Legacy Interview with Sheila Clark
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Legacy Interview with Sheila Clark |
| Interviewer: | Legacy |
| Interviewee: | Fiona James |
| Date(s): | 2007 |
| Medium: | print, CD |
| Fandom(s): | Star Trek TOS, slash, fan clubs, newsletters |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
In 2007, Sheila Clark was interviewed for the zine Legacy and the article The Legacy of K/S in Letterzines: British Letterzines: STAG, IDIC, and Communicator.
The subject of this interview was her life in fandom. A related interview is Legacy Interview with Fiona James, one in which she discusses her life in fandom.
Some Excerpts
What we did was run a fan club for Trek. We ran two separate ones over a period of around twenty years. We took over STAG (Star Trek Action Group) in 1975 from Jenny and Terry E., who started it some two years earlier (Jenny’s health wasn’t good) and ran it for some seven or eight years until we handed it on to one of our committee—we were burned out. About six years later, we started IDIC and ran it for about six years, by which time Trek fandom was moving in a direction we didn’t like; we were predominately TOS fans, and a lot of fans were moving over to DS9 and Voyager. We looked for member participation a lot; we carried news, reviews, articles, zine ads, and a major part of IDIC, in particular, was the “letter column.”
When was the first issue of STAG published? As I say, I don’t exactly know when the first issue came out. I do have a copy of it, but there’s no actual publication date on it. The second one had on it “June/July,” so extrapolating backwards, the first was probably put out in April 1973. The first one we put out was October 1975.
How many subscribers did it have? We started with about four hundred, and ended up with over a thousand, world-wide. We’d members in America, Canada, Australasia, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Israel, Turkey and probably one or two other countries too.
At what point did K/S come into the discussions? Latterly, we advertised K/S zines but because we considered ourselves to be a family newsletter—one or two of our members were, we knew, under fifteen, and a fair number more were under eighteen—we never made a big thing of K/S. Additionally, most of our newsletters were put out before K/S zines really began to appear. K/S was being written, certainly, but was still mostly pretty well underground.
What decided you to end publication?There were several reasons, but it was mainly because after devoting pretty well all our free time to fandom from 1975 until 1981, we were pretty burned out. Maintaining a two-monthly schedule for the newsletters became a chore; we were still working with stencils, and a lot of repetitive material (zine and con information, for example) had to go in every time but didn’t change much from newsletter to newsletter; but there were enough changes that the stencils had to be cut new every time. Pretty well as soon as one N/L was posted, we had to begin work on the next.
We carried on putting out zines, however, using the name ScoTpress, because there wasn’t the same pressure to put those out to a regular schedule.
Were there any intense discussions or major controversies at the time? I don’t remember that anything really controversial came up. Discussions tended to remain very polite—well, with two months between each comment, people had time to consider their responses even to something they felt strongly about.
At what point did K/S come into the discussions? Again, although we advertised K/S zines, it was a subject we tended to avoid. Part of the reason was that several copies of the newsletter went to the various actors—we had a lot of them as honorary members (whether or not they actually read the N/L)—and we were trying to be as discreet as possible about slash. Part of it was, again, that we had a number of under-age members. Part of it was that although she isn’t homophobic (hey, she watched and enjoyed Queer as Folk) one of our committee, having read some, rejected K/S as denigrating friendship; she felt that Kirk and Spock had a friendship that didn’t need sex to take it any closer, that slash was saying you can’t be close friends unless you’re also lovers.
What decided you to end publication?After Gene’s death, with Rick Berman taking over completely, we felt that Trek was heading in a direction we didn’t like. We also felt that many of the newer fans were fans of DS9 and possibly Voyager, and that at least some of them were almost anti-TOS, if only because of the difference (aka greater sophistication) in production values, special effects, etc. Fandom also seemed to be changing, with more and more of the new fans just wanting to sit and be entertained, rather than participating in any way. This was showing in a drop in membership—it seemed that for new fans, discussion wasn’t important; they just wanted to watch episodes, preferably uncritically. (The Glasgow Away Team, a very large local group, eventually folded for much the same reason—latterly, almost of the people going to the meetings wanted to do was sit and watch episodes, where originally talking about and discussing episodes formed a big part of the monthly meetings. Once UK TV had caught up with what was being shown in America and there were no new episodes to be seen at the Away Team meetings, people stopped going.)
In addition, although because we used computers and a professional printer rather than stencils and a second-hand duplicating machine it was much easier to put out than STAG had been, after six years we again felt stale, and decided to go out while we were still putting out a newsletter we could be proud of.