Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Joy Harrison

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Interviews by Fans
Title: Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Joy Harrison
Interviewer: Megan Genovese
Interviewee: Joy Harrison
Date(s): August 9, 2017
Medium: aural, transcript
Fandom(s):
External Links:
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In 2017, Joy Harrison was interviewed by Megan Genovese as part of the Media Fandom Oral History Project.

Interview length: 2:24:14.

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

Excerpts

I'd been reading science fiction and fantasy. It's, you walk into a bookstore, there were lots of bookstores back then, and you bought a book and read the book and gee, that was good. Let's see if I can find some more, that kind of thing. But as far as any organized fandom, I'd never heard of the conventions. I never, never heard of fanzines. I had no contact with any of it. Um, the closest I came was about a year before when I became involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism. And I know now, I didn't at the time that there's a tremendous amount of overlap between the two.

I worked as a dealer at a great many [conventions]. I ran the dealer's room at a great many of the Chicago conventions over a period of about six years. Um, I didn't particularly enjoy those. I didn't have time to, but I started to describe myself as a fan of fandom rather than being involved in an individual fandom. My, I took great delight in, in observing the fans. I found them vastly entertaining.... some of the odd things they would do, some of the costumes they would create, some of the stranger behaviors that some of them indulged in. I ran into a couple of people who somehow lost total track of reality and stopped answering to their real names. For instance, they, they started buying into the fantasy world they created and that I found it entertaining and a little bit sad. If your real life is so bad that you have to try and live a fantasy life instead, then it just wasn't something I could buy into, put it that way. But I enjoyed watching the fans.... I was more an observer than a participant....I mean, I suppose in many ways I still am an observer.

The story [I wrote as] for Mary Jean Holmes up in Milwaukee, I forget what her zine was called, but it was the story about what happened on that trip to Bespin where Han Solo and Princess Leia go into it, sniping at one another and come out of it obviously in love with each other. Um, ever wonder what happened? My, my feeling like, I see, yeah, he got sick and bloody tired of her acting like a spoiled brat and gave her what she deserved, which was a good solid spanking under-over his knee and walloped her a couple of times. Now it would be considered abusive I suppose, but she needed that. Face it.

I should point out, I also did some of the artwork in the zine though, not under my own name. And that was, that was a story in itself. The thing had front and back cover art and the artist who was supposed to provide artwork for the covers didn't, you could say the artist just kind of flaked out on us, and disappeared from the world. I didn't even sign my name to them. I got out a star chart. I have, you know, astronomers work from star charts. I had a book of star charts. I pulled out one of the charts, did a tracing of the star field and um, that was our covers. Oh, we, we pasted a little, little tiny Viper on the back cover. One of the spacecrafts. So there was a little spacecraft on the back cover, but that was one, one of my minor forays into the art world. I'm no artist, but I can do a mean star tracing....

I started using a pen name if you, if you will on those. And sold one of them in an art auction, which I thought was terribly amusing because the, the person who bought never knew that I had done it or he would never have bought it because he was definitely not a friend of mine. So I won't name names, but I remember vividly who he was.

I had, I had a great deal of experience as an editor. One of the things I told people contributing to these zines, if you don't want your work to be edited by a professional, don't bother submitting it because you will be edited. I will not, I will never accept a piece of fiction without editing. And anything that I wrote was always edited by someone else because no one can properly edit their own work. You're too close to it. My editor was professional trained as well and um, was very, very good.

I never lacked submissions, let's put it that way. Except for Imagination, which was the non-derivative, non-media zine. And we did two issues of Imagination, but it was a struggle because at the time anyway, and we're talking sometime in the mid to late eighties, um, fandom had gotten this reputation. If it's a fanzine, it's gotta be media. So people who were writing original stuff wouldn't submit to it because it's a fanzine and people who were writing fan fiction, the media stuff. [They] didn't seem able to to think of things on their own.

I'm not sure I even remember anymore [how I first became involved in SCA]. It was a long, long, long time ago. I think there was an article in Time Magazine, and we're going way back now to the, the late sixties, maybe 1970. There was an article in Time Magazine talking about the Pennsic War [1]. And, and they, they talked about this organization and said, there are chapters everywhere. And they listed a couple of names and it turned out one of those names was in Chicago. And I called the person and they said, yeah, we have meetings. I forget how frequently. Um, why don't you come to one, and all right, I had nothing else to do on the specific night they were meeting. So I drove down to Hyde Park. They, they met just off the campus of the University of Chicago down in Hyde Park. I drove down there and met all these really interesting people and an equally interesting dog who ended up being mine a few years later, um, who was half Malamut, half wolf and appeared on the Purple & Orange staff periodically and got mentioned frequently as the dire wolf puppy, uh, in some of our stories. But we sat around and started talking about books we'd read, fantasy novels that we enjoyed. And they started talking, I think this was the first time I ever heard of sci-fi fandom, in fact. They started talking about something called a World Con in Toronto. God, I'm remembering things I'd completely forgotten about. And they were going to go as a group, as characters from the novel Dune. They had all the, all the various parts assigned except for lady Jessica. They needed a redhead. Well, my hair used to be flame red and very long, so I was kind of drafted. Well, the whole project fell apart, needless to say. We, we never did go to Toronto but someone made a costume for me that ended up being my SCA court costume. And I went to my first SCA event with this bunch and had a blast.

