As I sat down to write a Harry Potter fanfiction for class this past term, I drew both on my experiences reading the seven canonical novels as well as my engagement with the best fanfiction that I鈥檝e read. I was reminded of how developed my own imagination was at 12 when I started reading fanfiction and writing some of my own; this began right after the book series ended, when I feared a loss of mystery and discovery in the secondary world that helped me make sense of my own experiences more than any other fiction work had before. In the hundreds of new stories that I devoured then, these writers suggested that the discovery journey was just beginning.

The onset of my fanfiction engagement coincided with great turmoil in key relationships. For a number of reasons, I became disenchanted with my own life and felt more like a stranger in many of the circles I occupied. Here, fanfiction in the Wizarding World was a healing balm for me. In a beautiful reversal, the stage became my life, and I could act out my adolescent frustrations and fears. Before I had the language to detail the grief and disorientation of personal trauma, I could lead the wizards and witches in my story to engage pain on my behalf.

Seeing their ability to persist in the face of mortal peril and acknowledging that their success was at my demand as their creator, I learned to consider my own power to do the same in my own life. Harry Potter offers a unique sense of agency here. The richness of its world makes the story as accessible for a young child as it is for any adult. The characters of Harry Potter are people to meet and know well, and fanfiction in the world of Harry Potter allows a writer to be themselves alongside original inhabitants, just transported to a new magical country. I didn鈥檛 naively assume that my influence stretched very far past the page; I was still 12 and still unsure of my place in the world. Rather, I noticed that my ability to hope and imagine could endure in the face of a world that seemed to indicate that the exact opposite was true. Not only that, but I could also create hope in another, even if that other was a fiction from my own head. I credit the nameless authors whose work inspired me to become a co-creator in my own life story. I consider them collaborators in my personal world as much as that of the Wizarding World.

Fanfiction can even synthesize micro-zeitgeists that those close to a secondary world share deeply. For those who want to imagine redemption for evil, there are stories detailing Voldemort鈥檚 ownership of his wrongdoing and subsequent penance, while others allow Draco Malfoy to overcome his cowardice to become the man that we all hoped he could be. For those who are used to being relegated to the background of their own lives, Colin Creevey tales represent a centering of any unexpected and unnoticed voice. Indeed, fanfiction can enable representation in areas where it is currently missing.

As beloved as J.K. Rowling鈥檚 created world is, it is often lambasted for its lack of effective diversity of characters. Everyone, primary to tertiary, is a straight, cisgender, White person, with the occasional, heavy-handedly written BIPOC. Even in these few instances of representation, we see nothing meaningful in Cho Chang鈥檚 Asian heritage or Dean Thomas鈥� Blackness. Our only known queer characters were identified after the series鈥� publication and still remain defined only by the tragedy in their stories. They all read as stand-ins to satisfy a white gaze, or to comfort heteronormativity without disrupting the typical world order. Fanfiction reimagines stories like these through subversion, where Hermione isn鈥檛 white, Ron isn鈥檛 straight, and our Wizarding community migrates from the mountains of Scotland. Imagination here becomes a recursive phenomenon; as new ideas are generated, they encourage and produce other novel stories, which invite more readers to create their own as well, all in the same shared secondary world. This is the 鈥渇irst fruits鈥� of any liberative work, where people need to see themselves living rich and full lives before creating them; they can rehearse fostering hope in the safety of a fictional secondary world before returning to our primary world to put it to practice.

Far from being the immature musings of uninspired fans, fanfiction invites readers to consider themselves as co-creators in their spiritual stories rather than consumers or spectators. For children and adults alike, it offers a chance to create a world within a world, to break and make rules of engagement, and to prepare the courage they need to confront despair and anguish in their own lives. A rich tool for capturing goodness and injecting often anemic hope with vitality, fanfiction asks us to hope that our primary world, the personal and the communal, might one day be just as magical.

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Every other year the 天美视频 offers the course SFD (Spiritual Formation & Direction) 523 Spirituality & the Arts and with each offering, the instructor has focused on a particular form of art as a way to explore spiritual practices and how the arts can inform and sustain spiritual formation. Two years ago I centered the course on film. This year I wanted another medium of artistic engagement that students may already find meaningful and that I too have found spiritually and formatively significant. The Wizarding World created by author JK Rowling was an obvious choice. It encompasses not only literary traditions rooted in the work of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, but it also includes film, fandom, immersive theme parks, and creative digital media.

