Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Eileen Roy

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Eileen Roy
Interviewer:	Megan Genovese
Interviewee:	Eileen Roy
Date(s):	August 5, 2017
Medium:	audio recording
Fandom(s):
External Links:	interview and transcript
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

In 2017, Eileen Roy was interviewed by Megan Genovese as part of the Media Fandom Oral History Project.

Length: 1:12:43. A written transcript is available.

For more information about the origins of this interview, where it is housed, contact information, suggestions regarding future interviewee candidates, and how to become volunteer interviewer, see the Media Fandom Oral History Project page.

Some Topics Discussed

• Star Trek: TOS as her introduction to fandom
• Jacqueline Lichtenberg was who encouraged Roy to write fanfic
• Roy's comments on Kraith, Lichtenberg's shared universe
• "Bone's Vision" is a fic Roy remembers as her first published fanwork (it appears in Kraith Collected #6) (however, Kirk's Challenge by Roy precedes this fic)
• the effect of Star Wars on fandom, the schisms regarding The Church of Ford
• Roy's views on slash, the emotionalism embedded in the topic
• the Star Trek movies on the big screen, which Roy regards as an alternate universe and not really canon
• the pace of fandom today: immediate feedback and communication as opposed to the long waits for phone calls and letters in the mail
• working with Paula Smith
• comments on Mary Sues
• Brent Spiner's (Data) comments that he needed to be paid to be at a convention as it was a performance, Carrie Fisher's comments that being a guest at a convention was like giving a lap dance
• fandom today, it's pervasiveness in popular culture
• "I don’t think I have anything to be really proud of [in fandom]. Proud is you’re doing something good, something hard when all forces are arrayed against you. Fandom was just a party. I’m glad that I didn’t get drunk and silly and step in the clam dip. That’s about it."

Excerpts

Well, obviously, by first watching Star Trek, which was the gateway drug for me, as for so many others. And it’s funny because I did not watch the first few episodes. I was in middle school, I think, at the time, because I was convinced that it was cheesy. I was only into “real science fiction,” and this was some type of space opera that was—they obviously didn’t have it right. And then I accidentally caught an episode early in the first season, where Kirk was leaving the gym or something, and unlocked his locker by using his thumb print, and I thought that was so cool because it was something that was just little, but real, a real in the future. And the funny thing was, is, that it was such an inconsequential scene that they cut it directly after the first airing, and I’ve never seen it again! (laughs)

[...]

Well, it took approximately two seconds of screen time so it was obviously an easy cut. And I watched it ever since. I wrote letters when it was canceled, got all the books that were published. The James Blish books—oh, I loved those! And, I went to the conventions where I found fanzines. Fanzines. Oh my. They were wonderful.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg had a very, very strong Kirk/Spock relationship going on, which was very interesting and very well-done, but I said, “Hey! I think that Spock and McCoy also have a very interesting relationship, and I wrote to her to say that, and she said, “Well, write it.” So I did. I think that was my first fiction. Well, probably not fiction; I’d been writing small pieces for myself or for school assignments, but my first piece of fan fiction that actually got published. Let’s put it that way.

[...]

Yeah, yeah. It’s basically all her fault [that I started writing fanfic].

[I was interested in Kraith because] it was the fact that she was doing a lot with telepathy and mind melds and with the technology of working with your mind in ways that no other science fiction expanding them into new and interesting dimensions. She was also working with politics, with politics of inclusion, politics of exclusion, of opening it up into a wider world, a more realistic world in many ways. In many ways, I could compare her to Marion Zimmer Bradley, with Darkover, in that she was using magic made into science, and she was using the real world extrapolated into the future. And she was using our people, that we knew and that we loved, being extraordinarily necessary to resolving the conflicts. So, it was catnip. I just loved it.

I didn’t meet [Lichtenberg] in person until many years later at a convention, and then only briefly. We mainly communicated through letters at that time. There was no internet, of course, and I’m not much good on the phone, so I apologize, by the way, in advance for that. So, everything was done by letter, and it’s a different world, which I’m sure people who are interested in fandom today wouldn’t realize, but we waited for the daily post because there was a new story coming in or a new fanzine or a new letter of critique, or it was a communication to the wider world, and everyday was Christmas when there was a letter delivered. It’s not the same with the internet, even though it is obviously much better for immediacy.

[Writing in the Kraith fandom?] Oh! It was lovely. Basically, [Lichtenberg] said, “Read the stories that have come up to there, and don’t — see if you can make sure not to contradict anything that’s come before,” and after that, you know, it was up to you. You could do anything. There were people who did very strange things. I remember there was one, at least one, nun who wrote some Kraith Kirk-and-Spock stories, and it was a little different. (laughs) But there were — when Kraith was active and bubbling and fermenting, there were a number of people working on various tangents, and the universe was big enough to basically contain all of it. I seem to recall that Jackie read all of it and had editorial sway, but I don’t recall it as ever having been onerous in any way. Mainly suggestions and “what if you take this in that direction.”

