Imaginary Worlds - Inverting Lovecraft

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

The works of H. P. Lovecraft have inspired a number of Black creators and other writers of color, from the new HBO series Lovecraft Country to the novella The Ballad of Black Tom. What’s so surprising about Lovecraft’s newfound relevance is that he was exceptionally racist, and racism was folded into his stories. In the era of cancel culture, there are few people more apt to be cancelled than Lovecraft. So why are so many writers, filmmakers, and even game designers of color using Lovecraft’s mythology to illustrate the experience of being a marginalized person? I talk with novelist Victor LaValle, novelist Premee Mohamed, Michigan State University professor Kinitra Brooks, and UCR Irvine professor and illustrator John Jennings about how to separate a bigoted writer from his brilliant mythology. Also featuring readings by actor Varick Boyd. The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle: Beneath the Rising by Premee Mohamed Box of Bones by John Jennings and Ayize Jama Everett Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Call yourself a runner. Peloton All Access membership separate. Learn more at onepeloton.ca slash running. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. I was really excited when I first read that HBO was going to adapt the 2016 novel Lovecraft Country into a show. The story imagines what if the demonic entities from H.B. Lovecraft's fiction were a manifestation of racism in 1950s America. My father, he wrote me, said we have a secret legacy, a birthright that's been kept from us,

Lovecraft Country. Bad place. It's not real. You sure? The novel that the show is based on was written by white writer Matt Ruff, but the team behind the show is mostly black, including Jordan Peele and Misha Green, who are executive producers. And Lovecraft Country isn't the only work that reimagines Lovecraft's world from the point of view of people of color. AMC is developing a show based on the novella The Ballad of Black Tom, where the writer Victor LaValle reimagined a classic Lovecraft story from the point of view of a black protagonist. N.K. Jemisin's most recent novel, The City We Became, uses Lovecraftian horror as a metaphor for white gentrification. There's even a role-playing game called Harlem Unbound

by Darker Hue Studios, which takes the popular role-playing game Call of Cthulhu and reimagines it with black protagonists. What's so interesting about this trend is that Lovecraft himself was exceptionally racist. So why does his work feel more relevant than ever to the people that he feared and despised? Well, before we get into that,

let's back up in case you don't know much about Howard P. Lovecraft. He was born in 1890. He came from an upper-class, waspy family in Rhode Island, but they fell on hard times. He always resented his family's loss in social status. He was also very eccentric, suffered from massive anxiety and depression. And his horror stories appeared in pulp magazines like Weird Tales. And within that community of pulp magazine writers, he was very well respected,

but he was hardly famous. When he died at the age of 46 in 1937, he could have been forgotten. But his mythology is really compelling. His most famous creation is Cthulhu, a gargantuan monster with a head of an octopus and wings like a bat that sleeps under the sea. Whenever this elder god rises to the surface, humanity is doomed. Lovecraft also did something unprecedented. He encouraged other writers to take his monsters and his mythology and set their stories in his world. He didn't care about copyright infringement. He wanted a different kind of legacy.

He was like literally teaching or in conversation with this next generation of writers who are going to do some amazing things. Victor LaValle is the author of The Ballad of Black Tom. He taught them his philosophies and he also let them write stories that were in his universe. And so it was not only that the universe was open source, but it was also that by chance or by fate, whatever you want to call it, some truly great writers of the

next generation were his essentially acolytes. That influence and that power was mainlined into the work of people who were reaching millions of readers. John Jennings is a professor of media and cultural studies at UC Riverside. He says even if you've never read Lovecraft, you probably encountered him through these other writers. Stephen King has a lot of Lovecraft, he has a lot of Richard Matheson, and stuff like John Carpenter's The Thing, obviously, or like Re-Animator, obviously, you know, it's the Lovecraft stories. One of the main artifacts that connects all of this

is like the Necronomicon, which was supposedly this ancient tome made of pain and torture that actually opens up these gates and stuff. So if you've seen stuff like The Evil Dead, for instance, you know, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, you know, the book that caused the dead is Necronomicon. And the Necronomicon comes directly from Lovecraft. And even if writers aren't borrowing from him, they can create original imagery that

is still clearly Lovecraftian. When you say something's Lovecraftian, then we're talking about this idea that the protagonist of Lovecraftian stories is him. He's well-educated, maybe middle-class to upper-middle-class white male, who is what they call a seeker character.

