Cover of Li Po

An Interview

with the author of Travels with Li Po.

Interview with William Kelly

(Q) How do you explain the lack of interest in Travels With Li Po and your allegations about it?

(A) There are a number of reasons. First of all, I suspect Rowling’s legal hounds are deterring any interested party from investigating the whole Harry Potter thing. What they are saying to inquirers is designed expressly to stop them in their tracks.That is their job. A Gorilla would stop any man in his tracks just by roaring from a mile away. The Gorilla knows this of course. Likewise, defamation lawyers are usually heard to some affect by good citizens such as editors and journalists who are trying to hold onto their jobs, families and careers. Having the right to threaten with punishment that is backed up by the State gifts them with power over the little man in the street. They are very likely using the apology wrestled out of the Derry News to substantiate their ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ statements, an apology which we repudiate and which should never have been made in the first place and was only made because that paper was faced with extinction if the editor did not cry “enough!” from the power-grip he was under.

Violence takes many forms: just because it is delivered by fax instead of gunfire doesn’t fool anyone who has been targeted by it. Justice itself, of course, is impartial or so we all want to believe. In practice it is anything but, political interests usually holding sway over both reason and a plaintiff’s lawful democratic rights. That apology was to drive us off the pitch by discrediting us. The Bogside Artists were certainly damaged by it, regardless, and for the reason I have just given. Our gullible public bows to all things legal the way savages prostrate themselves before the witchdoctor and for the same reason – out of fear of reprisal by unknown forces. The other reason is that people have been weaned on Harry Potter and “there are none so blind etc….” Sad, but true. Lastly, and most of the responses I have received so far fall into this category. They all say the same thing; “This cannot be true”, we are told, because I took so long to make it public. If truth was determined by that criterion most of the history books in your library, including the gospels, would never have seen the light of day and a man may well feel free to act on the conviction that his wife is a liar because she should have told him sooner that she was pregnant…. but you cannot argue with such people. It is beyond them to imagine a world in which Harry Potter did not exist. I have no difficulty there because I lived in that world and could see all around me the crying need for a role-model for kids that could proffer a palliative for their pain and give insight and validation to their own confused experience of living. That is where the VISION came from. If you think it descended magically on a woman during a train journey who dreamt of becoming a writer…. you need to talk to somebody.

(Q) And the book itself?

(A) Those who get it, get it, because the magic is in the book itself and how it impacts you. That was one of the philosophical premises for writing it in the first place, to clarify for all the guiding principle I cherished then and still do …… that art itself is magic, or a form of it. And I believe you can experience this in Li Po…..if you let it, that is. What I must stress here is that Travels with Li Po was never intended to be anything but the mould from which the series would be cast. I would certainly not have published it in its present state. Its purpose was to showcase the VISION I had without giving too much away. I was dealing in simple ideas and themes that I knew full well could so easily be pilfered.  Li Po is conspicuously a BLUEPRINT of a VISION;  and I stressed  to just about every publisher to whom I sent my customary three chapters and synopsis, that it bore “little resemblance to the finished version.”  We published it as is because we wanted to make that abundantly clear. Its present form is its original form and would not have been its final form. It doesn’t follow, mind you, that I would have purged everything that is already there. The text  would have remained mostly, if not entirely intact, but certain features of it and especially the personality of the hero would have been amplified. That is because what I did and had to do at the time was underplay very significant elements of character and plot and often only hinted at things I intended to elaborate on greatly later once I had been given the green light.

As it transpired, certain people plied me with questions about it because they knew this was the actual BLUEPRINT for a series quite outside their usual experience of children’s stories and they wondered how they could make their own version. Like a bunch of delinquents who have spotted a Golden Eagle glide into their back yard, they just had to snare it. They smelled money in it and very little else and knew damn well that, given the critical approach to society that I intended to take and had already made clear, I would have problems getting into print. And with my central character an Irishman? Place your bets. In the end, they stole the entire VISION, scaffolding, tools, bricks, mortar, the lot.  “And they rejoiced in their wickedness,” as the Bible puts it. If you read Li Po again with all this in mind you might get the magic of it. If you are conditioned with Fugleman Potter you are likely beyond recall. If you care not for the truth you probably have other reasons for reading thus far. Whoever you are, take the advice of a wise old man; – “trust nobody in the publishing industry unless you can get them to sign a contract promising you their organs should you require one!” Even then…………….

