Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Joan Marie Verba

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Joan Marie Verba
Interviewer:	Megan Genovese
Interviewee:	Joan Marie Verba
Date(s):	August 15-16, 2017
Medium:	aural, transcript
Fandom(s):
External Links:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

In 2017, Joan Marie Verba was interviewed by Megan Genovese as part of the Media Fandom Oral History Project.

Interview length: 3.20.08.

The Media Fandom Oral History Project is supported by the Organization for Transformative Works, the organizers of Escapade conventions, and the University of Iowa Libraries. 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 or transcriber, see the Media Fandom Oral History Project page.

Some Topics Discussed

• Ruth Berman, whom she met in 1969, was her first fannish contact
• collating T-Negative at Berman's house
• the Detroit Triple Fan Fair in 1972 was Verba's first Star Trek con
• being involved with the Star Trek Welcommittee, answering mail
• Shirley Maiewski felt the internet was a "very evil place" where "horrible things happened to people online," which was part of the decision to let the STW lapse after information became available online; Maiewski didn't want to make that jump; another reason was the STW's info had become too slow and redundant with the advent of online fandom
• much description of Boldly Writing, see that page
• some discussion of mimeo and offset zine productions and preferences
• APAs mentioned: MinneAPA, SippleAPA, CAPRA
• buying patterns from Lincoln Enterprises to make costumes
• running the fan club for Siddig El Fadil, later Alexander Siddig
• running BlooMN'Con, see that page
• Verba rated the Treks according to quality: "I would rank Deep Space Nine first, Next Generation second, Star Trek: The Original Series third, and the animations, Voyager fourth, and Enterprise fifth."
• correspondence and connections to Henry Jenkins during the writing of Textual Poachers
• tensions between Trek fans/fandom and literary science fiction fans/fandom
• the scandal of Trek fanfiction being nominated for a Hugo
• about "media tie-in" writing
• Verba's Thunderbird's media tie-in writing
• the rise of labels and warnings
• the beginning of published explicit fanfiction and art
• the The SekWester*Con Porn Debate
• the Kelvin Timeline and the new Trek movies
• Marion Zimmer Bradley's crimes and how they affected fandom, and Verba, in uncomfortable and disappointing ways
• donating her fan collection to the University of Iowa Special Collections

Excerpts

...there was a Star Trek panel which Peter David was the moderator of... and I was sitting in the audience and he says "Well, no one really liked the Star Trek movie," and I'm sitting in the audience, and I raised my hand, and I said "I did! I did! I did!" He says "Well," (Verba laughs) "Since you're the only one who admits to liking it, you need to be on this panel!" And I said fine and I walked up and I got on the panel....the first thing I said was "I watched the Star Trek: The Motion Picture and I loved it!" And... Peter David ...acted startled about that. And then the discussion went on. ...

In Interstat, they asked people to write in how many times they'd seen the movie, and I think I watched it twenty-six times in the theater, so I wrote in. There was a long list of fans who had seen it over twenty times in the theaters. Because the word was out that this Star Trek movie, good, bad or indifferent... you have to go see it, you have to support it. If this does not make a bundle of money, they will never make another Star Trek movie. So, regardless of what you think of it... So, we got the message. And we went out there. And we supported the movie, whether we liked it or not (laughs).

My opinion of the Star Trek novels at that time, I was not very happy with them. In fact, Lisa, and I forget her last name, put out a ... regularly scheduled newsletter reviewing the novels... the reviews were almost entirely negative.... First of all, it was my opinion now, and my opinion then that, the publishers the Star Trek tie-in novels would have been better off scouting the fanzines for the best writers and asking them to write the Star Trek novels. Now, some of the fans did graduate to writing tie-in novels. Those novels weren't well received and therefore the publishers apparently thought that, you know, this is typical of the fans. But there were fan writers who were capable of writing some really good Star Trek novels.

[...]

Now I found out a couple of years ago, that the Doctor Who people, and this is in the twenty-first century, way after this, but I think they did the right thing. They did scout fan writers and asked the best of them to contribute professionally. Paul Cornell told me this. And I think that that was a good idea and that's what [the Star Trek people] should have done. But instead what they did, they got science-fiction writers like James Blish, for Star Trek tie-ins. And he was just working from rough scripts. I don't think, if I recall correctly, he had never even seen the show.

