Reading, Writing, Rowling

Join us for the beginning of our Puffs-palooza!  In this episode, we talk with Dr. Melissa Aaron and Dr. Lauren Camacci about the off-Broadway play Puffs - how you can see it at home, why should see it (if you haven’t already), and why we love it so much. Warning: Spoilers abound in this episode!   Puffs imagines the seven-book Harry Potter series in a compressed timeline and from the perspective of students in Hufflepuff in those same years. This is a fan fiction approach that Henry Jenkins calls refocalization, which retells a story from the perspective of marginalized characters to provide new insights. Melissa, a theater historian who saw the play in New York, explains how the in-person play experience is different from seeing it on film, and we consider whether the play is satire, parody, or something else, and what makes it so funny. It creates an in-group experience for fans and millennials. Bringing Muggle pop culture, including fantasy geekdom, into Hogwarts corrects a gap in the original series