And I got very much involved with that for, for a good many years. And didn't really leave it until I became disillusioned with all the politicking, which seems to crop up in just about everything people do these days. We used to refer to the SCA as sca [skah] and scathian politics make today's politics look friendly or did in those days, just as fannish politics, make today's politics look kind of tame. So, you know, totally disillusioned with the political side of it, I just abandoned it and turned to fandom once I knew about it. Which we thank Leah for, uh, yeah.

I think I did wear one [my SCA costumes to a convention] once, but not the way it was intended. And that was that original court costume. You have to understand this was a costume from uh, oh around the 13th century, the kind where, where the sleeves trailed on the ground and the, and the skirts made puddles on the ground and they work best if you sat sideways on a horse, which I did want in publicity photos, well I got tired of tripping over the hem of that thing because it was six inches longer in the front than I am tall. It was just ridiculous in this, this trail behind me, people would step on it. So I, I went out with a friend of mine, we found a thrift store that had a hoop from the 1800s, 1860 or thereabouts, and with the hoop under the costume it just hit the ground.

My feeling has always been, if you're dealing with a character that's someone else has created, whether it's a character in a book or something that an actor has done, that character should behave consistently. You can't have him doing something that the existing character would not do. Which is why I never published slash fiction. I mean, if people want it, that's fine, to each his own. I have no personal feelings one way or another. But for me it never made any sense to take James Kirk and Mr Spock and put them in that kind of relationship. I mean, the way I saw the characters, the way, the way Shatner and Nimoy created them, Kirk was a human tomcat and would chase anything female, human or otherwise. And Spock was only interested once every seven years. So why waste it. You see, see my, my problem with it? They're behaving out of character.... Yeah, I mean some [slash pairings] I could see. I just never published any.

There's always been this split in the sci-fi fantasy community between media, what they term media, and literature. You have the, the book people on one side, the visual arts people on the other, and at least when I was still active in fandom, the two sides would almost never come together. This was why I was trying so hard to make a success of Imagination to prove that a fanzine could be non-derivative, but obviously, it wasn't destined to be a success. Maybe it was before its time. I don't know. What's interesting though is that while I read almost exclusively fantasy and science fiction back in those days, now I read almost none of it. I find that virtually every science fiction novel I pick up sounds familiar. Like there are no new ideas out there, or even if there are no new ideas, there's no new approach to talking about the old idea. It's just same old thing. Frankly, I have, I've never had much use for superhero story. It's just not my thing. I don't like what I consider comic books, which is superhero stuff. You get an awful lot of that in the movies these days A lot of what I'm seeing, you know, they, they, they build these as these great films and yeah, computer graphics are wonderful and all of, all of the, the stuff that they're doing visually is wonderful, but it's also so totally unreal. I like a little realism. That's why the Indiana Jones films were so much fun, because you had, you know, all the action, all the adventure, all the excitement without over the top special effects. And I, all right, I'm old fashioned. I don't like the over-the-top stuff. I think it's just too much. The original Star Wars, the very first film, when I went to see it, it was magic. It was the most incredible movie I'd, I'd seen in a very long time because it was so breathtakingly new. It was refreshing and yeah, they invented a whole lot of new techniques to do it, and they did a lot of special effects, but it was seamless. It looked plausible like it could be real, in a galaxy far, far away. By the time they got to the second trilogy and started using CGI, it was beginning to look a little too artificial, and the most recent Star Wars stuff, I mean, I didn't even go see the last one, this Rogue something, I think it was called. I just didn't bother. I'll watch it on cable when it turns up. I mean, I can't see wasting my time going to a theater to see something like that. They just don't, they don't hold my interest in it. The original is usually better than the sequels anyway. Yeah. When you get down to, what is this 10, 11, 12 sequels, it's just way too much. Like a photocopier. You make a photocopy, I'm saying it looks good, you make a photocopy of that photocopy and continue on doing that until you're making a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, you know, so on and it looks like garbage. And I think that's true of these movie sequels and a lot of the TV shows that run, you know, beyond the seven or eight years that I think is the lifetime of, of a show. They start getting stale and they start looking tired and trite and they get boring. That said, I'm still always interested in finding something new and exciting.