He's trying to find something, or try to seek something out. It has this kind of toe in fantasy and mysticism, but also it's sci-fi. So that's why it's weird fiction. It's all mutable and stuff. A lot of times the Lovecraftian mythos is dealing with incomprehensible giant ideas

that will squash us and not even care. Premi Muhammad is a Canadian writer of Indian and South American heritage. Her work is also influenced by Lovecraft. She says what separates him from many of the writers who were influenced by him is that Lovecraft used visuals sparingly. In most cases, Lovecraft doesn't describe a ton about what these things are or look like. You're left kind of to your own devices to imagine this thing like, oh, we saw an alien. And in the seconds before it crammed itself into the alien cube, we got a good look at it.

And it was so horrifying that all my friends went mad. Luckily, I didn't go mad, which is why I'm writing this story. And you're like, oh, really? What did it look like? And there's Lovecraft like, well, it was just, it was pretty bad, okay? They all went mad. Did I not point that out?

So if you've got a good imagination, you're not even just sort of visualizing what these things look like, but everything else about them. Premi likes to call this genre cosmic horror because the most frightening thing in a Lovecraft story is learning how truly insignificant you are. And I think for a lot of human history, a lot of people have felt like that

without minding it too much, I think. If you were a king maybe, or an emperor, or a nobleman, then you could have some significance, but otherwise you kind of wouldn't. I think with the advent of not just writing and the written word and the ability to spread your thoughts and opinions beyond yourself, but also the rise of the internet,

people started thinking, hey, you know what? I might be significant again. I might be important. People might listen to me and maybe people should listen to me. And then here comes these villains who are naturally evil. And the reason they are evil is because we are so insignificant to them that they're destroying us without even thinking about it. Victor LaValle says that feeling of insignificance is what made Lovecraft feel relevant to him as a kid.

And I think 10, 11 years old is the time, I think, when you feel, or at least when I felt, incredibly powerless. And like everyone and everything in the world was in control of me. And all I wanted was to be in control of myself. And on some level, that is the essential story that Lovecraft tells again and again and again. And that really spoke to me as a kid. As a black kid growing up in a diverse neighborhood in New York City, he did not become aware of how the rest of white society saw him until he was a little bit older. And by that point, the fear of being irrelevant or

insignificant didn't resonate with him anymore. Much of the world, I would say certainly most women, many people of color, at least I'm going to just talk about in the United States, the concept that you are not that important, that you are not central to the conversation that the culture is having is a given. It's a given. And so the concept that I would be terrified that I was insignificant is almost laughable to me as a grownup. Because to my mind, the sort of narrative that I feel like I live, you know, a good part of the day is that the world is actively hostile to me. That it finds me a bother, that it wishes I wasn't there,

at least in spaces that are not black or brown. And that's very different from what Lovecraft is getting across. When Victor was a teenager, he realized the problem with Lovecraft was not that Lovecraft was unaware of his white privilege. It was actually much worse than that. At the time, Victor was rereading an old Lovecraft story that he had read before called The Rats in the Walls. And he got to the part where the main character has a cat and the cat's name has the N-word in it. The cat's name is actually the N-word plus the word man.

It's like 12 times in the story that the cat's name comes up to the point where it just starts to feel like you're just enjoying saying this. Right. And then, of course, even more horrifying is when you learn that was the name of his actual cat, which is just other levels of messed up. And so at 15 or 16, I was much more conscious and able to see that. And somehow there's like a strange or powerful moment of feeling like, how did I just not notice that before? Because it really, it wasn't that at 10 or 11, I saw that and I said, hey, that's weird. And then I kept reading. It was genuinely like my mind just slipped past that. 15 or 16, I see that and I'm

just basically like, fuck this dude. And I put him away and I didn't read him again through high school, through college. And I want to say maybe like not until my 30s again, did I pick him up. And when I say pick him up, I mean like I knew which stories had the stuff that I really hated. But I was sort of like, you know, it was like I was missing a family member who I knew could be trouble. So I hung out with him when he wasn't drinking. And then it probably wasn't until my like, late 30s, early 40s that I said, No, you can't do this. You can't pretend. You got to go back and you got to read it all. And you got to figure out how, if and how you can make peace with all of it. And then when I read all of it again, I started to feel like, okay, I can see the ways, much like with family or friends. I can see the ways that I have to call out what's bad and still be able to embrace what I love. We live in the era of cancel culture. and still be able to embrace what I love. We live in the era of cancel culture. The term is applied on social media to anyone famous who says or does something offensive.