And then, so there wasn't a really good quality of the Star Trek novels in that ten-year period. Star Trek novels, tie-ins, in my opinion, got to be good in the 90's and afterwards, when what happened was that there were a sufficient number of established science-fiction writers who had seen and loved Star Trek, who were being asked to write the novels. Peter David, for instance, you know, participating in fan activity in those ten years. And he was writing some of the better tie-in novels.... He got even better as time went on. So, fans such as Peter David, established science-fiction writers now, generally have seen Star Trek and there are enough of them who have seen and loved Star Trek who can put the characters, who can write the characters accurately.

Yes, yes, I read, read "The New Voyages." I think I was a good idea for them to authorize a fan collection of the best fanzine stories. And some of the fanzine stories were very good and were printed in that, and that's a good thing. The next volume, I think they had more original stories rather than reprinted, if I recall correctly, but they didn't do another. I think the sales were below expectations of the publisher, I think that was it. A couple of people tried. I said "Good for her." And I wish it would have gone. But, it just... didn't. Much later they published anthologies and they made it a contest. A story writing contest where people would write in. Well, that was fine, except that one of the eligibilities of the contest was that you have have no professional creds. And the best of the fanzine writers, by that time, had professional creds. I had a professional credit by that time, so that locked me and many other fanzine writers out from those anthologies...

The art show was always spectacular at SeKWester*Con, and I have some art which I still have pieces of that I bought at SeKWester*Con, here in my home. What happened was that some of the artists started, drawing nudes. And... some of the nudes were in provocative positions. And, Mary Lou Dodge, a rather conservative fan and couple of other people took umbrage to that. [They] weren't extremely happy and called it pornography. Said they they came to conventions to enjoy themselves, not to have... I think, I think, uh, Mary Lou Dodge's exact phrase was "I don't want pornography shoved down my throat." So, for a few years after that, I don't know how long this lasted the x-rated art was put behind a, uh, was put in a special section behind a barrier, so that you didn't, if you didn't want to see it, you didn't have to. So, yeah, that was ... the issue about the art show.

Oh, my opinion then as now is art is art. ... Some people draw nudes.... Some people draw people clothed... some people, you know, draw pictures of people in the midst of sexual foreplay. Um, and, you know, that's, that's art. I mean, that's the way art has been since probably the beginning of time.

Almost all of the fan fiction in any genre is now published online, like in fanfiction.net. That’s a very large fan fiction archive. But once the internet came into being, and once writers were able to archive fan stories on the internet, the activity pretty much moved to the internet, and I just did not make that transition. I’ve read maybe one or two fan stories online, but not really [any more]... Other people like it, and other people enjoy it, and that’s wonderful. I’m glad they enjoy it, glad that it’s continuing, but I’m just, you know — I guess I’m just old-fashioned in the way that I prefer the printed page for fan fiction. And, after Deep Space Nine, there aren’t a lot of fanzines available in print anyway, so it sort of, well, it sort of leveled off.

...when Discovery comes out, I presume that almost all, if not all, activity, that will be online, and that’s perfectly fine because that’s the way, times change. Things change. We’re in the 21st century, and... the 21st century technology is awesome. I think that the internet is fantastic. It was such a struggle to stay in communication before the internet, and it was expensive to stay in communication before the internet. I mean, I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on fanzines, and you can get onto fanfiction.net for free. I mean, if you have a free internet connection and a low-priced computer, you can get on fanfiction.net and go for it, and I think that’s wonderful. It was expensive to keep in communication before the internet, was just such hard work...

Yeah, occasionally you’d get somebody who said, “All the fan stories are sexually explicit,” and that was never the case. It has never been the case. It may be because stories with explicit sex of any kind, is just so dramatic that it leaves an impression on people? It’s like the people that said all fan stories are junk. Well, they weren’t all junk, and the people who said all fanzines stories are explicit, well, they weren’t all explicit. It was generally a mixture...

[...]

The explicit sex has such an impact on people’s minds that once they see it, they think it’s all that way, or something like that... I mean, people who want explicit sex, post explicit sex, read explicit sex, then that’s their thing. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people publishing stories that are for a general audience. There’s still a lot of that going on, but it just seems that the impression is just that, well, that they see a little bit of it, and they think it’s all that way.