The groupies. Right, well, let's just say that I don't like fanatics of any kind, be they a fannish groupie or a religious zealot. I have no use for any of them. If you could eliminate fanaticism from the world, the world would be a much nicer place. And that applies to fandom as well as to any other area of life you, you care to choose. All right. All right. Here. I say we, it's, it's again the editorial we, but I try to see both sides of issues or all sides when they're multiple. Um, it's gotten me in trouble on occasion. I've gotten people mad at me for this, but it's not that I believe one thing or another,I just believe everyone has a right to their own beliefs, but they should also be tolerant of others. And frankly, the bunch I lump as groupies don't seem willing to tolerate other's opinion. You know, uh, the rabid, the very rabid Trekkie won't hear a word against their sacred show. And all right, I am speaking from personal experience here. I used to teach an adult education course in Astronomy. One year I had a class where there was a guy who introduced himself the first night of class. He says, hi, I'm a Trekkie. I love Star Trek. It should have been a warning to me because as it turned out, that man believed that everything he saw in, in the original series was real. It was true. It happened. The Enterprise exists. It's this spaceship that travels at warp speeds, blah, blah. And for 10 weeks he wouldn't let anybody say anything else. You're trying to teach astronomy to him. You're trying to teach the basics of relativity to somebody who, yeah. Well, like I said in, in the editorial, it would have been justifiable homicide. I swear to God, weeks of that man, there wasn't a person in the classroom who didn't want to strangle him because everything I said, he'd come back and go, but it's not like that on Star Trek. Do we care? Star Trek is a television series. It is fiction. But, no. Well, after that particular class finished for the next several years, one of the things I would do, you know, I, I'd always start out, is anyone here to learn to draw a horoscope? If anybody said yes, I'd send them down the hall to Astrology 101, because you don't want astronomy, you want astrology. It's different. My next question and would always be, are any of you Trekkies and I would strongly discourage them from staying in the class because I wasn't about to put up with it anymore. What I, what I refer to the, the, the group that called themselves Trekkers. Alright. They were okay. Again, they were tainted by the fanatics and be they Star Trek fanatics or Star Wars fanatics or any other kinds of fanatics. I don't know what the current favorite thing is. Um, I don't have any use for any of them. I just, I'm old enough to be intolerant of that sort of thing now. I don't have to put up with it. I'm, I'm too old to have to put up with it.

It's, the world is changing and yeah, I suppose I've changed with it to some extent, but in other ways, I have no intention of changing. I will still stick with my opinions about fandom, with my feelings about editing zines. Every once in a while I think to myself, gee, maybe I actually should try publishing another zine. But then I look at what's out there online, and why waste my time. I've only got a finite amount of time left. Again, you reach a certain age, you start thinking in those terms, how many more years do I have? Maybe ten, if I'm lucky, maybe even 15 if I'm lucky. Although you know, what will my mind be like 15 years from now? Who knows. Why should I waste what time I have when people prefer this, this stuff that a six year old could write, well maybe not six year old, but a frustrated 12 year old, let's, let's be kind. Most of what I've read online has been that childish. I mean, it's not, it's not that they're being written by children, it's, they're being written by people who can't write.

[snipped]

I've been directed by various people to a couple of websites for fannish stories. And I've tried to read some of them. One or two I've managed to actually get through and a couple of them have been pretty good, but the vast majority, I'll read a paragraph and, oh God, I can't, I can't go on. I'd rather go back and reread Stranger in a Strange Land because it's written by somebody who appreciates words. Every word has a meaning and they should be used with respect. You can tell. I love language. That's, yeah. To me, language is a gift to humankind. It's what sets us apart, that and the opposable thumb, from most other species on the planet. And we give up our language, our language skills, what do we have left?

I mean, now and then I'm tempted to, to, you know, stop in at one of the, one of the local cons. Windycon is, I think still being held every, every fall here in, in Chicago somewhere. But I think about it and then I don't do it because something comes up that I'd rather do, you know? It doesn't have the hold on me that it used to. I don't know if it's that I grew up and grew out of it or that I got turned off by the politics or that I just got bored. I don't know, but fandom has changed a lot and a lot of those changes I don't want to make. I think it was Morgan who, Morgan Dawn, who introduced me to Zinelist, and I've made a couple of friends on, on Zinelist. We email one another back and forth. We're all of roughly the same era, and one of these people use the term fanosaur. We are fanosaurs, fannish dinosaurs, and the current generations of fans, the, the younger generations of fans have different methods of telling their stories, doing their thing, whatever it may be. And we're just not into it. And personally, I don't know that I want to be involved in it. You know, I, I just don't like being sloppy and lax about things. And that includes language.

