CBC's This Morning's new Harry Potter Contest is now closed. 

Hot Type with Evan Solomon Interview with J.K. Rowling 

Evan Solomon: The legend is that
[your first book] came to you all at once.

J.K. Rowling: No, Harry came to me. Hogwarts came to me, not in its entirety but many of the characters did come in a kind of --

Solomon: Was it like an epiphany?

Rowling: Yes, it really was. I had this four-hour train journey. It shouldn't have been four hours, but the train was delayed. And Harry was there [in my mind]. The inhabitants of the castle were there. Harry's scar was there… It's a very strange thing, but I know I'm not alone in this among writers. It was as though I was given a piece of information and I just had to find out the rest of the information. It wasn't really as though I was inventing it. I was working backwards and forwards to see what must have happened.

On my last U.S. tour I was there over Halloween with my daughter. We were in this hotel room, and three programs in a row were concerned with the question of how we stop our children being frightened by Halloween -- three in a row … I'm sitting there thinking,
you are trying to protect children from their own imaginations, and you can't do that. That's how you turn out frightened children, in my opinion. You turn out frightened children by saying, "It's not scary. There's nothing there to frighten you." Kids will get scared and they've got to live through that and then deal with that… A happy child is not one who has never experienced fear or has never been allowed to experience fear.

Solomon: Fear is a healthy thing?

Rowling: It is a healthy thing. It's a survival thing… Let's say a child grows to age 14 never having experienced fear, it would be a destroying experience for that boy or girl the first time they felt fear. You have to learn that.

Solomon: What ought we to protect our kids from, then?

Rowling: We're trying to protect them from our own fears, I think, and that's not healthy. That's not good.

Solomon: What is it healthy to protect them from?

Rowling: Obviously we want them physically safe. That's a very natural instinct… My reaction to a scary book or a scary film with my daughter would be to watch it with her and discuss it with her, to be with her as she experienced it.

Solomon: Jo, why did you decide to write during that period? Most single mothers who are broke and have got a kid, they just want to make money. They forget their ambition to write, forget their dream. They have to be a little more practical.

Rowling: Well, I felt guilty about continuing to write, actually, very guilty… I thought, maybe I should just relocate. Maybe I should just come back down to London, where I had lived before, and get a full-time teaching job down there and give up this. I wondered, was I chasing rainbows and sacrificing my daughter's -- not well-being because she was a very happy little girl. But maybe she could have had more toys.

Solomon: As a mom, did you feel like a failure? You're broke. Suddenly you have this kid.

Rowling: I felt very angry. I don't know that I felt a failure. And yet at the same time I was proud of myself, and this is the truth. And there will be people watching this, women in exactly the situation as I was. I've got to say to them, "I do not look back at myself then and think what a loser."
I look back on myself then, and I'm very proud, because I was doing the work of three people. I was doing a paid job. I was the only bread- winner, and I was being mother and father. If anyone thinks that's easy, try it sometime. And I was writing a novel.
I'm still a single parent. The expectation seems to be that once you've made some money, you will hand over your child to a battalion of nannies and then you'll go off and do what you want to do. Well, the fact is that I want to bring up my daughter and that means I want to spend time with my daughter.
There's no way I'm going to be able to do that if I give promotional tours to every country that publishes me. So it's for very prosaic reasons that I've been keeping a relatively low-profile recently.

Solomon: And yet here we are on the train and at every stop there are hundreds of kids and parents...

Rowling: That's the nice thing, though. I really, really love meeting the kids, because that's like teaching without pain, you see.
I used to be a teacher and I enjoyed teaching. Meeting loads of kids in the context in which I meet them now, it's fun. I don't have to discipline. They want to riot, I can join in if I want to. It's fun.
I never expected to be in the papers. The height of my ambition for these books was to get reviewed. A lot of children's books don't even get reviewed -- forget good review, bad review. Personally, no, I never expected to be in the papers so it's an odd experience when it happens to you.