Our theme for the month of June is “snapshots.” Writers were asked to submit a piece with a cover photo that they took or created.
My friends lovingly roll their eyes when I make even a passing mention of my favourite podcast.
I get it, I do. I get excited about things and then I fixate on them. Case in point: I spent an unbelievable number of hours in 2022 reading extensively in Harry Potter fanfiction and have made multiple term projects either explicitly or obliquely about fan studies and fanon.
Despite being in graduate school for two years now, I’m pretty sure I’ve learned more from co-hosts Hannah McGregor and Marcelle Kosman and their frequent guests about how to read texts lovingly and critically than I have from my coursework. (It probably doesn’t hurt that Marcelle and Hannah have yet to assign me any term papers or projects, though they do include a Citations & Reading List for each episode.) It isn’t a coincidence that I feel this way, either, since it was soon after I started my program that my friends Josh and Delaney both recommended I give Witch, Please a try.
Hannah and Marcelle and the others who feature in the many episodes that span their 2015–2018 original run and their 2020 reboot have been a mainstay in my grad school experience—and so when they announced that after they finished this re-read of the Harry Potter books and an additional Appendix season, they would be moving on to different podcasting projects, I was momentarily devastated. Over one hundred episodes later, Witch, Please would be moving on from talking about Harry Potter content, and I wasn’t sure that I was emotionally ready to do the same.
I, along with many other millennials, grew up reading and rereading the Harry Potter books. I too waited for a Hogwarts letter that never came. I still have the Ravenclaw scarf that my older sister crocheted for me years ago—a Christmas gift after my continuous complaints that the “official” Ravenclaw merch sported the wrong colours. I spent time on AO3 and FanFiction.net looking for stories that would continue the plot behind the scenes and beyond the books.
And I, like many other queer and trans folk, was increasingly disappointed and disaffected as I got older and more involved with the Internet and social media, and came to realise that these books, like their author, do not in fact promise inclusion and celebration of those of us who are othered by society. Rather, they depict a continuous return to the same old mundane evils of racism, sexism, ableism, fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, capitalism, and nationalism. The same evils that produced Voldemort and the Death Eaters are not bugs in the magical world—they are systemic features reproduced by the magical institutions and experienced by characters like Hermione, Neville, Filch, Remus, and all nonhuman magical people within the magical world.
A couple weeks ago, I was invited (along with other Witch, Please Patreon members in the Faculty Club tier) to sit in on the Zoom recording of the last regular episode of the Appendix Season, talking about fandom and affective economies. When two o’clock rolled around, I was ready—coffee, seltzer, and kombucha all in a row, laptop artfully elevated, cursor hovering over the Zoom link like it was 2020. A few minutes later, Coach (Witch, Please’s producer, whose name also happens to be Hannah) opened the room and explained to the handful of us sitting in what the plan was for the session.
It was a truly delightful experience. Because I get excited and antsy during phone and video calls and am already used to doing chores while listening to Hannah and Marcelle have silly and insightful conversations about critical theory, I folded laundry and washed dishes and made a cake—with my camera on—and made amused faces at the silliness taking place in the Zoom call. Eventually, Hannah introduced the episode’s topic and lens, Marcelle did an amazing job of defining “affect” and “economies” (and laughing at every joke I typed into the chat) despite suffering from food poisoning, and Coach did her best to keep us all on track, unmuting herself here and there to ask folks—I was one—to retake a line for clarity. (We’ll all find out when the episode drops tomorrow whether anything of the two sentences I said made it into the final cut).
We considered together how Witch, Please has provided a much-needed space for fans of Harry Potter to grieve the loss of what we hoped and believed to be a story and community that were for us, work through our feelings of disappointment and betrayal, and move towards stories with more possibilities.
We discussed how, although fandom can serve as a powerful site for community change, the continued transmisogyny of JKR and its very material impacts in the world are perhaps an indication that continuing to circulate takes about the Harry Potter world and pour our emotional labour (not to mention our money and time) into these texts will only continue to harm us and those we care about.
Being able to care about this podcast and the people who make it, and the ideas and thinkers they engage with in it has been a helpful exercise in detaching myself from Harry Potter and being open to new attachments with texts and people that practice the sort of learning process that Hannah describes in her book: “trying, fucking up, listening, learning, and trying again” (A Sentimental Education, xii).
As I write this, I am preparing for a weekend adventure of workshops and camp activities with my friend Angel where we’ll get to meet most of the Witch, Please Productions team as well as folks from Not Sorry Productions. I’m excited to spend a couple days with some of the people who have helped me to think more deeply about my feelings and feel more deeply about my ideas.
Jack Kamps (’16) has been paid to do many things, such as teach preschoolers, pastor youths, schlep things in warehouses, bake pastries, design curriculum, serve coffee, maintain gardens, and fix computers. Jack is currently a student at Princeton Theological Seminary—though they tend to spend more time working at a few local farms, plotting a future cheesecake business with their spouse, and listening to/talking about the latest Material Girls episode than doing their homework.
