Twenty-Seven Grilled Bards and One Reviewer: Joanna

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Twenty-Seven Grilled Bards and One Reviewer: Joanna
Interviewer:
Interviewee:	Joanna
Date(s):	July 2, 1998
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Xena: Warrior Princess
External Links:	full interview is here, Archived version
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Twenty-Seven Grilled Bards and One Reviewer: Joanna is a 1998 Xena: Warrior Princess fan interview at Whoosh!.

Series

For others in this series, see Whoosh! Interview Series.

Some Excerpts

[What is a.t.x.?] : The newsgroup: alt.tv.xena. When I dipped my big toe in Xena fandom, I had no web access, so I didn't have any idea how much was out there, and couldn't access the forum. I had watched the show a couple times (starting at season two) and was watching Giant Killer when the promo for GJWHF aired. I watched the neck bite, sat up and thought, "Hmmmm... Are they...?" So I watched the ep the next week and hopped online to figure out if my theory was correct. Not being a lurker type, I immediately started posting and got embroiled in Xena fandom. About a month later, I was asked to join a private fan fiction discussion list and that sealed my doom -- I was hopelessly caught. I've written comedy as a profession, and sometimes, I find that a sketch is the perfect means of making social commentary, poking a little fun at the show and at us, its viewers, or just to have me some fun. Certain things just lend themselves to a good parody.

Yes, I've been writing for years. The genre was comedy. The response from the web was very different than I was used to because not one of them sent me a check.

Because my parodies, as a rule, receive very little feedback (with the exceptions of Bitter Treat and the Coming Out series) I can't get caught up in the "Oh no! I just wrote something terrible because I only got three letters!" When I first started posting, the volume of mail was zero. That's right, not one letter of feedback. This went on for quite some time. I would write a sketch, post it and never hear a word. In fact, I didn't realize there was such a thing as feedback off the web. I just put them out there to entertain and assumed that people were probably reading them. Xellen got a couple letters and I was really surprised to see them. When I posted Coming Out, it was downright shocking. Who knew people would write feedback on a sketch? A lovely surprise indeed. Now, I do tend to get the occasional letter on the various sketches and I even have a couple of fans who follow my work. It's a lot of fun to receive attention, and I'm grateful to anyone who writes to me about my work. But even if it all stopped tomorrow, I'd still crank out the occasional sketch. Why? Because I have this wacky sense of humor that simply has to get out somehow. So Xena was elected.