Old School X Interview: Dawson E. Rambo
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Old School X Interview: Dawson E. Rambo |
| Interviewer: | Lilydale |
| Interviewee: | Dawson E. Rambo |
| Date(s): | January 12, 2021 |
| Medium: | online, Tumblr |
| Fandom(s): | The X-Files |
| External Links: | at lilydalexf; archive link |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Old School X Interview: Dawson E. Rambo was conducted by Lilydale as part of the series Old School X Interview Series.
Some Topics Discussed
- having one's personal life very affected by fandom
- receiving "27,000 [fannish] emails in just over four years"
- being an avid shipper but now feeling like Mulder ruined Scully's life
- "the Gilligan’s Island aspect of Scully’s belief system"
- his pseud, XFBandit
From the Interview
What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?
A wife, actually! My wife Annie read “ELS” and wrote me a fan letter in the summer of 1998. As I always have, I answer every fan mail I get, and I replied to hers. We started exchanging emails, and 22 years later, we’ve been very, very happily married for 20 years. I gained two (adult) stepchildren in the marriage, and now am the extremely proud grandfather of 3 granddaughters!
I was literally blown away by the response to some of my later fics. My very first one, even before “Snapshot,” I made the error of the characters calling each other “Fox” and “Dana” and got flamed pretty hard. I tried again with “Snapshot” and the “Mulder/Scully” names and…well, the rest is history. I was overwhelmed with the support and encouragement of the fans, and in fact am still friends with two or three people I met back then. One of them attended our wedding. At the height of my writing, during ELS and shortly after, I was getting between 100-150 emails a week. At the end, I went back and counted, and I’d gotten over 27,000 emails in just over four years. The support was incredible!
Social media didn’t really exist during the show’s original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?
alt.tv.x-files.creative mostly. I had a private mailing list for people that wanted my stories 2-3 days before I posted to atxc, and at its height it numbered about 2,500 people.
What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?
I’d written fanfic before, although never published it. I wrote some Magnum, PI fanfics when I was a senior in HS (1984 or so) and some Wargames (the movie) fanfic as well. X-Files was a new one for me at the time. Looking back, after now being married for over two decades, I have turned 180 degrees from my former position and am not NOT a Shipper at all. Their relationship was hugely dysfunctional in so many ways. I think viewed through one prism, Mulder literally ruined Scully’s life.
I say that to say this: One of the things I took way from the fandom in general is that the fans (mostly) want what they want when they want it. I’ve read in dozens of fandoms since I left The X-Files, and I find it interesting how many times and in how many different ways fanfic authors can get two characters together in ways that the creator(s) never intended. Fanfic authors are inventive, to say the least.
What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?
... I got hooked on the relationship between Mulder and Scully, although the Gilligan’s Island aspect of Scully’s belief system has always annoyed me. I liked the switches between the MOTW episodes and the early mythology episodes.
To be clear, anything post S5, to me, is problematic. It’s obvious that CC and his crew completely and utterly lost control of the narrative and at the end were just throwing things at the wall to see what would stick.
[...]
What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?
ELS and Umbra and most of the Bandit stuff are my favorites. Snapshot not so much because it wasn’t really organic as a story. I just kept adding things to it. Umbra was a lot of fun to write. ELS was…different.
I was standing in a Borders in Tucson, AZ and I saw a book on one of the tables called The Bible Code, and I picked it up and started reading it. Within about 10 minutes the entirety of the plot to ELS had popped into my head. I could not wait to get home and start writing, and that kind of urge…that kind of experience where the book just FLEW off my fingers was amazing. The first time that’s happened. It actually helped me finish Umbra so I could get to writing ELS ASAP.
The Bandit stuff was my attempt to do two things: Mimic the author Andrew Vachss’ style (just to see if I could) and to see if people really liked my work, or if my ‘name’ had gotten too big. I know that sounds egotistical, but I was releasing some short stories around that time that I wasn’t that happy with and was curious to see if people would react to my writing or my name.
What’s amusing is that it took about 48 hours before a fan sussed me out. Apparently, at the time, I had a go-to phrase, “…in the space between two heartbeats” and I used it both in an XFBandit story and they grok’d it immediately.
[...]
Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?
Obviously my wife knows, LOL. My kids know, and my daughter-in-law actually read ELS and liked it very much. My sister-in-law just asked to read it, and I’m trying to find a copy that I can easily convert to MOBI since we all use Kindles or the Kindle app on an iOS device these days. My granddaughters (11, 9 and 8) are vaguely aware that Poppa wrote a bunch of stuff on the Internet that Nana read and that’s how we met. My siblings know, and they just don’t get it. As in they don’t get the concept of fanfic. People writing stories about TV characters? They just aren’t the “fan” types, except for my sister, who is a gigantic Bruce Springsteen fan although I doubt she’s ever written a fanfic about him. My brother is a huge Steelers/Penguins fan – and again, I don’t think there is sports team fanfic. Although Rule 32 might come into play, LOL. (Rule 32: If it exists, there’s fanfic of it.)
I’ve told my co-workers in various jobs how Annie and I met – mostly greeted with a giant shrug and mutters of ‘nerd’ under their breath.
[...]
Is there anything else you’d like to share with fans of X-Files fic?
Simply: Thanks.
There is a direct line between my XF writing and my life now, and that is my wife and our family. If I hadn’t decided to write XF fanfic, if you folks hadn’t really, really liked it, when Annie first found alt.tv.x-files.creative and asked “Who’s good around here?” and some kind soul mentioned me, there was absolutely no way we would have met.
In the 22 years since I met my wife, I have been incredibly happy. My life literally did a 180 from “before Annie” to “after Annie,” and I owe it all to the people who enjoyed my work enough to remember my name. When I think of the dozens of choices that I had to make, the dozens of choices that my wife had to make, all the little dominos that had to fall in just the right order for me to end up writing XF fanfic, for the Internet to even freaking exist as a place for me to publish, for her to be a fan of XF and to go looking for fanfic… and then read my seminal novel, write me a fan email (You figure that maybe 1 in 10 people actually write the fan email, right?) and for me to answer and for her to answer back and then 6,000 emails later realize…
Love isn’t a thunderbolt from the sky. For us, at least, it’s more of a “Oh, THERE you are! Where have you been?” I knew within six weeks of that first email that not only was I in love with her, but that we needed to spend the rest of our lives together.
…and she felt the same way.
I literally owe everything I have right now to xf fandom.
So again: Thank you so much!