Featured Fen -- Twofen:Trufen: Debbie Goldstein and Carol Lynn

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Interviews by Fans
Title: Featured Fen -- Twofen:Trufen: Debbie Goldstein and Carol Lynn
Interviewer: boojums Press
Interviewee: Debbie Goldstein and Carol Lynn
Date(s): March 1976
Medium: print
Fandom(s): Star Trek
External Links:
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Featured Fen -- Twofen:Trufen: Debbie Goldstein and Carol Lynn is an bio/interview with Debbie Goldstein and Carol Lynn, two BNF Star Trek fans.

first page of interview

It was published in Menagerie #9

Also See

Excerpt by Debbie

So in 1970 I swindled my way into the last Clarion and did nothing there except waste the instructor's time. In 1972, along came the first New York International Star Trek Convention. I had met Carol Lynn at a travel-arrangement party the winter before the con, and had sat up the whole night reading Kraith II and III (they didn't have Kraith I, you see) out of old T-NEGATIVES. I took home about ten pounds of trekzines, and stayed up till 8 am reading. I was Hooked.

There was also the second NYCon, where I gofered for the first time, and entered (winning three runner's up prizes) my first costume ball; Carol and I were the empresses of the Klingon empire, having deposed and disposed of our brother.

Paula Smith tells me there was a party at which I first met her, but it feels like there never was a time I didn't know her and Sharon Ferraro. Jacqueline Lichtenberg's Kraith magazine started somewhere, but that too has been something that has always been there — when you live with something and know it intimately, if it somehow just happened without being planned, then it's always been there.

Carol and I started doing Kraith Collected when it became obvious that Margaret and Laura Basta, who had first volunteered, didn't have the time and really didn't want to do it. We told Jacqueline that we'd do it, if for no other reason than it would give us a chance to read all the new Kraith stories before they were published. I got into it by offering to help type — Carol is one-finger slow, but accurate, and I touch type about 45-50, with a minimum of three errors a line. Our first issue had a print tun of 250 and we thought it would never sell out. We also thought it would take only 4 or 5 issues to do all of Kraith, but we were naive in those days. Kraith has been growing too fast to keep up with (our print run for #5 will be at least 1000), and we've gradually acquiring the stuff and junk that any small home business has; file drawers, storage cabinets, stamps (in the hundreds of dollars), rubber stamps for envelopes, manila envelopes, and back issues of Kraith stacked in cabinets, on chairs, in boxes and loose, and in the backs of our cars for weeks on end, when there's no other place for them.

We used to try to make all the nearby cons, taking as many issues of Kraith as we could carry, but now it's the other way around—don't call us, we WON'T call you.

Excerpts by Carol

I was seventeen before I ran across Have Space Suit Will Travel again and realized that it was by Heinlein. In the intervening years I'd read all the s-f I could get my hands on, written TV scripts (none for sale), foisted s-f books off on credulous friends, hawked Save Star Trek petitions in school corridors, and wrote threatening letters to NBC. (I know, I know, but I had never heard of Bjo then, much less her rules for conducting a write-in campaign.) My parent and teachers were certain it was a phase I'd grow out of because momentous things were happening. High school and Star Trek ended at the same time. I faced college and the future assured that from now on things would be different.

They were. I had a lot more free time to read s-f in and Star Trek was on seven days a week. I also met for the first time people who were as enthusiastic about s-f as I was.

The second quarter of my freshman year at Wayne State University I took a speech class. My partner for the introduction speech decided to make me out as a nut case; after all, I still watched Star Trek reruns. Immediately after class I was accosted and thrown up against the wall by a short, brown-haired girl who demanded, "Have you read SPOCKANALIA?" "Spock-a-what?" "I'll bring it tomorrow." The next day Margaret Basta dropped two SPOCKANALIAs, one WARP NINE, the incomplete librettos for La Tribbiata and Lord of the Tribbles, and some ST Enterprises scripts in my lap. Fandom had found me.

Margaret, and Laura too of course, were in a local s-f club, the Wayne Third Foundation. Within three months I had been elected secretary and was helping with the club fanzine that came out every two weeks. That summer I started going to conventions: Fan Fair II in Toronto (Asimov, up close!), Noreascon in Boston (Worldcon!), and then the first New York Star Trek convention where my costume ended up in TV Guide. (I was the vampire cloud and won most beautiful, in case you're curious.)

On returning to Detroit we found that a George Christman from Ann Arbor had formed an organization called the Star Trek Association for Revival, but he had never heard of fandom. When George was unable to continue S.T.A.R., we gladly took it off his hands, and I became a S.T.A.R. vice president.

Unfortunately the Basta sisters were now so busy that they didn't have time to take on another project, one that had become near and dear to my heart, the collecting of the Kraith stories into one volume. Until now I'd been helping with Seldon's Plan and Babel, but I had never considered one of my own. With the help and encouragement of Debbie Goldstein, whom I had met just before the New York con, I published Kraith Collected Volume One in November, 1972.

Between then and now I've run conventions, helped at conventions, met hundreds of nice people, and my mother has ceased expecting me to grow out of s-f. When she sees me toting 13 boxes of magazines into the basement, or resignedly sets up a card table to eat an because the dining table is covered with half-answered mail, she only sighs. To which I can only reply, "FIAWOL!"

References

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