From January to April of 2019, 40 students read (or re-read) over 1,000 pages of Harry Potter
texts, created immersive experiences for their classmates, wrote and analyzed fan fiction as a
form of spiritual practice, and unpacked together the resonance, both theological and
psychological, of these stories that have enchanted so many of us for over twenty years. I was
humbled and awed each week by what students discovered and shared with one another, and
am pleased to have some of them able to share their work with a wider community. Expecto
Patronum.

When I was a kid, my two best friends and I loved to make movies. Dressed in robes we stole from the church choir and armed with a cheap camcorder, we would run around the neighborhood making cheesy knockoffs of our favorite fantasy films. Given that we lived in the not-so-primeval city of Saginaw, Michigan, an important part of our process was scouting fantastical and enchanting-looking locations. It wasn鈥檛 always easy, but we steadily became adept at finding anything that even remotely resembled Narnia, Middle-Earth, or the Hogwarts grounds. An eerie section of trees, a wooden and ancient-looking church door, a shadowy path; all of these places became something more to us.

During one of the first weeks of Spirituality and the Arts class, I was struck by a quote from C. S. Lewis about the enriching power of fantasy. Arguing against critics鈥� objections that fantasy creates an unhealthy and unrealistic desire in children, Lewis writes: 鈥淸A child] does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.鈥�

Looking back at our filmmaking adventures, I remember feeling a rush of joy and electricity in finding something otherworldly in a seemingly ordinary place. The stories we loved didn鈥檛 make us despise our city because of its lack of magic; the stories we loved made our city more magical. The woods, the old church door, the shadowy path; they became magical because in them we discovered beauty and detail that we never saw before.

Lewis鈥� quote stuck with me throughout Kj Swanson鈥檚 Harry Potter class. Week after week we would walk into a 天美视频 Classroom for a 鈥淧ensieve Presentation,鈥� a peer-led immersion into the Wizarding World, and feel like we were somewhere else. We were at the 天美视频, but we were also at the Yule Ball, or in Potions Class, or traveling through time, or competing in the Triwizard
Tournament. Whether it was through a guided reflection or through engaging our senses with lighting and taste and sound (actual bubbling cauldrons, butterbeer, candles, strobe lights!), these projects (and the stories that inspired them) enriched the space we inhabited.

Now, even though the class is over, I can鈥檛 help but walk around through the 天美视频 feeling that things are a little more magical than they were before.

I left that class with an unshakable sense of magic, and鈥攇iven my childhood habit of finding magic in ordinary places鈥攊t鈥檚 no surprise that a month or so later I decided to dress up as Harry Potter, take a picture in front of Stadium High School, and create an Instagram account called: The mission: Finding magic in the #cityofdestiny.

When I moved to Tacoma in 2015, I immediately began to notice the rich and timeless architecture. It all began with Stadium High School鈥攁 French chateau- inspired building infamously compared to Hogwarts鈥攂ut I then branched out to other places: an old street bridge on my running route, the ivy-covered brick buildings on the University of Puget Sound Campus. I began to see the fantastic everywhere, and once I started, I couldn鈥檛 stop.

What started out as an impulsive and tongue-in-cheek photoshoot has now transformed into a project that is helping me fall more and more in love with my community and my home. Expecto Tacoma has allowed me to meet new people, inspired others to visit places they鈥檝e never been to in their city, made people homesick for Tacoma, and overall highlighted the incredible pride Tacomans have for their city.

I keep coming back to Lewis鈥� quote because I think it describes my experience so well. Harry Potter has not made me despise the real world because of its lack of wizards, dragons, and magic wands. Harry Potter has helped me find magic everywhere: in Saginaw, Michigan, in Tacoma, Washington, and at 天美视频. It鈥檚 not that these places weren鈥檛 magical before鈥攐n the contrary, they always have been鈥攊t鈥檚 just that Harry Potter (a text) has allowed me to see things in these places that I never would have noticed before.

And, if I鈥檝e learned anything, it鈥檚 that magic is possibility: The possibility of noticing something you didn鈥檛 see before, the possibility of meeting new people and appreciating old friends, the possibility of seeing how the past touches the present, and the possibility of envisioning a beautiful future.

Following the creation of his Instagram account Expecto Tacoma!, Mike Thomas developed quite a following and was featured on King 5.

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