backchannels earlier this week and the conversation thread led to a pretty serious discussion about a book each of us would like to have on our shelves, namely, a ‘Greatest Hits’ anthology of Rowling’s most important interviews. It was really an explosion as much as a ‘conversation’ because more than once of us had given this subject a lot of thought.
There were three main topics we explored: whether such a collection was possible, what constituted “important” when it came to comparing interviews between 1997 and today, and which interviews each of us would choose. I had an advantage in that last category, well, several advantages. While I will never have the encyclopedic recall of interviews that a Lisa Bunker, Beatrice Groves, or Patricio Tarantino at The Rowling Library index has, I did spend the last four or five years writing a PhD thesis on Rowling’s works and had to review as much interview canon as I could stand. I also, it turned out, had started a post on just this subject in May 2022, a draft that included a preliminary list of my own.
I compared that list of thirteen interviews with the one I threw together as a sample for the backchannel consortium last week, a list of twelve. Join me after the jump to see how much overlap there is — and where I want to go with this.
Let’s start with a compare and contrast of my two “off the top of my head” lists:
The May 2022 list:
- Amini
- Grossman
- Cruz
- deRek
- [Nabokov]
- Lloyd
- Rose
- Parker
- Poet Laureate
- Adler MTV
- *Alchemy
- *J J Marsh
- *Fry 2022
The August 2024 list:
- Adeel Amini
- El Pais
- MTV ‘Open Book Tour’
- Steven Fry, ‘Fantastic Beasts’
- Dutch magazine post Deathly Hallows
- Lake and Shed BBC4
- Poet Laureate
- ‘Mugglemarch’
- Larry King 2012
- Scottish newspaper ‘Alchemy’ reveal 1997
- Radcliffe interview for DVD extras
- Barmy Army Twixter interview
I need to apologize for not including links to those interviews or short explanations of what my shorthand is referring to. I’m saving that for a future post! Today I want to introduce the subject without going too deeply into my favorites.
About which, I confess to being startled that ten interviews were on both lists; only five appeared on one list but not the other: the unknown German magazine interview in which Rowling discussed Nabokov from which Michael Mahr quoted, Lev Grossman’s conversation with The Presence in the wake of Half-Blood Prince’s publication, the J. J. Marsh talk between old and good friends, not to mention two novelists again, the Deathly Hallows 2 DVD face to face Rowling did with Daniel Radcliffe, and the brilliant one-off ‘Barmy Army’ live twixter interview with Rowling and her Serious Striker fandom.
That doesn’t mean that those interviews are the most “important,” but it seems clear that those ten are the ones I think of most when I think of Rowling tipping her hand about important subjects. There’s a lot of core belief conversation in those lists, reveals about things I’d discussed before she had shared anything on the subject (alchemy, Christian content, chiastic structure the big ones), and there’s Rowling talking about her writing — the Lake and the Shed BBC talk, the poet laureate conference in his shed, and the Fry talk supposedly about Fantastic Beasts but a lot more about archetypes and writing.
The big absence I see now on the second list? ‘The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling‘ should be on the latter or something representative of her solve et coagula experiences around “transgender” over-reach.
The consensus in our backchannel back and forth was that such an anthology would be a copyright quagmire-nightmare for any editor or publisher to attempt. I get that, but still think an exploration of Rowling’s most important interviews would be an excellent exercise.
Feel free to share your lists or to critique my choices. I’m going to be asking Potter Pundits, Serious Strikers, and Rowling Readers in the coming weeks to write up their lists and to write up their number one choice. More anon!
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