I am way overdue in posting this interview with Travis Prinzi. I read Prinzi's Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds last fall and LOVED it. For those who love all things Potter, in my estimation Prinzi's work is the best book I've read on the subject. Prinzi not only brings a wealth of learning about literature, and particularly fantasy literature, to bear on the J.K. Rowling's Potter oerve, but he also thinks interdependently. He avoids merely splicing quotes and others' insights, but rather he engages other writers and Rowling from his own point of view. The questions Prinzi asks in HP & Imagination kept me riveted, and he writes in a style that is a delight to read.

If you want to read Potter at new levels of depth and see Rowling's adroit use of venerable traditions in fantasy writing and her simultaneous creation of new forms, let Prinzi be your guide. He not only enriched my reading and understanding of the Harry Potter series, but also he  nudged me into considering how these great themes could impact my own life more deeply.
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GL: Why is the concept of faerie important? What would life be like without fairy tales?
 
 
Travis Prinzi:
Faerie is the philosophy of life that there is more to the world than what the five senses can perceive; indeed, there is a spiritual reality that we need in order to rightly understand even what information the physical senses gather. G.K. Chesterton wrote that the fairy tale philosophy - that the world is magic - is the only reasonable philosophy. The concept of Faerie is particularly important to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment people, because, as I write in Harry Potter & Imagination, fairy tales are a protest against strictly naturalistic rationalism. Of course, fairy tales were around long before the Enlightenment, but great writers like George MacDonald, Tolkien, Lewis, L'Engle, and now Rowling write to remind us that the world is a much more magical (spiritual) place than we often realize.
 
Life without fairy tales can be found at Number 4, Privet Drive in the Harry Potter stories. Life without fairy tales is a life devoid of imagination. The Dursleys are cardboard cut-out characters not because J.K. Rowling wrote them poorly, but because they have no imagination and have therefore made themselves cartoonish representations of life without meaning and creativity.

Part 2 tomorrow...