In some cases, what's jarring is that the work of these creators was thought to be progressive until their offensive beliefs or actions are revealed. And their fans struggle with whether they can still enjoy these people's work after knowing the truth about them. And there's been a backlash against cancel culture. Some fans will argue this person may have said or done something offensive in the past, but they've apologized. That's not who they are now. And recently, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and dozens of others signed an open letter urging people to cancel cancel culture itself because they say it's stifling free speech. Either way, I can't think of many people more deserving to be canceled.

Anyone who's canceling could not be less controversial than Howard P. Lovecraft. He was obsessed with racial purity, especially his fear that people of color and immigrants were going to pollute and corrupt American society until it collapsed. And it's not like he kept those beliefs private. It's in his fiction. I think he wholeheartedly believed in white supremacy. But I also think that he, like many others, suspected and was aware that it was a crock of shit. Kenetra Brooks teaches literature at Michigan State University. He has an overall anxiety about whiteness and the false nature of its supremacy.

And he's anxious about when this will all fall down. So much has been built upon the falsity, the false foundation of white supremacy. There's no way that it can last. There's no way. But because of that falsity, I think that the power, the hold on the power has always been unsure. And I think Lovecraft's talent was that he keyed into that anxiety and that lack of surety about the hold of white supremacy on the culture, on the nation, on even its own peoples. And because of that, I think he was always riding towards that anxiety. And one of the reasons why Lovecraft thought that Cthulhu and the other elder gods were horrific

is because they see the entire human race, regardless of color, as being unworthy of existence. And that idea terrified Lovecraft, even though it was a fantasy he had made up. But also with the hierarchy, there's always someone higher. And there's always a bigger, badder monster. And that those gods are those bigger, badder monsters. And there is this fascination with them.

There's this fascination with when will they come and do their own reckoning? And will they make me as enslaved as they make these other peoples, right? Will they do to me what I do to other people? Because that's always been the anxiety of whiteness. Of one day, will folks treat us the way we have treated other folks? And I think that's where the anxiety of the gods come in. Will we now be those that are subjugated as we have subjugated others? A lot of white Lovecraft fans have said we should be able to separate the art from the artist,

but they couldn't help but venerate Lovecraft himself. From 1975 to 2015, the World Fantasy Award was a bust of Lovecraft's head. In fact, the award was known as the Howard's until several authors of color voiced their opposition. Now the design of the award is more abstract. It's a tree wrapping around the moon. But, of course, that decision led to a backlash against cancel culture. And I think we have to talk about the different levels of canceling. Are they totally ignored and shunned? Or do we perhaps not revere them? Do we take down the statues as we're seeing, right? We accept that this is a part of our history, but what we're not going to do is have our greatest

award have his face. Lovecraft, the person, yeah, let's cancel him. Let's fire him out of a cannon into the sun. Again, preemie Muhammad. With that said, I think his sandbox doesn't necessarily deserve canceling, particularly if there are people of color or women or gay people or poor people or any of the people he hated who can make a focus of why they were so, so bad and bigoted. I've heard people use the term reclaim, and I don't think that's what people are trying to do.

We're not trying to reclaim it. I think we're trying to invert it. We're not trying to reclaim it. I think we're trying to invert it. We're not trying to recreate anything of his. We're trying to analyze it and see what it was that is interesting about it rather than what's appealing about it. Because I think we're all very much into that space where it's kind of, well, it's better if something's interesting than if it's likable. better if something's interesting than if it's likable. So how do you walk that line of using the mythology of a racist author to talk about the experience of being a marginalized person? We will find out be the same. Plus tax, Canada only, limited time only.

