The KSA Archive Interview with Gwendolen

Interviews by Fans
Title:	The KSA Archive Interview with Gwendolen
Interviewer:	Taz
Interviewee:	Gwendolen
Date(s):	January 2000
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
External Links:	interview is here, Archived version
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Gwendolen was interviewed by Taz in 2000 for The KSA Archive.

Some Excerpts

Once I knew how to read I read almost everything I could get my hands on but my favourites were always tales with some kind of phantastic or historical elements. As a child I love myths and folktales, read things like Prince Valiant, Karl May (A German writer of the 19th century who wrote so-called 'traveller-tales' about adventures in Arabia or with Indians), everything I could find about pirates and the European myths which led me to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table which then led me to Marion Zimmer Bradley. And after reading Mists of Avalon. I also read her other books, especially her Darkover-books who were my first actual contact with homoerotic ideas. And it was through Darkover that I got involved in the fandom, first a Darkover-dinner (fans meeting for dinner) and then more and more contacts with the German Fantasy- and SF-Fandom. And as things are within the fandom, one gets introduced to others, so one day a friend gave me an address with the words *I think you two would get along just fine*. And we did get along just fine and she introduced me to K/S (Kirk/Spock). I was hooked. And the rest is more or less history.

Since back then the Internet was nothing more than a dream, we had to make do with zines.The first homoerotic story I wrote was Darkover. The first slashstory was K/S. But also a lot of my original work involved sexuality and the question of gender. For some time the idea of hermaphrodites fascinated me and influecend a lot of my earlier work. And vampires. I always loved reading stories about them. Interview with the Vampire was one of the first books I tried reading in English, after studying English for only three years. I had to look up a lot of words but found out that this is the best way to learn a language. Things really changed when a friend of mine talked me into writing a Star Wars story in English for her, or rather for her Star Wars zine Elusive Lover. Until than I'd only written a small story for my English class and wasn't really sure whether that was a good idea. It worked, more or less, but I had a great beta-reader. Since then I've written more and more in English in rather wide variety of fandoms (Star Wars, X-Files, Voyager, Babylon 5, James Bond: Goldeneye, Professionals and Hercules or rather Ares).

Badboys who hide their vulnerabilities behind masks. Characters with difficult lives. Complex characters like Iphicles or Alex Krycek. Why? They are fascinating and while writing about them I can address issuess that interest me or that I want to write about.

[My favorite story]: Fandomwise? Or just any story? The best one I've written so far would be one of my German stories, an original story called Eine Art von Ekstase (A Kind of Ecstasy). The story was an experiment where I wrote three or four different versions of the whole story, playing around with tenses and using names and no no names for the characters. The end-version is written in the present-form and uses no names. I'm very happy with the whole narrative which is very focused and fast, drawing the reader in. It's a brutal story but still somehow touching. Can't really explain it but I just love this story and still think of it as my best work.