I'm one of those weird people who way back in high school, loved Shakespeare and that should tell you everything you need to know because when you get to the written word, you want one master writer. And I don't care if William Shakespeare really wrote the plays or if it's an assumed name for God knows who. I'm not going to get into that debate. Whoever wrote those plays was The Master of the English language, with a capital T and a capital M, and no one has ever come close since. I love the language. It's, it's that simple.

[Interviewer: You can have Shakespeare fandom, today. There's somebody else out there who shares your love for Shakespeare.]

Yeah. Well, I know a lot of people who love Shakespeare and we go to the theater and enjoy the plays, but we're not writing fan fiction because again, I mean, who can write better than Shakespeare?... Um, no one could do it better. No one can do it as well. So who would presume, I mean, who, who, who claims to love Shakespeare rather would presume to write fan fiction as Shakespeare. You can't. You can, you can do anything you want with any of these fandoms. But Shakespeare I know, I think Shakespeare is untouchable.

Yeah. I, you know, if, if somebody tried to write Shakespeare or a Shakespearean story, I wouldn't, I wouldn't bother reading it because it could never measure up. I mean, I've, I've read stuff by really, really good fan writers over the years and there's nobody likes them anymore. At least nobody, I've come across. And I know a number of them have died, and I think that's fandom's loss, great loss, but the world's going to go on and people are going to keep doing what they're doing. And if they, if they want bad writing, they can have bad writing. I mean, who am I to say. One, one fanosaur's opinion. I like that. Fits.... If I were to go to a convention in a costume now, assuming I could make a costume, which I can't, I think I'd go as a dinosaur... Yeah. I mean that's, that's how I feel about it.

There was the time constraints, and I just lost interest [in fandom] I guess. Like I don't read a lot of science fiction anymore. It's just too much... Too much. The same thing, and fantasy... Well, again, too much the same thing. You, you've read one, one heroic warrior saves the world just one time too many. If somebody would come up with something really new, something different, but it's as if imagination has, has totally shut down. Used to be, you could turn to science fiction and fantasy for all kinds of imaginative, new stuff. I mean, this is where the imagination was. This is where things started and you know, yeah. You'd go from that out into the real world and make, try to make it a reality. But this is where it had its beginning. Now, it's the, the science fiction fantasy community seems to have lost its collective imagination.

[snipped]

I hate to be pessimistic about it, but I honestly don't see things getting, you know, alright. In fandom, all I can see is the declining ability to tell a good story, the declining imagination to even envision a good story. I mean, sure, media fandoms are all very well and good and it's, it's fun to play with someone else's characters and all that, but at some point you really have to let go of that and reach for something that's uniquely your own and people aren't doing it. They're staying mired in their little fandoms and not going anywhere.

I can honestly say I met George Lucas before the world knew George Lucas. It was at a Worldcon right after the first Star Wars opened. People didn't,you know, didn't know who he was. He was just this director who made this suddenly successful movie nobody had ever heard of before. That was, that was when we put out our first issue of Imagination and I'm sitting in the dealer's room at a Worldcon and this guy comes by and he looked vaguely familiar. He wasn't wearing a badge, but he looked vaguely familiar. And he picked up the zine and started thumbing through it and started reading things. And then we started talking, cause the room was almost empty. There was some kind of presentation going and we introduced ourselves and he says, oh, by the way, I'm George Lucas. Oh, hi. You know, so I, I would never have met him.

There were some, some good experiences. It's just that I don't think fandom has learned anything as a whole. And that's, that's the unfortunate thing. That's, that's what I think is so sad. Fandom has to learn. I mean, I, I learned a lot and I think I improved my editing skills a lot. I helped a number of writers, which makes me feel really good. Um, but I mean, what else can I say about fandom? It, it's kind of hard to say anything beyond that. It didn't change my life. It kind of dominated my life for 20 years, which may not have been a good thing. Probably wasn't. I think it was a thing as I could've been doing for those 20 years.

[snipped]

I guess you could say it left its mark on me for good or ill. I guess some of both. I mean I don't begrudge the experience. I can't say that I'm sorry I did it. I may be sorry I spent so much time doing it, but I did enjoy doing it

References

  1. ^ The Pennsic War is an annual American medieval camping event held by the Society for Creative Anachronism—a "war" between two large regional SCA groups: the Kingdom of the East and the Middle Kingdom.
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