JK Rowling is a writer of stories who first created her characters and detailed their early adventures in an Edinburgh café using pen and paper. They didn’t have flat whites in those days, so let’s assume she did it over a cuppa.

To add to the picture, I like to imagine a hand-rolled cigarette in her non-writing mitt because that’s how George Orwell would have done it. And Ms Rowling is hugely fond of George Orwell, finding his writings (in particular those dealing with imagined totalitarian futures) to be a deep reservoir of wisdom and a useful source of quotations and aphorisms. Quite right too.

Today, Ms Rowling is arguably the world’s most famous living author. Her characters and their world have transcended the page to become priceless and ruthlessly franchised items of IP – it stands for intellectual property – and exist now in dimensions barely imaginable 30 years ago. They are, quite literally, in the ether: action role-playing video game Hogwarts Legacy was launched earlier this month for PlayStation 5 and Xbox, but you can also play it on digital distribution platform Steam.

As well as being good places to write, cafés are great for meeting people, whether old friends or new acquaintances, and for talking to them face-to-face. They are places to swap confidences and opinions. To dispute, listen, learn. To have your mind changed through conversation or debate. Ms Rowling, though, engages with the world from a position of relative seclusion – through her website, on blogs, and on social media, predominantly on Twitter where she has 14 million followers. Which is problematic because Ms Rowling is also arguably the world’s most controversial author.

She isn’t hosting a salon in a café backroom, but when a new podcast featuring her premieres next week we will at least hear her voice on the subjects which have generated all the fuss. It’s called The Witch Trials Of JK Rowling and it will drop like a stone into the shallow waters of public opinion – which is my way of saying expect ripples. Why? Because the literary fame which saw Ms Rowling praised as a “social, moral and political inspiration” when she was invited to give the prestigious Commencement Speech at Harvard University in 2008 has turned to infamy in recent years as she has taken a side in the debate over trans rights and gender identity which is not to everyone’s liking. Particularly unappreciative of her stance is the young LGBTQ community which is a large subset of her fan base. Or was.

The Herald:

Tweeting last week, Ms Rowling revealed that the podcast came about after she received a “long, thoughtful letter” from one Megan Phelps-Roper inviting her to take part in an in-depth discussion about “the issues that have interested me in recent years”. No prizes for guessing what those are.

Ms Phelps-Roper is a former member of and spokesperson for the notorious Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, and is the grand-daughter of its founder, Fred Phelps. Members have been known to turn up to demonstrations wearing t-shirts with slogans such as ‘God Hates Fags’. Ms Phelps-Roper modelled one on The Howard Stern Show while still in her teens. Unsurprisingly the church has been labelled “the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America” by respected civil rights organisation the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Ms Phelps-Roper left the church in 2012 – some would say escaped – and in 2019 she appeared in a Louis Theroux documentary titled Surviving America’s Most Hated Family. In the same year she published Unfollow: A Journey From Hatred To Hope.

“Megan proposed bringing in other voices, and looking at the wider picture, bringing her own unique viewpoint as a former fundamentalist who’s dedicated her life over the past decade to difficult conversations,” Ms Rowling continued in her tweet. “I agreed to sit down with Megan because, having read her wonderful book, Unfollow, I thought the two of us could have a real, interesting, two-sided conversation that might prove constructive.”

So far, we only have a trailer. It’s a minute and a half long and starts with vox pops from grown-up Harry Potter fans, the Millennials for whom the book series was A Very Big Deal Indeed. And they say so. “It teaches you the importance of friendships, the importance of forgiveness,” says one man. Asked what they think of Ms Rowling, however, and the hosannas turn to harrumphing and avoidance. “Erm …” says one interviewee. “I …” says another. “There’s a lot of controversy with that one,” adds a third with an embarrassed laugh. A fourth says he will speak – but only if the microphone is turned off.

And Ms Rowling? Here’s what she says in the clip: “I never set out to upset anyone, however I was not uncomfortable with getting off my pedestal. And what has interested me over the last 10 years and certainly in the last two years, the last three years, particularly on social media [is when people have said] ‘Oh you’ve ruined your legacy. Oh you could have been beloved forever, but you chose to say this.’ And I think: ‘You could not have misunderstood me more profoundly’.”

The podcast is produced by media content company The Free Press, founded by journalist Bari Weiss. She was formerly an opinion writer with The New York Times but resigned in protest at an article in which a Republican senator called for troops to be used against Black Lives Matter protestors. Her resignation letter warned against the advent of what she called “a new consensus” in the US media in which “truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”

Interestingly the paper is itself embroiled in a trans rights row following an open letter sent to it last week accusing it of using “pseudoscience” and “charged language” in its coverage of trans issues. Among the 100 or so signatories were writer and film director Lena Dunham, former Sex And The City star Cynthia Nixon and whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. Unbowed, the paper ran a column with the headline In Defence Of JK Rowling which stated that calling Ms Rowling transphobic was “as dangerous as it is absurd”.

READ MORE: JK ROWLING IN T-SHIRT ATTACKING NICOLA STURGEON

So will the new podcast prove constructive? As Ms Rowling says, it might. It has certainly started well, with Ms Rowling appearing to claim that her views have been “profoundly” misunderstood. But I hope those other voices she mentions will be drawn from those who oppose her with reasoned arguments because the dial certainly needs to shift, for Ms Rowling’s benefit as much as everybody else’s. She needs to state her case on a platform other than Twitter, and one where contrary views can be put to her for her to refute as well as she is able. Likewise her complaints need to be addressed by those who have contributed to the narrative that she is transphobic. There are difficult conversations to be had and it’s only by agreeing to have them that combatants in any war, culture or otherwise, can resolve issues.

Oh, and if all this feels like a distraction from the seismic political events which have gripped Scotland in the last few days, think again. “If it weren’t for JK Rowling, Nicola Sturgeon would never have fallen,” opined one Daily Telegraph columnist last week. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how somebody who resigns out of the blue can be described as having ‘fallen’. The point is the Harry Potter author is being touted as the reason for the First Minister’s imminent departure, and the trans issue as Ms Sturgeon’s Kryptonite – in particular the recent row over the presence in a Scottish female prison of a rapist who is biologically male. Or “penised”, as Ms Rowling has phrased it in the past.

If indeed Ms Sturgeon could have a future career as director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival – it has already been mooted – then wouldn’t a sit-down with JK Rowling to discuss all this be a blockbuster start? Until then we have a podcast to look forward to.