I mean, that kind of mistake is made, you know, for all sorts of topics everywhere around the world. They see a little bit of something, and they think everything is like that.

[Fanfiction is] just like any other kind of writing. Some was good. Some was bad. Some was indifferent, and I read it. The bulk of my fanzine collection, however, was was the stuff that didn’t have explicit sex because I have a preference for just your traditional action adventure story where people get into adventures.

[...]

In second grade, my teacher put up a bulletin board of the solar system, and I have been an astronomy enthusiast ever since. And because of my enthusiasm for astronomy, I got interested in science fiction. [...] What I liked about Star Trek was that they were going to other worlds, that they were doing stuff in space, that they were meeting people from other worlds and other cultures, that they were making friends with other people from other cultures. That’s what I concentrated on, on Star Trek , and that’s the kind of story that I had preference for, and that’s the kind of story that I bought.

Now other people, especially you know, what TV would allow on the screen is more flexible now than it used to be, especially back when there was Star Trek, and then the Treks that followed that. So, especially in the more recent Star Treks, like Deep Space Nine and Next Generation, and farther on from that, they did get some into exploration about sexuality and sexual identity and things like that, and, and of course there were people who were watching these shows for these aspects of the show, and they wrote fan fiction about that. That’s perfectly natural, that if they’re watching it for that, they’re going to write fan fiction about that. That’s fine. And, and I said, I’ve read some stories about that, but that’s not my main interest. My main interest is going to other worlds; going out into space, discovering things about science; discovering things about other planets.

Marion was very involved with the fandom and in the science fiction conventions. At the World Science Fiction conventions, if she was there, there would be a Darkover room party, and we would be invited, and she would tell us about her latest work and what she was working on and what was coming up next, and she would gossip about the characters. She told me once that she loved gossiping about the characters of her stories, and so she would tell us things about the characters that we didn’t know from reading the novels, and so, yeah, it was quite a good relationship up until the time one of the Darkover writers gave her a very, very hard time, and then she sort of backed off on it, and about the same time, she started having health problems, so she really withdrew from fan activities for her health... It was about the same time that one of the fans gave her a hard time about the fan fiction.

... I only heard this second or third hand, so, um, you would probably — there are a lot of publications that are still available with Marion writing about this. She wrote an article for Writer’s Digest about it. She wrote in various other places. You can probably find them, find out what, you know, what happened there, so -- Those, those are better sources than me.

I do know that there were people who were turned down [by Marion for her anthologies and/or fanzines] because one fan who is no longer with us told me at the time, “Boy, you are lucky! I have sent stories and stories and stories to Marion, and she hasn’t accepted one of them, and she’s accepted all of your stories!” (Verba laughs) She said, “I guess I don’t know what’s going on.” Well, I don’t know either! She just accepted my story. I couldn’t tell you why.

[...] There were only two times that she didn’t take a story. One time, she accidentally lost the story, and the deadline passed, and then after the deadline passed and I hadn’t heard anything, I wrote her, and I said, “Uh, Marion, I sent you a story, and the deadline passed, and I didn’t hear a yay or a nay from you. I mean, if you want to reject it, that’s your privilege, of course, but could you tell me if you rejected it?”

And she was like, “I didn’t get it!” “Really? I sent it to you?” She said, “Okay, I’ll look around.” It turned out that she had — it’d apparently fallen under her desk, and a pile of papers had fallen on top of it, and she misplaced it. And she just received it and accepted it for the next volume.

The second one, I sent her a story, and she sent it back and said, “I didn’t like it.” And I thought, fine. I’ll write another story. The deadline hasn’t come yet, so I quickly wrote another story and sent it to her, and she took that.

[...]

Generally, [Marion] took [my Darkover fiction] right as I sent it to her, exactly as I sent it to her. Quite often, I sent stories to other editors, and there has been back-and-forth, and revise the story. Okay, I’ll revise the story, and I’d send it back, and either I’d eventually get it accepted or I don’t, but with Marion, I think most of stories were published almost exactly as I sent them. I certainly didn’t mind it if she had edited them.

I do know that she edited one of my stories for her fanzine, you know. She wrote back, and she said, she said, “Well, you’ve got some information here that I want to make consistent with whatever else I’ve written. Do you mind if I do that?” I wrote back, and I said, “It’s your universe. It’s your story. I got your permission to do it. Do anything you want!” And she did, and it was fine. It was great. Fantastic.

