Advertise on podcast: Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,Every nighte and alle,Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,And Christe receive thy saule. In our final S3 bonus episode, we spend either three hours (from your perspective) or the full eight days (from ours) digging even deeper on DWJ's deep secrets -- thank you all for your thought-provoking questions, intriguing speculations, and excellent endless additions to our collective reading list. Transcript available here, and if you're interested this time please also check out our accounts on Bluesky and Tumblr, where we'll be adding links to some of the other references mentioned in the episode. This episode wraps up our third season, but we'll be returning to in October with Year of the Griffin!

JOKES are against the rules. A tour of nineties Fantasyland, with stops along the way in California, Minnesota, Shannara, Valdemar, Derkholm, Dalemark, and the 'Maggots' entry in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997). Transcript available here, and our next (and last) bonus episode for the season will be our overview/Q&A, which we'll be recording in early July.!

Truth is the fire that fetches thunder. A planned minisode on the Guide to Dalemark goes fully off the rails with the addition of early proto-Dalemark novella "The True State of Affairs," for a wide-ranging discussion on art, time, splendor, and a possible alternate vision for Diana Wynne Jones' career.   Transcript available here, and we'll be back sometime next month with our next bonus episode on The Tough Guide to Fantasyland! NB: this episode contains discussion of child abuse and pedophilia.

""Why have we got six soppy men in a green haze hanging about?"" Tolkien and Disney, coffee and cotton, children and chattel, colonialism and capitalism, satire and sitcoms and sentimentality and as many jokes as can possibly fit in a three hundred page book.  NB: This episode touches on prisoner abuse and sexual assualt.  Transcript available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1edDFMD9LbdsdrgTIflJCwfynukFnrTw5/view This brings us to the end of our nineties season, but we're planning couple bonus episodes over the next few months, so please stay tuned, and send any questions for our Q&A to [email protected]!

I thought of Uncle Ted's wobbly windows, and I began to think he must really, truly never look through them or anything else. Can't anyone look out there and see that you need not to think of everything in terms of what works or what they ought to do? Game dev and narrative expert Ariella Bouskila joins us for a discussion of bad colleagues, sick empires, beautiful boys, katabasis ducks, and the magic that can be found all around us if you have the eyes to see but can perhaps especially be found at a 1990s science fiction convention.  NB: As much as we would like not to, this one inevitably contains some conversation about Neil Gaiman.  Transcript available here, and we'll be wrapping up our season in two weeks with Dark Lord of Derkholm!

Mitt at last came out with the real cause of his disappointment with the North. "They told me it was free here," he said. "They told me it was good." North and South, history-time and story-time, past kings and future kings, bicycle horses and evil-haunted trains and a really truly impressive array of bad dads all meet on Dalemark's green roads in the book it took Diana Wynne Jones fifteen years to write. Transcript available here, and we'll be back in two weeks with Deep Secret!

This wood is like human memory. It does not need to take events in their correct order. Do you wish to go to an earlier time and start from there?  It's a portal fantasy! It's a space opera! It's an office comedy! It's an epic romance! It's an exploration of parenthood! It's a metaphor for authorship and creative control! It's King Arthur! It's Siegfried! It's ten books in a trenchcoat playing 4D chess with each other, and we could probably talk about it for another four hours and still have more to say. Transcript available here, and we'll be back in two weeks with Crown of Dalemark!

The restraints of knowledge harmed this wild power. In order to use it, Zillah could not know what it was. It would only answer a being as untrammeled as itself. Time for elves, centaurs, demons, gods, witches, monks, princes, soulbonds, spaceships, sex, death, and an ever-present toddler, in undoubtedly the wildest book of Diana Wynne Jones' career to date. Transcript available here, and we'll be back in two weeks with Hexwood!

What's the good of being civilized? That's what I want to know. It just means other people can break the rules and you can't.   The gender dictatorship, the horror of conformity, the limits of word power, and how to stop your mother-in-law from living rent free in your brain. Transcript available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gnTKOU9XOofGvXZR4CdpBVJI-qYp5UqO/view?usp=sharing And we'll be back in two weeks with A Sudden Wild Magic!