THE DECLARATION OF PLAGIARISM AGAINST ROWLING

This particular text is primarily intended for those involved in the media. Read it if you have time to spare and interest enough. Please do not write to us complaining about how long and tedious it is and all the rest of it. Nobody has a gun to your head to make you read it. Good luck and thanks for reading thus far.

Surprisingly, only a few of the comments we received so far to our last post have been openly racist. Most were reactions from idolaters who cannot bear the notion that their idol may have feet of clay. The most common knee-jerk reaction was inevitable;  in so many words – “Aw come off it! Why would you take so long to come out with this rubbish!” In other words, “do you really think we are that dumb?” Well, we don’t actually. At least not quite as dumb as Rowling and her buddies seemingly believe you are. For those of you therefore in either of these quandaries let us explain.

William is not a man to seek the limelight. Of the three of us he is least likely to put himself at the front of anything. As he says: “Why on earth would I want to put myself in the dock to have my character impugned by people of very dubious character and my ’sanity’ questioned by people who are likely a whole lot crazier than I?”

What took him so long is simple for those of you who know anything about us. In 1994 we embarked on a project that was well under way by the time J.K. Rowling published her first book in the Harry Potter series. This project – a series of large-scale murals that we call The People’s Gallery - was not finished until July 2008. It was a mighty vision, a vital service to our community in the Bogside, a tribute and and a visual record of what we all  had lived through for over thirty years. To us nothing was more important that finishing it. I will repeat; NOTHING WAS MORE IMPORTANT TO US, not even MONEY. William is one of us, in case you didn’t know. One of the trio known as The Bogside Artists. We enjoy high esteem in the world and the global art community…. because we have earned it. Now, if you are still with us, let us cut to the chase:

The gallery expresses the experiences of a predominantly Irish Nationalist community. Their feelings towards England have never been friendly for reasons that are too easy to understand and which we need not elaborate upon here. At the core of that feeling was the firm collective conviction that justice was not to be found in England. The Birmingham Six, the Hunger Strikes and the bogus Widgery Tribunal that fully exonerated soldiers guilty of the Bloody Sunday massacre in the Bogside, to name just a few, meant simply that with regards to justice from England – forget it! And woe betide the man or woman from the Bogside who went there to find it! The Bloody Sunday Committee did just that because they had no choice and have spent years and years waiting for a result and are still waiting.

We, on the other had a choice. Given then this distrust against England’s self-serving notions of ‘justice’ on what grounds exactly was William to expect to win a case of plagiarism against J.K. Rowling in an English court assuming he would live long enough to get a verdict? And had he lost, which we took to be a virtual certainty, irrespective of what evidence he had, what would have become of our mission….our gallery? Our own reputations as credible artists and the high regard our murals are held in worldwide would have been wiped out overnight if only because we were dumb enough to seek justice in an English court against their literary champion, the flag-bearing J.K. Rowling. We chose to leave well enough alone… until we had finished our gallery.

Once our gallery was completed and inaugurated by Bishop Edward Daly and Nobel Laureate John Hume we decided immediately to publish TRAVELS WITH LI PO, at our own expense, if only to let the world know where the story came from. It is a story about an orphaned boy who doesn’t know he is a wizard heading off to a school for sorcerers in a parallel world where he is to be tutored by an old achemist in seeking the prize of immortality called The Philosopher’s Stone. Why at our own expense? Because no other publisher would have taken it on after Rowling’s version hit the shelves without being hauled into court by her for stealing  ‘her’ work. The so-called similarities are too obvious for words. Moreover, Rowling has established swift and merciless retribution as the ‘norm’ with regards to anybody infringing ‘her’ copyright. Attack, being the best form of defence and all that.

William knew well enough that once he had mapped out his plans for a series of seven books describing the adventures of his boy-hero Owen Muldoon he had created something of profound and global significance that would be a huge commercial success for anyone who took it on. He was understandably very wary of having his ideas stolen. Therefore, he sent the manuscript first to AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL where, alas, J.K. Rowling was working at the time.  She co-incidentally, an unknown writer, was working feverishly, we are to believe, on a story about an orphaned boy who doesn’t know he is a wizard heading off to a school for sorcerers in a parallel world where he is to be tutored by an old achemist in seeking the prize of immortality called The Philosopher’s Stone.