[...]

A lot of my fan writing is informed by Kraith. I think of it as being in the background, but I didn’t keep up with it after a while, and I didn’t want to go against canon, and I think Jackie moved on to Sime~Gen, which is another universe on its own, very nice. Kraith sort of receded in importance and became more quiescent.

I don’t recall [Lichtenberg's] reaction [to the parody, Krait-Spock Anthropods] one way or the other, but she was very involved in everything that went on in Kraith, so I can’t imagine that she wasn’t aware of it and we probably passed it by her first. I can’t say for sure because I frankly don’t remember, but was the kind of thing that I think she would have probably enjoyed.

[Yes, she had a sense of humor about it, about Kraith.]

[...]

Kraith kind of spun off more into alternate universes without Jackie to make sure there was a canonical true path. No one wanted to encroach upon that so it became more and more curlicued and rococo. (laughs)

The East Lansing conventions were some of my favorite memories. They had people I knew, fan people — the people who wrote stories, people who drew pictures, people who were gods in fandom, as far as I was concerned, and it was wonderful to be able to meet them and to put faces to the names and to actually babble in their faces, how much I enjoyed their work. I think that’s where I met Leslie Lilker for the first time.

[What grabbed me about slash]? Well, let’s see. I was about 20—early 20’s this time—so I was fairly young. I enjoyed romance, and I knew homosexuality existed, but had not had any direct contact with it or thought about it. It was a matter of my two favorite people in the world, Kirk and Spock, had been able to find happiness with each other, and it was—it was just “ohhhh that’s so nice!” It was so well written. Oh my goodness. It was just very—ended—narrated through McCoy’s point of view, which I loved, because he was always my viewpoint character in Trek.

(laughs) It was kind of hard to not know about [slash]. It was in your face. It was everywhere. People shrieking and writing, and all of them “This is disgusting! This is awful! How could you do this perversion, this thing, to our heroes?!” And it’s like, “Eh, screw it. It feels good. Let’s do it.” (laughs) there was not much of a rational basis for either the slash movement or the anti-slash movement. It was basically whether you were into it or whether you weren’t, and it was — which has basically become my rationale for human sexuality in general, you know? You’re into it or you’re not? As long a nobody gets hurt? Ehh

[The Star Trek motion pictures are] okay. The first one is fairly forgettable. The second, third, and fourth are okay. I don’t really consider them part of canon. All the bit about Kirk’s son just strikes me as an alternate universe. And of course, the newer ones, the retread that has just come out? I have seen the first one, and I thought it was a wasted opportunity. It was just explosions and no thought. There was no intelligence there.

[How did Star Wars change fandom?] Well, I remember an early convention where several fans announced that others had joined “The Church of Ford,” and I worshiped and could no longer be relied on for anything except for worshiping at the feet of Harrison Ford. That always felt to me to be the perfectly reasonable position to take, so (laughs)…I found no reasons in the years since then to change that position. In fact, actually, one of the fandom stories I’m writing now is based on his character in The Fugitive. I just realized that. It’s funny.... as far as I was aware, when Star Wars came in, fandom expanded sideways. We had more people added on instead of substituting. People always go in and out of fandom. That’s normal, but it wasn’t a matter of a schism; it was a matter of an expansion from my point of view.

Oh [writing with Paula Smith as the collaboration "Roy Smith"] was just us bouncing ideas off of each other. She is so ferociously intelligent, and she is another person who has ideas bubbling up all the time, and we would say, “Oh wouldn’t it be funny if this happened and then this happened and then this happened, and so we ended up writing it several times over. Those were fun stories.

[...]

In some ways, writing with a partner is more productive because there’s always someone waiting for the next installment or the next go through, and I personally find editing much easier to do than writing the first time, so I can do the editing part of it fairly quickly, especially when I don’t have to write the first part of it, but on the other hand, there’s that pressure because you have somebody else whose vision you want to see succeed, and who is waiting for the next installment from you. So, it’s got good parts and bad parts. I wouldn’t even say bad parts. I’d just say it’s got easier parts and harder parts.

The filk by Paula Smith that Eileen Roy references. It was printed in Menagerie #17 in 1981

I think I first read about [Paula Smith's use of Mary Sue] in the filk song, the Mary Sue filk song, which is hilarious, and I recognized it, and I said, “Wow, this is great! I’ve got to write one of these!” (laughs) It always was used as a pejorative in fandom, pretty much, and I never felt it you make yourself the Queen of the Universe and everything rains down rainbows — that’s doesn’t make for a good story. But on the other hand, if a story doesn’t have a viewpoint character, some way that you can insert yourself into the story and feel what’s happening, then, to me, it isn’t a very good story to begin with. So it was always a kind of affectionate term for me.

