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 first request we received was one asking for more on the ‘Twelve Golden Threads’ in the work of J. K. Rowling, the plot points and story features that run through everything she writes.

In this first overview of the Golden Threads, Nick and John go back and fourth with four Threads each. Nick gives at least three examples for Bad Dad, Writing about Writing, Violence against Women, and the Evils of Fleet Street. John responds with three or more ’for instances’ of Mother Love, Ghosts, Pregnancy Traps, and the Lost Child with Grieving Steward. Enjoy!

New to the Lake and Shed Kanreki Birthday series? Here’s what we’re doing:

On 31 July 2025, Joanne Murray, aka J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, will be celebrating her 60th birthday. This celebration is considered a ‘second birth’ in Japan or Kanreki because it is the completion of the oriental astrological cycle. To mark JKR’s Kanreki, Dr John Granger and Nick Jeffery, both Nipponophiles, are reading through Rowling’s twenty-one published works and reviewing them in light of the author’s writing process, her ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor. The ‘Lake’ is the biographical source of her inspiration; the ‘Shed’ is the alocal place of her intentional artistry, in which garage she transforms the biographical stuff provided by her subconscious mind into the archetypal stories that have made her the most important author of her age. You can hear Nick and John discuss this process and their birthday project at the first entry in this series of posts: Happy Birthday, JKR! A Lake and Shed Celebration of her Life and Work.

Tomorrow? John and Nick talk about the six remaining Golden Threads, namely, Bad Government, Occult Tokens, the Search for the Real, Embedded Texts, the Embedded Author, and Shadow Doppelgangers. Stay tuned!

Links to posts mentioned in today’s Lake and Shed conversation for further reading:

'Pregnancy Traps' in the Works of J. K. Rowling: A Rowling Studies Podcast

* The Golden Thread of Coercive Love that Runs Through Everything She has Written

The seven Hogwarts Professor weblog posts that John and Nick reference in that conversation can be found here:

Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Merope Gaunt

Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Casual Vacancy’s Krystal Weedon, Kay Bawden

Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Bellatrix Lestrange and the Cursed Child Delphini

Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Leda Strike

Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Four Strikes

Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Last Strikes

Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Fantastic Beasts, The Ickabog, The Christmas Pig

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