So, I thought she did a good job, editing. So, I had no complaints there, you know? She made it consistent with her own universe, and she said she got some ideas from my story and I said, “Well, I’m flattered,” but my thing is, if you’re writing for another author, like Marion or Katherine or somebody, it’s their universe. They own it. You’re doing it with their permission. It’s theirs, and so, if they want to change it, that’s their privilege.

At the time, and I got that information [about Walter Breen's sexual abuse of children] second or third hand, and I was extremely shocked, and I did not know that, and I knew that Marion divorced him after that, and that he was in jail... I got it from enough sources so that I was pretty confident that it was accurate, and I was just shocked and overwhelmed.

I had one [copy] the Darkover Concordance, a copy that was written by Walter Breen, and after that came out, I sold it. I just — it just shocked me so much, I sold it. I didn’t want anything from him in the house. It was a little uncomfortable for me, and then a couple of years ago, the story came out that Marion had molested her daughter, and that was extremely rough for me because I felt betrayed... I never guessed. I had talked to Marion face to face for, you know, any, over the years. It must have been accumulated hours. I never guessed. I never knew.

[...]

It just, it just, just completely flabbergasted me. I was just — and a lot of people, not just me... I just sort of felt not connected to Darkover anymore, and I have sort of not felt connected to Darkover since, and that’s sort of why I felt a little, I’ve been feeling a little awkward, answering your questions about Darkover, because I really haven’t felt a connection with it ever since I got that news ...

I have the definite distinct impression that the current Darkover anthologies are not getting a lot of contribution because of that, and the people are not wanting to contribute. And I have been invited to contribute, and I have not, even though I’ve been invited, I have not contributed since that news came out because I just don’t feel connected with Darkover anymore because of that. It is really deeply disturbing.

[...]

It’s a very uncomfortable topic for me. I’m still feeling devastated by it.

Well, it was it wasn’t just Darkover fandom [that was almost all female]. It was Star Trek fandom. It was Star Wars. I mean, I mean, just recently, with The Force Awakens, there was a lot of talk about Rey being the primary character, and she was a woman. And, some people were saying, “Well, isn’t that unusual, considering that the bulk of Star Wars fans were men?” And I, and probably a lot of other fans were sitting there, chuckling, because, women made up the bulk of Star Wars, of active Star Wars fandom (Verba laughs). They made up the bulk of Star Trek fandom. It was very unusual, and I noticed that in Boldly Writing, when I mention some of the fan conventions, I mention in at least a couple of places, at least how many men were there, because there were less than five. I mean, like, maybe three men at one of the conventions and two men at another, and very, very, very few in the in the Star Trek fanzine community and in the Star Wars fanzine community. I mean, maybe in general, there were a lot of men, but the women [who] were active and actively promoting Star Wars and Star Trek. Mainly women. Writing the fanzines. Mainly women. Contributing to the fanzines. Writing the stories. Publishing the fanzines. Mainly women. The men I can remember because there were so few of them that it was very easy to keep track of them.

[...]

For active, for active fans who were actively publishing fanzines and actively contributing to fanzines and actively involved in reading fanzines, hmmm, 95% women. I would estimate.

The thing is, is that [fandom today] is instantaneous. It’s free. It’s more direct. I mean, for instance, I had a question about Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who was one of the writers on Deep Space Nine. I follow him... he offers a Twitter question and answer session every so often. It’s not on a regular basis, but every so often, he’ll say, “Okay ask me anything about any show that I’ve worked on,” and I had a question! And ... my question was “if the Borg and the Dominion had a fight, who would win?” ... he responded almost right away, and he said, “The Dominion. Because they’re sneakier. Besides, how do you know that Dominion didn’t create the Borg? You don’t!” That was his exact answer. Now, could I have done that back in the old days? No! That would have taken — I would have had to write a letter to Paramount, hoping that they would forward it to Robert Hewitt Wolfe, and maybe he would see it and maybe he wouldn’t, and maybe he would answer it and maybe he wouldn’t, and if he did, it would take maybe 20 weeks because he has a busy writing schedule, to get back to me, and maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t. You know, who knew? But on Twitter, he puts out the question. He puts out the call, and he says, “I’ll answer any questions.” I tweet him the question. He tweets the answer, and it’s there!

