Jill Kolongowski - Life Lessons Harry Potter Taught Me: Discover the Magic of Friendship, Family, Courage, and Love in Your Life

Table of Contents

Ive spent a lot of time thinking about the incredible magic that meant that I got to write this, my first book. Without the absolute lucky abundance of support around me, the book would never have happened. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank you first to my family, especially my sister Beth (who read Sorcerers Stone first and told me I should really check out this new book), for being my first Hogwarts House. Thank you for your hours spent reading with me, Amanda, Megan, Jessie, Matt, Grace, Kate, and Caroline. And thank you to my parents for your endless support and patience, even when I insisted on reading at the dinner table.

Thank you to my friends who were always willing to have long conversations with me about wandlore and house-elf rights (while others got bored and walked away), especially Alisa, Angela, Jo, Ashley, Anna, Emily, Krista, Sara, Stephanie, Ian, Alex, and Renee, and to all of you who were willing to indulge my requests for Harry Potter movie marathons, to go with me to midnight showings, and who remembered to ask how the book was going (especially you, Sunni), or offered to bring me coffee, booze, or butterbeer.

Thank you to Marcia Aldrich, Marilyn Abildskov, and Wesley Gibson for your mentorship, and to my dear MFA classmates. I would not be who I am without you. Wesley, I wish you were here to tease me about this book.

Thank you to all the people who were brave enough to lend me their stories for this bookmy parents, my sister, my grandpa Roger, my Busia, Alisa, Sunni, Lindsey, Greta, my Aunt Pam, and Pamela Wall.

Thank you to KMA Sullivan and the YesYes Books crew for their support and constant, necessary cheerleading while I neglected them in order to write this.

Thank you to Kat Finch, for your kind gesture of selflessness, and to the 3-4-5, and to the Binderswithout you, this book wouldnt exist.

Thank you to Michele Brusseau for her Harry Potter class that I somehow lucked into taking as a graduate student. Many of my ideas for this book took shape there, though I didnt even know it at the time.

Thank you Ulysses Press for choosing me for this project. Specifically, thanks to editors Shayna Keyles and Bridget Thoreson and publicist Molly Conway, who believed in this book from the beginning, and who helped make it a fully formed Patronus, instead of just the wisps of smoke from which it began.

Thank you to Vanessa Zoltan and Casper ter Kuile of the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast, whose thoughtful discussions inspired me throughout this book, and who gave me the incredible gift of reading Harry Potter as if its sacred (which, of course, it is). And thank you to my Bay Area Writing Project friend Eva for introducing the podcast to me (and to my other teacher-friend-colleagues Scott and Chris for always being willing to analyze Harry Potter with me).

Thank you to shinyswablu, a random stranger on the Internet who made the Hufflepuff Commonroom ambient noise mix on Ambientmixer.com. I wrote most of this book listening to it.

Thank you to J. K. Rowling for giving me one of the greatest loves of my life.

Thank you to my students for giving me another. Thank you too, students, for your patience with my slow grading while I wrote this book, and for promising to buy it. Thank you to all of you for your bravery and your laughter. You make me believe in magic every single day.

Thank you to you, whom I shouldnt have forgotten. Please forgive me.

And thank you to my husband Charlie, whos told me for years that I should write a Harry Potter book. I should have listened much sooner. Lots of people dislike the epilogue to Deathly Hallows because they say no one ends up with their high school sweetheart. But I ended up with mine. Thank you for understanding my tears on the Hogwarts Express, for every dinner you cooked, and for every hour you didnt mind that I spent huddled over my computer. I still dont believe in fate, Charlie, but I believe in you.

JILL KOLONGOWSKI is a Hufflepuff who teaches writing and literature at the College of San Mateo. She is also the managing editor at YesYes Books. Her essays have won Sundog Lits First Annual Contest series and the Diana Woods Memorial Prize in Creative Nonfiction at Lunch Ticket magazine. Other essays are published in Profane, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Southern Indiana Review, Fugue, and elsewhere. She lives in California, and her Patronus is a tortoiseshell cat. Visit her website at jillkwrites.com.

As a child, I was sure that magic was everywhere. I was just waiting for it to find me. My sister and I spent many bruised hours jumping off the couch with blankets in our hands. Each time, we slammed down to the carpet, knees first, but we were never deterred. One of these times, if we were patient, our carpets were bound to catch magic like a match catches fire, and wed never hit the ground.

I watched and rewatched Matilda, the story of the child with powers who could move objects with her mind. In my bedroom, I twirled and imagined the playing cards that she made rotate around her in a joyful tornado. I spent hours staring at pencils and glasses of water, hoping for a tremble. When my father wanted us to put our toys away, hed set our dolls up overnight as if theyd been having a tea party, or rearrange our bears as if theyd been playing catch. I knew it was my father, but every so often, when hed leave early in the morning for work, I convinced myself that the toys had done it themselves. Magic existed, but it was tentative, private, fragile. The toys lived, and they only stopped moving when we looked. They stopped moving because we looked.

And then came Harry, the boy with magic beyond what Id ever imagined. Though Harrys powers are great, and though he ends up needing those powers to face some of the most terrible dark forces in the world and within himself, some of the series most enduring power is in the magic at its simplest.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone is where I turn when I want to remember how it feels to be 12 and to still believe in magic. Despite everything that happens after, Sorcerers Stone is my favorite book of the series because we get to tag along and experience Harrys wonder at the newness of this magical world, where he finally belongs. We find joy each time Harry discovers Diagon Alley through the Leaky Cauldron, which Muggles cant quite see; we experience his curiosity at self-stirring cauldrons, overpriced dragon liver, flying broomsticks, and goblins weighing huge rubies at Gringotts. Harry, whos gotten used to the way his life has always been, now finds newness all around him, seeing the world through a fresh-scrubbed pane of glass. And even after Harry is fully immersed in the wizarding world and some of that newness wears off, the books continue to deliver the childlike wonder, even if it comes in smaller bitesHogsmeade, the beautiful prefects bathroom and its taps full of magical foam and bubbles, dragons, the fantasies of being able to fly and breathe underwater, and the curiosities in the Department of Mysteries. Though Harry gets older, its comforting to know that there are still plenty of secrets to discover.

Not everyone in the series views magical secrets as a source of possibility and discovery. During