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black lesbian and she's seeking this box that is filled with like supposedly like black rage and pain right and so there's these monsters that live in the box you know and so so that by itself is already kind of a lovecraftian like structure um because here's the thing i mean there's things in his work that are useful for us as storytellers you know and i don't like council culture i think that that is you know i don't like shutting someone down i like having discourse you know what i'm saying i understand understand if it's hurt someone, then we have to understand and unpack what is the system that made that thing happen

instead of shutting it down. I think that is in some ways, I mean, censorship essentially. Don't believe in it. As an artist, I was like, nah, don't cancel it. Engage with it and see what's going on. And also too, one of the things, I know this is really petty,

but I know he'd hate it. He'd hate for people of color and for people who are not him until he's messing with his work. And that's one of the things I dig about. It's like, yeah, he would hate this. I'm going to do this. John's thinking around this issue was influenced by a nonfiction sociological book called Racecraft, which looked at race as a social construction. The similarity between the term racecraft and Lovecraft's name is a coincidence, but John thinks racecraft could be a good word to describe this sub-genre of fiction.

This idea of like racecraft, and you mix it with a Lovecraftian you know analysis then you can actually utilize some of the elements from his work and their theoretical underpinnings to create what I call racecraft DNR where you're actually like looking at the arcane nature of like how race is constructed and how it gets deployed through narratives and then utilize like the idea of cosmic awe or like you utilize the idea of the grotesque or different things that Lovecraft is dealing with but filter it through a critical race studies lens. Premi Muhammad took a racecraftian approach to her novel Beneath the Rising.

Like Premi herself, the main character's family comes from Guyana, which began as a British colony in South America. The British brought over thousands of Indians as indentured servants, including her ancestors. And she imagines white imperialism acting like a Lovecraftian monster. You know, to the indigenous peoples of the continent, it's very likely the settlers seemed like cosmic horror. They couldn't be reasoned with. They showed up. All they did was kill. all they did was take over, all they did was try to run you off the land, try to control you, take your children, kill your elders, that kind of thing, so that you couldn't pass on your heritage or whatever, because your heritage had been glanced at once quickly and

determined to be worthy of extinction. And you can just see the elder gods going, "'Yeah, good, good, do that. "'That's what we wanna do to humanity.'" But she did not wanna write a hopeless story. The problem with having a villain you can't defeat is that you don't have a story then, because you have to have something that you can fight against.

And Lovecraft himself did this all the time. His stories didn't have a satisfying kind of narrative resolution. You mean going insane is not a satisfying narrative resolution? It's like, I saw the thing and I went insane and that's the end of the story. Or my friend saw the thing and he went insane and now he's in an asylum or he's dead or something. Or all these people in the swamp saw the thing and they all went insane. There's a couple stories, I guess, where people try to do things like rebury the artifact or something. The one I'm thinking of actually is the Dunwich Horror, where those guys go up to the hill with the ring of standing stones.

And they've developed that powder that lets them see the Shoggoth and they make their chant. And that to me seemed like the only story where humanity was able to fight back against something that we had never really been able to fight back against before. That was actually the story I was thinking of for my own book, which was, okay, well, maybe this enemy has been here repeatedly, has noticed Earth repeatedly, has been here before. And in the past, there were people that somehow, to some extent, even if not completely, fought back. So that actually turned out to be kind of the gist of the book is that hope and then following that hope until all the clues were assembled. Victor LaValle also used racecraftian horror in his 2016 novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, which is based on a 1927 Lovecraft story called The Horror of Red Hook. Victor says he felt compelled to write his book after the murders of black people at the hands of police in 2014 and 2015. And I felt like I need to find a way to get to this question of like police brutality,

who pays, all this kind of stuff. But I don't want to talk about it in the present moment, like now, like as if I was telling one of those stories. It also felt like too sort of ghoulish to try to sort of inhabit one of those stories and tell it in the moment. And then I would almost say like instinctively or with intuition, I started pulling books off the shelf. Like who could I riff off of? Who's here that I might sort of be in conversation with? And Lovecraft sort of was the one that stayed with me the most. The only problem is that most of Lovecraft's stories take place in New England, where Victor has hardly been. But the horror of Red Hook

takes place in Brooklyn. And I thought like, okay, this is a place I could inhabit, because I damn sure know New York better than H.P. Lovecraft. Victor incorporated some of the characters from the original Lovecraft story, like a policeman called Malone. But Victor saw the character of Malone very differently than Lovecraft did. In the story itself, Lovecraft goes to great lengths to talk about like the poetic soul of Malone. And then he goes to these warrens of immigrants and dusky people, and they're all savages by comparison. But he's not the, he's not like the head-cracking policeman, right? He's not the explicit racist, was how I read it.