Where in fact this story really came from and the reasons for writing it in the first place are fully clarfied at ; http://www.travelswithlipo.com. 

There is a time and place for everything. The place was the conflicted grief-filled streets of the Bogside, Derry, N.Ireland. Streets, let it be said, full of men, women and children whose sense of abandonment was palapable. The place it wasn’t….. a train to London. What it was … a character and story born of a father’s experience of rearing kids in a war-torn situation, his time spent teaching and working with children, and his life as a down-at-heel political artist. What it wasn’t …..  an “idea”…. on  train to London. 

After telling him that Amnesty would not be publishing his book, a third party, who might be interested in publishing it, was suggested to him by Rowling. We must assume this was a saintly act on Rowling’s part as she was selflessly helping another to the utter detriment of her own effort and its chances of publication. The publisher wrote to say she would indeed publish his work and her husband elicited from William, an aspiring author, confidential information about the character he had created, the philosophy behind his story and two new chapters of the second volume, one entitled “The Trial” where the hero gets tried and is sent to jail for kssing the red-haired girl who is too smart for her own good and the other called “The Town of the Academics” where is situated the College for Sorcerers. The town is entirely given over to ancient books, tomes, papyri and magical alchemical texts. It’s purpose is to serve the college and nothing else. He also sent him a complete breakdown of the main character “Owen Muldoon” that you can find on the Similarities Complete link on the Li Po website. “… to my eternal regret”, says William. “I was at the end of  my tether. I believed they were publishing my book. I took a chance.” This publisher directed William to the internet where he was to find a contract form and send it off to him. Soon afterwards he received a letter from the man’s wife saying she had a “terminal illness” that he assumed to be cancer and would not be proceeding with the publication but had sent his book on to Christopher Little who “would know what to do with it.” He also received a very formal and cryptic letter from her husband telling him he was not to try to publish his work anywhere else. This woman is alive and well. She knows who she is.

Prior to our publication of Travels with Li Po in the winter of 2008 William, who knew what had happened to his book, took leave to send a letter to this ‘third party’ who, he is convinced, is very much involved in the pillaging of his work. She received his letter and immediately ran off with it  to Christopher Little whose legal hound Neil Blair replied with a swift “shut-up or else” letter to William at his home in Australia. That letter meant solely for her, let it be noted, and which has since been cited as potential grounds for defamation is reproduced below exactly as it was, word for word. 

          Frightening…. threatening ? Or just what it is, a simple and candid statement of intent with adequate furnishing for the reasons why?  Depends who you are. You decide.

 Oct 1st/2008

Dear  ……,
               I feel impelled to write to you . I sent you  the manuscript of a book I wrote for children many years ago about a boy who doesn’t know as yet that he is a sorcerer and is being trained into this realization by a bird, a magical bird, a Puffin  called Li Po. I shied away from calling my book after it’s hero Owen Muldoon and simply called it TRAVELS WITH LI PO. You wrote to tell me you would publish it. You wrote later to tell me you had cancer and would not be able to. You did send my book and the two extra chapters of Book Two to a “colleague” in London because you knew as I knew that it would be a smash hit whoever published it.

             What you may not have known at the time was that Joanna Rowling had already read my book. You have only to ask her to verify this.  I sent it to Amnesty International in 1990/91. Rowling wrote to me asking me all sorts of questions about the hero and the plot etc. Foolishly, I told her all she needed to know  just  as  I foolishly  told you and your husband. I always had fears that my book would be ripped off which is how and why it ended up on your desk to begin with, in Scotland.  English-Irish relationships were at an all-time low during those years. I trusted you after you told me you would publish it.  I had no reason not to.

              “Travels With Li Po”, that, I am certain, became transmogrified into ‘Harry Potter’, was born out of the abysmal sufferings of my community in Derry in the North of Ireland during The Troubles.  Now  I know , better than most, that it is a big  wicked world etc, etc, and no mercy is shown to anyone who naively trusts strangers and “to the victor belongs the spoils “and all the rest  of  that vile nonsense. My book was ripped off by people who think like that. Harry Potter is a crime against The Holy Spirit, to put it bluntly. Compared to my original, it is exploitative rubbish.

              I am writing to tell you that my book will be published soon by myself and the whole saga of this will be in the preface.  Now, I am telling it like it is; unless you, your husband or Rowling, have a good reason why I should not.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

    Regards, William Kelly.