‘That djinn has taken liberties with a person's castle,’ Sophie said. 'Unless I'm entirely turned around, this used to be our bathroom.' Richard Burton's Arabian Nights and Edward Said's Orientalism, fairy tale and retail, big dreams, big crimes, and Diana Wynne Jones' empire of the imagination. Transcript available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s-yK-BV-i6hpFtn-kpxpMUCdZe3Gr3Nf/view?usp=sharing And we'll be back in two weeks with Black Maria! (or Aunt Maria, depending on your location)

Nobody should be losing lives at this rate. What is wrong, Christopher? In our first episode of Season Three, the brilliant Iona Datt Sharma joins us for a discussion of bureaucracy, cricket boys, Burton and Kipling, and the limitations of escape into fantasy,  Transcript available here, and we'll be back next time with Castle in the Air!

The first time round most of the catching-up you do is retrospective. The second time round you see it happening. In our final S2 bonus episode, we do a terrible job of not looking ahead to Hexwood as we work our way through a wonderful pile of letters to discuss class, adulthood, lying DWJ fathers, the many (more) layers of Fire and Hemlock, and the real meaning of "The Master."  Transcript available here. This episode wraps up our second season, but we plan to be back in November with Lives of Christopher Chant and a guest!

"She has tremendous talent, of course, or she couldn’t do it at all, but I do sometimes feel that she—well—she repeats herself. Put it like this: I think maybe Carol doesn't give herself a chance to be herself any more than she gives us."   Endless questions, out-of-control characters, silly adults and weird bad dads: this week we're discussing the playground of ideas that makes up DWJ's short fiction of the seventies and eighties.  Titles discussed include  "Carruthers" (1972), "Auntie Bea's Day Out" (1978), "The Fluffy Pink Toadstool" (1979), "The Sage of Theare" (1982), "Warlock at the Wheel" (1984), "Dragon Reserve, Home Eight" (1984), "No One" (1984), "The Plague of Peacocks" (1984), "Carol Oneir's Hundredth Dream" (1986), "Enna Hittims" (1987), "The Fat Wizard" (1987), "The Green Stone," (1988), and "The Master" (1989). Transcript available here. Please note: we've postponed recording our Q&A episode for the eighties until September 25th, so if you understand what's happening in 'The Master,' please write in and tell us!

The thing we must notice is frequently identified by what is not described or told or explained. In our first Season Two bonus episode, Farah Mendlesohn -- who literally wrote the book on Diana Wynne Jones -- joins us to bring a critic and historian's eye to the first two decades of DWJ's career.  Transcript available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pUoTY4vf69pSgYCj-nTVKA7DCE_gePEF/view In our next bonus episode, we'll be covering the short stories of the seventies and eighties as collected in Unexpected Magic and Mixed Magics, including: Unexpected Magic: "Carruthers" (1972), "Auntie Bea's Day Out" (1978), "The Fluffy Pink Toadstool" (1979), "Dragon Reserve, Home Eight" (1984), "No One" (1984), "The Plague of Peacocks" (1984), "Enna Hittims" (1987), "The Fat Wizard" (1987), "The Green Stone," (1988), and "The Master" (1989) Mixed Magics: "The Sage of Theare" (1982), "Warlock at the Wheel," (1984), and "Carol Oneir's Hundredth Dream" (1986) And on September 17th we record our Q&A episode for the eighties, so please send us any thoughts before then!

Twenty Century refugee equipment. Case is open to show clothing and protective mask.  A tale of one or two cities, three or four Vivians, four to fourteen badly translated old women, and at least two hundred thousand dollars' worth of butter-pie. Transcript available here.  This is the last official episode of our eighties season, but once again we have a few bonus episodes up our sleeve -- we'll be recording a Q&A episode September 17th, so if you have thoughts or questions for us on the 80s please send them in before then!