And I thought, like, I can use that. In fact, he gave Malone a partner named Howard, who is blatantly racist in contrast to Malone's passive racism. The main character in Victor's story is a musician from Harlem named Tommy Tester. He's a character that Victor created, and at one point Tommy is hired to play at a party for the nefarious Robert Sudam, who is a character from the 1927 Lovecraft story. Here is the actor Varick Boyd reading from The Ballad of Black Tom. Verrick Boyd, reading from The Ballad of Black Tom.

Sudam turned to the tall windows. Night out now, and the lights of the bright library turned the panes into a screen, just as they had before. When the sleeping king awakes, he will reward us with dominion of this world. We will live in the shadow of his grace and all your enemies will be crushed to dust. He will reward us. They clapped each other on the shoulders, founding fathers of a new nation, or even better, a world now theirs to administer and control. A world now theirs to administer and control. I will guide you in this new world, Saddam called, standing and raising his hands. And in me, you will find a righteous ruler. They stamped and knocked over their chairs. They toasted Robert Saddam's reign.

But Tommy Tester couldn't celebrate such a thing. Maybe yesterday the promise of a reward in this new world could have tempted Tommy. But today, such a thing seemed worthless. Destroy it all? Then hand what was left over to Robert Sedan and these gathered goons? What would they do differently? Mankind didn't make messes. Mankind was the mess.

Thinking this way caused Tester to play a series of sour keys. Saddam noticed, even if others didn't. He looked up at Tester sharply, but quickly his expression changed. His annoyance shifted to surprise as he saw Tester raise the expensive guitar and bring the body down against the floor, shattered. Kenetra Brooks teaches the Ballad of Black Tom at Michigan State, and she thinks it's empowering for her students of color to see that you can reclaim a work by an author whose views are reprehensible. that you could reclaim a work by an author whose views are reprehensible. And having that spectrum in which students can choose to engage or not engage with his work gives them more agency, gives them the ability to see themselves, but also allows them to see that literature can better itself,

that the work can better itself, that it can reckon with these uncomfortable things. However, some of her white students have struggled with the story. As a reader, you are doing work. But what we are pushing for is for white folks to now do the work, the identifying work that everyone else has had to do when they've always been the protagonist. She was hoping they would be able to empathize with the Black protagonist, but... So many of them identify with Malone.

Really? Yes! And I'm always like, he's the enemy! He's the largest enemy because he does nothing. He's he seems to be an innocent figure. He has this veneer, a false veneer of innocence. And I always say to my students, I'm like, he's the classic white liberal who thinks he's a good guy, but he's actually just allowing a lot of bad shit to happen around him and not really doing anything about it. In The Ballad of Black Tom, Black Tom is the vigilante name of Tommy Tester after he's been empowered by Cthulhu. But Cthulhu never has humanity's best interests at heart. And Tommy's quest for justice becomes corrupted. And Tommy's quest for justice becomes corrupted. And it's only toward the end of the story, when all has been lost, that that gets sort of curdled.

And that he begins like his true ballad, which is a song of violence and death and destruction, that in a way is him leaning into the worst stereotypes. Black Tom forced Malone down to his knees. They were 10 feet from the portal. The great wind that blew through smelled not of the ocean, but of deep corruption. It howled and Malone's senses reeled, pummeled by a repulsive wisdom. Words and music, Black Tom said, speaking right into Malone's senses reeled, pummeled by a repulsive wisdom. Words and music, Black Tom said, speaking right into Malone's ear.

That's what's required for this song. You can hear the music above you, but the words are not all done. One more letter needs writing, but I could use a little more blood. Would you like to help me with that? Through the portal amid the ruins of the sunken city, Malone perceived the figure's enormous features, a face or the perversion of one, the upper portions of its visage smooth like the dome of a man's skull. But below the eyes, the face pulsed and curled. Tentacles, tendrils, eyelids the size of unfurled sails remained blessedly shut, but they quivered as if to open.

No more, Malone wailed, closing his eyes. I don't want to see. Black Tom brought one arm around Malone's neck and squeezed tightly. My daddy's name was Otis Tester. Black Tom whispered, My mother's name was Irene Tester. Let me sing you their favorite song. Missing you, their favorite song.