[...]

I just recognized it as being — it wasn’t the worst thing, having a Mary Sue character, and, in fact, some of my favorite science fiction stories are Mary Sues, but Mary Sues in which everything awful happens to the main character instead of everything good.

Fandom in the pre-millennium was not the same as today’s social media blitz. You didn’t get automatic likes every time you posted something. You were lucky if you got any responses to a story or a piece of writing or anything. It was a matter of you published a 200-copy fanzine, which was fairly standard, as far as I know. You might get two or three letters of comment back. It was normal. It takes a lot of work to read it, digest it, write something in response, and send it off in a letter as opposed to, on Facebook, you press an emoji. Now there are some advantages to that because if you’re going to write it down in a letter and sign your name to it, you actually have to care deeply about what you’re saying and think about it, hopefully, but we existed in what today would be felt the be a vacuum of response, or possibly, that’s just me. I wasn’t -- except for the conventions which I went to maybe once every two or three years, I didn’t meet a lot of fans. There weren’t a lot of local fans that I knew. It was me and the typewriter, and it was a typewriter, with White-Out and carbon paper. I don’t know how old you are, and I don’t know if you remember carbon paper. It was an invention of the devil.

I did some work in Starsky & Hutch, and it was very enjoyable. Connie Faddis did some marvelous work in Starsky & Hutch and drew me into that quite a bit, and Bodie and Doyle. Bodie and Doyle was such an enormous fandom. It basically drew in almost everyone I knew. I did some work in that but not a lot. I think I did a Starsky & Hutch/Bodie and Doyle crossover, but that was just for fun. Let’s see. What else? No large fandoms since that time. I stayed mainly in Man From U.N.C.L.E. and ventured out occasionally.

I did hear about when the actor who played Data in Next Gen said that he needed to be paid for an appearance at a convention because it was a performance, and he is a professional actor and needed to be paid for performances, and I’m going, “Hmph, interesting.” But his character, obviously, requires a lot of makeup, and he can’t just appear as himself, although he could and people would enjoy and ask for signatures anyway.

I just saw Carrie Fisher’s documentary Bright Lights which has a brief segment with her appearing at conventions, and she says it’s basically like giving a lap dance for money, and I’m going, “Well, that’s definitely a way to look at it, for an actor.”

Fandom is largely middle class and white because this is a hobby. Very few people make their living from it. In fact, I will make a wild, unsubstantiated statement and say “Nobody makes their living from fandom besides a few vendors,” and unless you have enough money and enough social status and you can have a comfortable life and a few leftover pieces of energy, you can’t have hobbies. So, it’s — yes, people do get very involved and incensed and entangled with their hobbies, but this is not real life. This is for fun. When it comes to pistols at dawn, then you’ve taken it too far.

I don’t know a lot about fandom today. I’m not very social and involved. I just basically got on Facebook last year, but it seems to me to be, from the little I’ve heard, to be very vibrant, very active, tentacling into dozens and dozens of different universes, and publishing in all kinds of different ways, both E-books, online, traditional publishing. It seems to me that, from what I’ve heard, what little I’ve heard, that fandom hasn’t schismed; it has expanded again.

Just couple of weeks ago, saw a new story about an actress who was on Broadway on Fiddler on the Roof, playing one of the daughters and she was so enraptured by her character, caught up by her character, that when the Broadway run ended, she wrote a book, a fan book, about what happened to her character’s life after the end of the play, when she had to follow her husband to the Siberian labor camp, and I’m thinking, “Wow! Fandom’s everywhere!”

I’m not sure that we were — I’m not sure that the characters in the universes were as much a part of the social media as a shared social experience in the past. Novels are a really young art form. I’ve read the first novel Pamela, which was published in the 1800’s. I mean, we’re talking less than 300 years. So the fact that characters have to have a life outside of their originator’s imagination — I mean, that came as a severe shock to Conan Doyle when he wanted to get rid of Sherlock Holmes and the fans wouldn’t let him. It is a new phenomenon, I’m pretty sure. The fact that somebody can create a character, a universe, a setting, and other people can glom onto it and say, “Yes, we want to play there now. You have entered our imagination; therefore, this is part of us, and we will not give up ownership of our little piece of it.” With social media and electronics, it’s just become more so. We’re wading in the vast sea of archetypes.

I don’t think I have anything to be really proud of [in fandom]. Proud is you’re doing something good, something hard when all forces are arrayed against you. Fandom was just a party. I’m glad that I didn’t get drunk and silly and step in the clam dip. That’s about it.

MG: What advice would you have for a new fan today?

ER: Umm, keep your ears open, your eyes open, and your mouth shut. At least at first.

MG: And don’t step in the clam dip.

ER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unless you really want to because hey, life is too short. Fandom is weird. Experience all of it that you want to, all of it that you can.