Dear Reader,

Last March at the Granger Leadership Academy, over cat-faced coffees, Grace and I began to concept a new podcast: The Art Life. Over a year and 39 episodes later, we are getting ready for our first live show, at Camp GLA in two weeks’ time.

The Granger Leadership Academy (GLA) a conference for fan activists led by the Harry Potter Alliance. I attend annually (for three years now!).

The conference is online this year, as Camp GLA, and a friend of mine asked me to share 1-2 aspects of the experience that I enjoy most. This was such a great question, I’m sharing my response publicly.

1 – GLA is my personal activist check-up. I trust the thoughtful, hands-on programming curated by the fantastic GLA team. Every year, I educate myself on major social justice issues (such as privilege, micro-aggressions, and ongoing habits of activism for daily life).

2 – At GLA, I am surrounded by people who get it.  GLA is a community of fans who care. Readers who, like Hermione Granger, want to do some good in the world. These are the people with whom I share Hogwarts (especially when its author disappoints).

One of these people is Grace, whom I met for the first time at GLA in 2017 (we tell this story in The Art Life: Episode 1). We hope that our live show brings the cosy, feminine reprieve that a walk to the cat cafe in Philadelphia brought us. Though most of our friendship has been long-distance, we’ve made an effort to be analog, writing letters, and connecting voice to voice. So our first live show of The Art Life will be about setting digital boundaries, which we have both found essential to sustaining our art lives and activism.