By Isaac Handelman

The point is that you can never ever run out of things to write about. Just let your hand go, and it will write something. If you put no blocker on it, no filter, and you have no criteria, and just write whatever is flying through your brain down on a piece of paper, or a wall, or a table, or whatever it is you’re writing on, you can’t possibly run out of things to write because your brain is always firing, there’s always something shooting through it, every fleeting moment from its formation until your death — your brain-death, that is. If your heart is beating but your brain is blank, you aren’t really alive, because you can’t write anymore. At that point, you have truly run out of ideas.

Is anyone still thinking about Harry Potter? For the better part of the seven elapsed years since the release of the eighth and final installment in the film franchise centered on The Boy Who Lived, I have not been. But obviously, the franchise still has plenty of ardent followers — the ones who are lining up for the midnight premiere of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, who have propelled Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to dizzyingly successful heights in London and on Broadway, and who continue to fuel J.K. Rowling’s seemingly endless world construction on part-fan-site-part-universe-expansion Pottermore. I, however, have fallen out of the loop. In 2011, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 entranced me. When it released, I was fourteen, about to begin high school, and nearing the tail end of a childhood that transpired very much in the midst of the Harry Potter phenomenon. To say that I was anything less than engulfed by the franchise for a majority of my youth...