Fandom is not an isolation chamber. It is created and built in places like convention halls, online communities, mailing lists, social media groups, theaters, and bookshops. Fandom is created when people dress up for the Harry Potter book release, when fanartists create genderbent or racebent versions of their favorite characters, when fic writers post a […]
Fanfic is, at heart, a derivative retelling or restoration of a story that has already been published and distributed. It can be a personal experience, and fic can be private and unshared, relegated to static pieces on a desktop, or it can be posted in a space where the fandom at large can read and […]
If we’re fans of Harry Potter, we remember the names of the spells and curses: avada kedavra, alohomora, lumos. Fans of Lord of the Rings, go to painstaking lengths to name the Dunedain as the descendants of the Numenorians, and to keep track of all of all of Aragorn’s names. It’s what we do. In […]
Have you heard of the Black Warrior Review? Published out of the University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, a journal associated with an MFA program is not really the place you’d think to look for speculative fiction. But the BWR stakes a claim in the bizarre. On their website, the editors say: We seek risk-taking prose that […]
A now former coworker introduced me to Harry Potter in 2002. Four books were published in the series at the time; I spent the next 5 years eagerly waiting for each new book to release. I was in my early 20s and never questioned if I was “too” old to enjoy the series. Friends ten […]
I’m a big Rainbow Rowell fan and it’s lovely to see her writing in the fantasy genre so she can join the ranks of the speculative fiction aficionados among us. Her latest book, Carry On, is particularly interesting because it’s based on the novel-within-a-novel from her highly successful Fangirl. For anyone who has been living […]
