Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast

When Running Grave was published, John Granger charted each Part’s chapter sets, the Book-as-a-Whole, and then the Book as the concluding novel of a seven book series . It took him weeks and weeks, it yielded astonishing revelations via Rowling-Galbraith’s structural artistry, and… it was a rather joyless affair. No one joined him in the process to verify or discount via a separate but simultaneou...

Nick Jeffery and John Granger do a Compare and Contrast test of the latest Cormoran Strike novel, The Hallmarked Man , and the previous seven books in Rowling-Galbraith’s longest series of novels. Adapting a list of ‘Greatest Hits’ moments from the first ‘Reading, Writing, Rowling’ podcast John did with Katie McDaniel and a panel of Potter Pundits in Roanoke, Virginia, Nick and John share their fa...

Nick Jeffery and John Granger do a Compare and Contrast test of the latest Cormoran Strike novel, The Hallmarked Man , and the previous seven books in Rowling-Galbraith’s longest series of novels. Adapting a list of ‘Greatest Hits’ moments from the first ‘Reading, Writing, Rowling’ podcast John did with Katie McDaniel and a panel of Potter Pundits in Roanoke, Virginia, Nick and John share their fa...

Nick and John have posted eight Hallmarked Man conversations since its publication last month and, as interesting as their back-and-forth talks have been, South Wales to American Fly Over Country, Lake to Shed, much of the best theorizing and interpreting of Strike 8 has been happening in the comment threads beneath those posts and in email messaging with John. Determined that these insights would...

Nick Jeffery and John Granger continue their Q&A conversations about Rowling-Galbraith’s Hallmarked Man (if you missed the first discussion, click here to catch up). As usual, the pair promised to send links and notes along with their recorded back and forth for anyone wanting to read more about the subjects they discussed. Scroll down for their seven plus one questions and a bevy of bonus materia...

While John Granger labors with the paid subscribers to chart each of Hallmarked Man’s ten Parts and one Epilogue (in preparation for a charting of the whole book structure), there will be a break in the series of conversations they have had about Strike 8 in which they have focused on a single Shed tool per episode. They will be discussing instead during the charting period a series of Q&A discuss...

Nick Jeffery and John Granger were asked in the first week after the publication of Hallmarked Man what they thought of Rowling-Galbraith’s twitter storms after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They promised to devote a conversation to just thast subject and today they deliver on that promise. Is it just about the tweets? No, it’s really about their importance or insignificance of those messages...

It’s been a month since the publication of Hallmarked Man so Nick and John decide to have a ‘Pit Pony Pickleball’ match in which they serve and volley Strike 8 examples of Shed tools and Lake springs as fast as they can. After a round of back and forth between Team Lake and Team Shed, they do a flash round of Golden Threads against the clock and then John is given a ‘Final Jeopardy’ tie-breaker qu...

Url to Tweet Nick Jeffery and John Granger focus their Hallmarked Man Week Three conversation around the mythological content of Strike 8, a subject prompted by Rowling’s 8 September tweet above. They briefly review the author’s background in mythology, from her study in school to her use of it in Harry Potter , Fantastic Beasts , and Cormoran Strike. John explains the relationship of myth with Ro...

Nick Jeffery and John Granger opened the Orthodox New Year with a conversation about, you guessed it, Rowling-Galbraith’s Hallmarked Man . Both of them confessed that they were struggling with the most complex and carefully integrated novel in the author’s oeuvre , with five different candidates for the body in the silver vault, a cast of characters for each candidate, all of them spun together wi...

Spoilers Warning! If you haven’t finished reading the 900 pages of The Hallmarked Man and don’t want to hear details from the novel, you will not enjoy this conversation about Strike8. John read the latest Strike-Ellacott novel by Thursday morning using the pre-publication head start, the Robert Glenister audiobook dropped early Tuesday morning, a bootleg epub version on his wife’s iPad, and the c...

What can you say about Hallmarked Man that doesn’t include anything beyond epigraph authors from the latest pre-publication drops from the leak-ing ship of Rowling, Inc.? Nick and John elect to discuss their respective plans for reading the latest Cormoran Strike-Robin Ellacott murder mystery cum Modern Romance. Enjoy that conversation in the hours left before the books arrive — and tune in here t...

We’re counting down the days until the publication of The Hallmarked Man ! Nick Jeffery and John Granger take perhaps the last look at Rowling’s most recent postings before they dive into discussion about the meaning and artistry of Strike8. In today’s conversation, they review Rowling’s relationship with Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series, a New York Times feature article ‘The Wiz...