Ever since Get Out became a cultural phenomenon, I've heard a lot of black writers and filmmakers discuss the fact that horror may have been very white, historically speaking, but the genre has always had a large black fan base because horror can be a powerful metaphor for the African-American experience. You could move into the wrong house and find yourself a victim of something terrible. In the case of a horror movie, it might be you move into the wrong house and you discover that an evil spirit lives there and it's going to do harm to your family. In the real world, you might say, certainly in an earlier era,

but even still today, say as a black person, you might move into the wrong neighborhood in the suburbs and you might wake up one day and discover, oh, all your white neighbors don't want you here. They burned a cross in front of your house or they left a threatening letter that if you don't leave, they're going to kill you. That's a horror novel. John Jennings says the emotion that resonates with him the most in any horror story is the feeling of dread. Having a police car pull up behind you and you're black, the level of dread I can feel, even thinking about it, I can feel a pit in my stomach about it, you know. And also, like a Lovecraftian story, it's infected our country, you know. Think about the slave ships as the meteorite.

And you think about the infection being racism and oppressive behaviors and stuff that happen as the infection, because you can see someone who's totally church-going, white person from a particular class or whatever, become an evil mutant. To me, that's a race-craftian horror story because it's talking about race as this infection and this monstrous thing. If you're seen as monstrous yourself, that literally changes the reality that you experience.

And I think the thing so long has been like, do we believe Black people when they're saying this? And it's now we have video proof and now we have video proof from multiple angles. So it's like more and more you're starting to see the monsters that black people encounter from their point of view. And I think that is what is politically significant at this moment. But Victor knows there is still more work to be done when it comes to representation. He was once giving a talk at City College in New York,

and at one point, a student raised her hand. And she said, I'm just wondering, like, there's only one woman really in this whole book, and she just gets kind of shuffled off. I'm wondering why you did that. And I really was like, in the moment, my first reaction was just like, what'd you say?

I was doing this. Don't you tell me about my book. Well, you know, all the very natural feelings of being defensive. And then I had to think about it for a minute in the moment. And I had to acknowledge, I said like, you know, the funny thing is like,

I wrote Ballad of Black Tom to critique Lovecraft on his white-centered view. And now you've pointed out a very fair note, which is that I've written a book that has a black male-centered view. And so the best case scenario, if I'm infinitely lucky, there will be a book in 10 or 20 years that pokes at all the holes that Black Tom overlooked, all the women who are in this world, let's say, or the Chinese immigrants, all these other places. And again, to go back to Lovecraft and the open source, I feel like the best case version is, you're right. I didn't see that. And I really, really hope you'll write that book. Maybe it was a book I can't write. Maybe I didn't have the ability, the talent, the vision to see it.

But I think there's room for that book too. And I would devour it. The question of how to separate the art from the artist is an issue we've been grappling with a lot recently. And as a fan, it's hard to fall out of love with an artist's work, especially if that work meant a lot to you when you were younger and it actually helped you find your own voice. That's why I find this approach so inspiring. I've always thought the history of the arts is like a long conversation between the living and the dead. And Lovecraft wanted his mythology to grow beyond him. That's why he gave

it away for free. Although he never imagined the type of people that he feared and despised would use his imagery to respond to him. In this conversation these creators are having with Lovecraft shows that if a work of art or literature is truly great, it can, as Kenetra Brooks said earlier, better itself. And it can become even better than the people who created it. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Premi Muhammad, Victor LaValle, Kenetra Brooks, John Jennings, and Varick Boyd, who did the readings. Brooks, John Jennings, and Varick Boyd, who did the readings. By the way, I did my own subversive Lovecraft story. In 2016, I did an audio drama where I played a version of myself grappling with Lovecraft's monsters and Lovecraft's antisemitism. The episode is called When Cthulhu

Calls, and you can find it in the Imaginary World show feed. In my next episode, I'm going to revisit an older episode called Dumbledore's Army, which was about how young progressive activists were inspired by J.K. Rowling. In that episode, I interviewed Jackson Bird, a transgender man who was the spokesperson for the Harry Potter Alliance. J.K. Rowling has recently alienated a lot of her fans and even the stars of the Harry Potter movies with her anti-transgender views. I will catch up with Jackson to discuss all of this in the next episode. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emalinski and Imagine Worlds Pod. If you really like the show, please do a shout out on social media. That always helps people discover imaginary worlds.

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