Way TMI: A 2003 Interview with Gwyneth Rhys

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Way TMI: A 2003 Interview with Gwyneth Rhys
Interviewer:	dragolyn and onetwomany
Interviewee:	Gwyneth Rhys
Date(s):	July 10, 2003
Medium:
Fandom(s):	Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel: The Series, The X-Files
External Links:	Way TMI: A 2003 Interview with Gwyneth Rhys, Archived version
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Way TMI: A 2003 Interview with Gwyneth Rhys are questions by two fans (dragolyn and onetwomany) that Gwyneth Rhys answered.

Some of the questions are fannish, others are not.

Excerpts

Questions by dragolyn

What draws you to be involved in fandom stuff? Not just Buffy but in general. What is it about being a critical fan that appeals to you?

I’ve always wondered about that, because I’d almost prefer NOT to be a fan! But it seems as if I was genetically programmed: When my mother died, we went through her things and found the first short story I ever wrote, when I was five and a half. It was about Mickey Mouse and Goofy. I was writing fanfic before I even knew what fanfic was!

But I think it’s that I mostly enjoy a world where it’s okay to believe that characters are real — by that I mean, I know that Spike or Vin or Skinner or Doyle or whoever are not real people, but they exist in a world inside my head, they have feelings and beliefs and senses and are corporeal, and I want to know about them, I want to find out everything I can about them. Fellow fans understand that — we can discourse on what Spike is really like underneath or how Giles really behaves, but we also can say “the way ME wrote them” or something. We have both the real reality and our reality playing together (this of course doesn’t include those folks who can’t distinguish between real life and objects of fannish interest; those people scare me and make me embarrassed to be a fan). I never just watch a show I like — later on, I think about what those characters feel and what they do outside my screen. In fandom, we can do that and no one tells us we’re freaks. No one censures us for spending thousands of words and hundreds of hours analyzing an episode or dissecting a character. I will always do that, and it’s nice to have a world where I can.

I think that your writing is very bold. You don't pull your punches or seem to get shy about writing what you write. Is that ever a struggle?

Oh wow, thank you! I am shy, though, horribly shy. Sex scenes terrify me. And since I’m all about the love, sex is kinda mandatory, even if all it leads to is cutaway to billowing curtains. I’m strangely modest (in the prim way, not the humble way), and I get all embarrassed about love scenes, and take refuge in poetical language that often feels badly drawn to me. But others seem to like it, so it works as a refuge. I think the most significant thing is that I am a person who has BIG emotions — nothing’s ever half-way with me, and so when I write characters, I want to get at the core of what they feel or are. And that often is very intense, at least, the way I see them, they’re intense people, and so it comes out that way.

Questions by onetwomany

I know that you got into fandom generally through Zines, and you've talked a little about the differences in writing for online and offline fans. I'm fascinated by the contrast. How did you get into 'zine fandom, and especially into zine fanfiction? Was it something you actively set out to do? Was there a higher degree of 'quality control' over what was 'published' in the zines? If so, how did you feel about that?

I used to see fanfic zines at SF cons back when I first started going in the early ‘80s. Actually I’d never have gone to a con until I was invited — a huge local SF con com called our newspaper office and wanted a film critic for a couple panels. I said I was a big SF fan, and sure, I’d love to and found out a couple friends of mine went to this every year. I kept going to the con afterwards. I never read fic — I figured they would be crap writing by stupid people who couldn’t get published themselves. Once I got hooked up with some fans, after searching for 16 long years for fellow Professionals fans, they showed me fanfic, and I was kind of surprised. I met some new people at a slash con, and one of them was also a published, experienced writer, and I realized there was this whole different world where I could get quality fic about people I was obsessed with. So it all kind of happened by accident, in a way, though I’d searched for other fans for so long. I was what they call a feral fan — one out there on her own, no knowledge of society, but still a fan.

Zines were all over the place — there were some outstanding ones, and some that were crap. I was super lucky — the person who first published all my zine stories was a friend, that experienced writer I mentioned, and then a couple other good zine publishers took stories — one in Oz, btw! Putting out a zine was a huge labor of love and money and time — so you didn’t take things for granted. Arguments used to erupt over page counts and word counts — some people padded the cost of zines by printing with huge margins and wasted white space, and said, well it’s a big zine so it costs more. Some publishers stole or didn’t give trib copies as recompense. Some publishers made enough money to buy a freaking house. Most of us, though, were in it for love and fandom. People lived to go to cons, so that they could get the newest zines. I never had the truly awful experiences many folks did; I was really blessed.

You're really best known as a slash writer, and I get the impression you still think of yourself as falling within that genre. But then there is Spuffy. What draws you to that ship? When did you jump aboard?

You know, I wrote a lot of slash, still do, but... I never self-identified that way, which has earned me a lot of scorn from people who used to be my friends. A lot of my local pals are serious hardcore slash-only types, and they really are not terribly friendly about my het obsessions (Skinner and Scully, Mulder and Scully, Spike and Buffy). And a lot of slash fans think I betrayed them by not writing it exclusively. It’s just that it’s how I got started — the first people I met, after searching for 16 years, were slashers, and Professionals was almost entirely a slash fandom. It’s hard to explain how hard it was back then, without the Web. You just didn’t know about this whole new underworld unless you actively sought it out. I never even knew about it, till they explained it, and then I was like “oh wow, I can see that.” I’ve always found same-sex porn way more titillating than het, and I think a lot of it is that it’s not how I am, so it’s more interesting. I love guys together, and slashiness is fun. But I often felt funny because I really didn’t think only that way, but all my peers did. Most of my oldest fan friends are slashers.

What I love most is complex relationships between equals, that are often thwarted or challenged. Love can’t be easy. And slash really gives that to you, whereas het usually doesn’t need to be mitigated or explained. I wrote an essay at my site about het slash, which interested me, in Buffy, Nikita, and XF fandoms. They were het relationships that were almost slash-like in their forbiddenness, their thwartedness. Slash in Buffy just doesn’t interest me much, although I’m intrigued by the possibility of Wes meeting Spike and what he’ll make of him. Plus I still think Wes and Angel are boffing. Spander bewilders me completely. If I were ever going to write Spike slash, it’d be Giles and Spike, though.