Nick has been reading his way through Anthony Powell’s twelve volume Dance to the Music of Time because Rowling mentioned it in a 2017 tweet and he thought there were interesting connections between that Roman Fleuve and Rowling-Galbraith’s series-writing. And it turns out he was right! Rowling tweeted about her favorite book in Dance and her favorite character in the epic (see links below). Two w...

In the last two episodes of our Kanreki tribute last month to the life and work of Joanne Rowling Murray , a.k.a., ‘J. K. Rowling’ and ‘Robert Galbraith,’ as celebration of her 60th birthday, we first explored perhaps the most ubiquitous and mysterious ‘Golden Thread’ that runs through her work, namely, that of a ‘Lost Child.’ We reviewed the forty plus appearances of this plot point in the just o...

We collected all the questions and comments posted last month beneath our daily Kanreki Lake and Shed videos and sat down to answer them live with paid subscribers sitting in on the conversation. That discussion drew the Kanreki celebration-marathon to a close (Phew!) and opened the door to our next efforts. We’ll be writing weekly posts about Rowling’s life and work, filming video conversations a...

Happy 60th Birthday, Joanne Rowling Murray! Thank you for close to thirty years of challenging, even edifying fiction, for the joys of community your serious readers enjoy in discussing your work, and for your philanthropic efforts on behalf of women and children everywhere. The faculty at HogwartsProfessor all wish you many, many years. As a birthday gift of sorts, Nick and John close off their m...

It’s the Day Before Rowling’s 60th birthday so Nick and John tackle by reader request the never before discussed subject of the Lost Child theme in the author’s more than twenty published works. They re-introduce the Golden Threads idea — see their Pregnancy Trap podcast or the two Kanreki series on this subject (here and here) — then they do a deep dive into the crowded waters of Lost Children in...

Two Days and a Wake-Up until Joanne Rowling Murray’s 60th Birthday. In their home stretch conversation, Nick and John fulfill a reader request to discuss the book inside Deathly Hallows (one of three actually…), ‘Tales of Beedle the Bard,’ a text that Albus Dumbledore leaves Hermione in his will for her to read and apply to the Horcrux Hunt. Nick tells the story of Rowling’s creation of six hand-w...

We’re in the home stretch of the 60th Birthday Blitz at Hogwarts Professor! On the first of the last four days of July, Nick and John return to the books at a reader’s suggestion in order to give a Lake and Shed reading of the original Newt Scamander textbook, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Nick relays everything you need to know about the genesis of this work and John talks about Rowlin...

Let’s talk about Rowling’s use of traditional chiastic structure, what anthropologist Mary Douglas called ‘Ring Composition.’ John travels to his backyard Mongolian ger , the archetypal circular architectural form, to deliver a firehose introduction to the four essentials of ring writing. He uses slides to depict the structure of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone as his brief ‘for instance’...

Welcome back! John and Nick finish their back-and-forth challenge to come up with three examples of the ‘Fourteen Golden Threads’ in the work of J. K. Rowling, the plot points and story features that run through everything she writes. In this second overview of the Golden Threads, Nick and John talk about Kanreki red caps and tackle three Threads each. Nick gives at least three examples for Evil G...

Welcome back! John and Nick, having finished their Lake and Shed review of the seven Harry Potter novels, the first seven Strike-Ellacott adventures, the three Fantastic Beasts screenplays, and the three stand-alone stories Cursed Child, Casual Vacancy, and Christmas Pig, are open to suggestions about how to fill the remaining week of daily conversations until Rowling’s birthday on July 31st. The...

Today’s Lake and Shed framed conversation focuses in on the remarkable Strike-Ellacott novel, The Running Grave, the last book in our review of every work of fiction with either of Mrs Murray’s pseudonyms on the cover. Nick confesses to feeling stumped about what to say as his ‘Lake’ contribution to the discussion — before his epiphany on a long walk with Addie that almost every buoy or pillar in...

Welcome back! After learning the Snakewood Secrets of Dumbledore — that’s right, it’s Rowling the Wood Snake having a private Lake moment — we return to real books, Ink Black Heart to be specific, a novel written entirely by Mrs Murray, aka Robert Galbraith. Nick covers the front and the back of making Lake readings of Strike6 without a lot of circumspection and John talks about the eerie feeling...