And I’ve had direct, real time, instantaneous contact, with a Star Trek writer! Back in the seventies—even the nineties! Almost impossible to do. That’s what I like about it.... I get the news right away. I don’t have to wait for somebody to gather it and publish it in a newsletter and wait at the mailbox. I don’t have to pay for a newsletter to come in and they don’t have to pay for the news, they don’t have to pay for the newsletter to get out the news. You know, it’s just wonderful, and there’s such a wealth of it, and you can see it all over the place, and it’s accessible and it’s instantaneous, and it’s direct, and it’s just wonderful.

...the technology for today is much, much better for fans, and I’m certainly glad that you are able to take advantage of it, and I’m glad I’m able to take advantage of it because it’s good, and I mean, when Facebook came, I said, “Yeah!” When Twitter came, I said, “Yeah!”... I’m all for the future in that sense, yeah, and I know, I know that Roddenberry would have loved it too, because he was a forward-thinking guy, and he was thinking, “you know, the future is going to be different, and it’s going to be better, and we’re going to have better stuff,” and that’s what I liked about Star Trek and that’s what draws a lot of people to Star Trek, I’ve found.

I had heard that various universities were collecting things from fan projects, and I sort of wondered if they were interested in mine. But what really got me thinking was that a local fan who was a librarian, came to ask to read my collection, and over a year she borrowed parts of it at a time and would read it and return, read a part and then return it and then take another part and then return it. And so, over a year, she read all of my fanzines, and she said, “Have you considered donating this to the University of Iowa?” And I said, “Oh will they take it?” “Oh,” she said. “Sure they will!”

I had thought of what am I going to do with my fanzines after I’m gone, and I did have one of my earlier wills, which has been since modified, one of my earlier wills it to another fan because I didn’t want them to be thrown away, and I thought that if I gave it to another fan, at least it wouldn’t be thrown away, but what happens when that other fan passes? Will they be passed on to another fan or, you know, I wouldn’t be here, so what would happen?

So I said, “This sounds like the perfect solution,” because then I wouldn’t have to worry about that, and the fanzines would be someplace. I did not want to throw them away. As I said ... one of my purposes in writing Boldly Writing was to raise the profile of fans and fan fiction and the people who did such good work and give them some recognition. I didn’t want to throw away that recognition. I want them someplace where they could be recognized, and this accomplishes that purpose. They would be there, and then anybody who wanted to read it could read for themselves and draw their own conclusions, and that was great.

And I deliberately also sent my correspondence with it because this was the era before I had a computer so I typed and wrote everything, and I kept a carbon copy of everything, and the carbon copy, I would tuck into the fanzines. And so I have correspondence with with various editors back and forth, and I thought, “Well, they’ll probably find the, the correspondence interesting, and so I sent the correspondence with it. I think that people would get more out of the context of fandom, what was going on, what were fans thinking, you know. It’s one thing to read the fan stories. It’s another thing to read, you know, what people were talking about, the fanzines behind the scenes, and that why I sent the correspondence, because you get another level of what the involvement, how the involvement went — if you can read the correspondence.

I would like to be remembered for Boldly Writing. I guess I just would like to be remembered as somebody who made a positive difference, somebody that, you know, contribute in various ways to history, and I think the the goal of every positive person is to make a positive difference in the world, and that I was, well, that I, that I made my own contribution, that the things went well.

[...]

Maybe I shouldn’t say this for the record, but I guess I will, and that is, like just about everybody, and I know that I’m not exception to this, that I had done in my life that I’m proud of, and I have done—and I have made mistakes and that I have done a lot of stupid things! And I think everybody has. I don’t think you get even past the age of 18 or 21 without doing something of which you look back at and cringe. I’m quite sure that somebody’s reading the stuff that I’ve written in the collection, the atlas [?] and stuff, are going to read stuff that I wrote that I now cringe at, and I would hope that they would put that in context and think that, you know, everybody has done cringeworthy things in their lives, but that, on the whole, even though I have done cringeworthy things in my life, that I have overall tried to make the conversation positive and to make a positive difference and to be a positive force in fandom in specific and in history in general.