Today’s Lake and Shed framed conversation is about J. K. Rowling’s first adult novel and one Nick and John think she may have been writing before she was inspired to write Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s that autobiographical, a transparency of sorts for the several unhappy women Jo Rowling Murray has been. Nick explains all the projects we now know she was working on between 2007 and 2012, the dates of Deathly Hallows and Casual Vacancy’s respective publication dates, as well as the degree to which readers can assume that the novel’s Simon Price is a fictional portrait of her father, Peter Rowling. John describes the three Gospel parables embedded in Casual Vacancy and why he thinks the book was a project the author was working on before the Hogwarts Saga as well as why it reflects a religious crisis akin to Harry’s ‘struggle to believe’ in Deathly Hallows.
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.
The seven HogwartsProfessor birthday videos posted thus far in this series can be read at the links below:
A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
A Lake and Shed Reading of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Tomorrow? It’s Cuckoo’s Calling, the first Comoran Strike publication in Rowling’s oeuvre (or ‘in Robert Galbraith’s, if you prefer the second of Mrs. Murray’s pseudonyms), in which Nick reveals the real-life Deeby Mac to whom the book is dedicated and John talks about the parallels between the first and seventh Strike novels. See you then!
Links from today’s Lake and Shed conversation for further reading:
‘Bad Dad:’ A History of Rowling’s Relationship with Peter Rowling, Her Father;
‘Christmas Pig 1: Jack Jones, Peter, and John,’ Rowling’s Use of the Names ‘Peter’ and ‘Simon’ for Bad Guys in Her Stories;
‘Exceptions to the Peter-John Rule: John Bristow, Dolores Umbridge, Matt Cunliffe;’
Casual Vacancy: The Characters Derived from Rowling’s Life and Why the Book Should Not Be Read through a Biographical Lens;
The Christian Hypocrites and Sympathetic Sikhs in Casual Vacancy;
The Casual Vacancy and the ‘Good Samaritan’ Gospel Parable; and
J. K. Rowling on the ‘Good Samaritan’ Event in Casual Vacancy
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