Jenna Sinclair

Fan
Name:	Jenna Sinclair
Alias(es):	Jenna Hilary Sinclair
Type:	Fanwriter, zine publisher, convention organizer
Fandoms:	Star Trek: TOS,
Communities:
Other:	Beyond Dreams Press
URL:	archived link to the Beyond Dreams Press site, K/S archive under Jenna Sinclair, K/S archive under Jenna Hilary Sinclair
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Jenna Sinclair has been a Star Trek: TOS fan since the 1970s and a K/S writer since the 1990s. She also publishes K/S zines and the letterzine/newsletter The K/S Press as Beyond Dreams Press. She is Co-Moderator of the KirkSpockCentral mailing list. She also organized KiScon.

Jenna is also very active in preserving and recording the history of K/S fandom. She researched and wrote A Short History of Early K/S or How the First Slash Fandom Came to Be.

Her Words: From Scribbling Women: Editors Talk Back

What made you decide to print artwork given that it is expensive and difficult to reproduce?: “I was intensely grateful to the artists who were giving me a look at what had only been going on inside my head before then. I mean, actually seeing Kirk and Spock together in a K/S type of pose, and not just having to rely on my imagination for the images.... I cannot convey how excited I was. When D’Anne and I decided to publish a zine, there was never any question in my mind that we would publish the most explicit art, and that I was going to actively seek that out. Other than that, we just wanted plenty of art in our zines, as I consider artwork an integral part of the K/S world. I wanted prose, poetry, and art, all together, of the highest calibre.”

How do you find artists? Have you chased artists you like or just waited for the submissions to come rolling in?!: “We haven’t had any problems with not having art yet! I do ask artists to draw something sometimes. For example, I did invite the five artists who worked on the novel In the Shade to illustrate the story, and we often will ask an artist to create a cover for us.”

How far do you try to match the fictional content with the artistic? Do you try to illustrate the stories you print, or let art stand alone as a separate treat?: Jenna writes that the final job in creating her zines is matching the art that she’s got in hand to the stories she is going to print. She writes that “ since we do not generally commission artists, I’m always amazed that it turns out as well as it does. I don’t demand that a piece of art exactly fits a scene in a story; often, the tone of the piece matches, and that’s good enough for me. I’ve always been happy with the match-ups we’ve achieved.”

Given that women are often said to be less visually aroused than men, do you think that the images you print add to the erotic content of the zine, or do you think they provide something more subtle?: “Oh, something more subtle. I doubt that too many of the images we print arouse anybody. But it’s actually seeing the images we paint in our minds that is so pleasing. Seeing Kirk and Spock naked. Seeing them embracing. Seeing them, what the heck, in bed together. That’s adding another, substantial layer of reality to what we’re reading about, and I think the artists’ contribution towards making K/S such an enduring fandom is huge.”

How do you feel about the visual impact of the zines you produced?: “The ‘look’ of the zine is extremely important to us. Extremely. We want something attractive to look at, attractive to read, something that just looking at it suggests something worthwhile. We want a clean, clear, organized appearance to all the Beyond Dreams Press zines. Excellent reproduction of art, as a consequence, is also very, very important to us. It is sometimes frustrating when I can’t get a piece to turn out as well as I want it to, but each time we put a piece in a zine, then the reader can rest assured that we’ve done our best.”

Works

• Sharing the Sunlight series
• so many others!