I don’t often mention SWG’s begetting day because it seems irrelevant to anyone but me since the group was inactive until its birthday in July. But this is the SWG’s fifthbegetting day so enough of a milestone that I thought, what the heck, I’ll mention it just this once. The SWG came into being on the night of March 14th into 15th when I couldn’t sleep. (Insomnia being a generally dangerous thing for me, creatively, considering that I also invented my o-fic universe the Midhavens one night after taking stimulant cold medicine and lying awake until 5:30 AM.) It occurred to me that night that there were a lot of talented Silm writers yet, aside from the Silmfics discussion group, they had no place of their own to call home. And this being soon enough after the LotR movies, Silmfic tended to get drowned on general Tolkien archives by stories written by enthusiastic though largely ephemeral members of the fandom drawn to the sources by the movies. Since I didn’t have much interest in LotR-based stuff, the lack of a centralized place for discussion and stories relating to the Silm was frustrating for me, so I took on that dangerous middle-of-the-night and quintessentially Dawn way of thinking: “It does not yet exist; therefore, I must create it.”

So create it I did. I had no idea how to use LiveJournal, but I signed myself up for an account so that I could set up SWG there, and I created a Yahoo! group too. That was March 15th, the Ideas of March, SWG’s begetting day.

It sounds cliche to say it, but five years seems simultaneously a short a time ago and an eternity. I was a very different person when I started SWG than I am now. Of course, I was a complete n00b in the fandom and really not qualified to be taking on such an ambitious project. I was also incredibly insecure as a writer. I wasn’t sure I was any good at all and thought there was a good chance that I completely sucked. That first year of posting Another Man’s Cage on a weekly basis nearly gave me a peptic ulcer, I was so convinced that, at any moment, someone would denounce me as the fraudulent writer I was sure that I was. Likewise, SWG was a tender part of my fannish self just waiting to be wounded … and it would not take long for that to happen the first time. (I remember my first unsubscription notice to this day and how much that bothered me that my group had clearly made someone unhappy enough to unsubscribe. I won’t say that unsubscriptions don’t ever bother me now–it really depends on the person and/or the circumstances–but this was someone who never spoke once; I really shouldn’t have cared that much. But I did.) In January of 2006, one of SWG’s members (and we were just an LJ community and mailing list then, though we were discussing our website and archive) became most unhappy with me over a perceived insult on the mailing list that she felt that I’d ignored and started a public campaign against my infant Silmarillion group and me personally. That was … distressing, mostly because while I perceived the unfairness of her accusations, I wasn’t sure that my and SWG’s reputation would withstand them, no matter that they were not true. My grandmother–my last surviving grandparent–died right around the same time, and that was a slap in the face to bring me back to reality. My grandmother was a stubborn Polish lady who once rear-ended a car because the driver didn’t go fast enough for her after the light turned green; it felt like, with her death, Nanny was giving me a shake and asking me when I had begun to care so deeply and allow myself to be hurt so much by lies spread by someone who was known to be both unkind and a magnet for drama. When the SWG’s first begetting day rolled around on the Ides of March, 2006, one could say that I was already a much tougher person than I had been just a year ago.

I could sit here and spout many such examples of how the SWG has enriched my life in the past five years and shaped who I am today, but in truth, my experiences as a group and archive owner have been ambivalent. I don’t think I’d ever unwish my insomnia on March 14, 2005, and the subsequent creation of the SWG, but neither have my last five years as the group’s owner been all honey and roses. If I am being totally honest, there are times when I have considered giving it up. When I think of the time for my own writing and art that I have sacrificed to learning web design and building the site and maintaining the site and coming up with ideas to keep the site active and interesting … well, I think, “I am a writer; this isn’t what I had in mind when I started this group.” I have sacrificed most of my Tolkien-based writing and a lot of my o-fic writing too in order to run this group. If I am being perfectly honest, there are days when that breaks my heart. And I would be lying too if I did not acknowledge that there are days when undertaking the sort of effort that it takes to keep such a project afloat (”launching the lead balloon,” as I recently said of B2MeM) does not seem worth it “for love alone.”

But, of course, there are the friends I would not have made, the stories that would not have been written, the things I would not have learned (including web design!), and the experiences I would not have had if, at this precise moment five years ago, I had deleted my nascent group before anyone knew it existed.

So happy begetting day, SWG. I am grateful to you for bringing me to a point in my life that, five years ago, I could have never imagined. I wonder where we’re going next.

My ambivalence toward awards has been discussed before. Clearly, I have come to terms with my own participation in the MEFAs since I have participated as an author, reviewer, nominator, and volunteer at various times in the past four seasons. But my ambivalence remains. How so? For me, nomination in the MEFAs is the award. A nominator has the chance to choose her or his twenty favorite stories for the year and chose one of mine; that is really high praise to me. The reviews only sweeten the deal. By the time the actual winners are announced, my emotion towards it is largely one of curiosity. In the end, though, no matter how well they’re matched in categorization, I don’t believe that you can judge one work of art against another. That my story about Maedhros was somehow deemed better than her story about Elrond but not quite as good as his novella about Gil-galad really doesn’t say a whole lot. It may well be that the majority of readers did agree with that arrangement but it may well be that the next batch of readers will disagree completely, to say nothing of the myriad factors that influence votes and have nothing to do with the readers’ actual preference for one story over another. (Like I have time to read one of the three and pick the shortest or the one about Elrond because I like him more than the other two characters.)

I don’t say this to diminish the satisfaction or pride of this year’s (or any year’s) winners. The meaning I attach to the awards is mine alone and surely not the only–much less correct–way to look at things. It comes back to that ambivalence: The fact that some people will inevitably walk away from the whole experience with a decreased sense of enjoyment in this community, a lessened view of their work, or a diminishment in desire to be involved in future events (not just the MEFAs). And while I know that is not the intention or even necessarily the dominant experience, it exists, and it makes me wonder, not for the first time, what role awards should have in art.

I don’t write this because I have answers. I have been wrestling with this question since my first exposure to the MEFAs came through a fandom friend who, despite several nominations, did not receive a single award and was hurt by that. And seeing similar experiences every year after. I have been wrestling with this question since deciding to participate as an author and reviewer, then a nominator, then a volunteer. I think I might be even further now than I was then from finding an answer, if such an answer can even exist. Part of me thinks that those who end up bitter just have the wrong outlook. Part of me thinks that works of art should never be pitted against each other; that that misses the point. Part of me thinks that the collateral benefits of recognizing our favorite stories each year and creating an easy means to find new authors make the enterprise, in itself, worthwhile. Then part of me replies that we don’t need awards to do that.

I can only congratulate again those who were nominated this year, thank those who wrote reviews and administrated the awards, and remain ambivalent.

The post scathes tech companies (like Yahoo!) that continue to engage in behaviors and practices unfriendly to women, such as having strippers at trade shows, which to the writer “implies that there are no women in the audience [and] certainly sends the message that the tech world is the He-Man Woman-Haters Club.” What about other facets of geek culture? Do you, HL readers and most trusted fellow citizens of geekdom, think that males that identify as “geeks” tend to be more overtly sexist than those who do not?

I’m a woman so, of course, I’ve experienced sexism in its myriad forms. For example, at work (in a male-dominated profession), I often feel that I have to stand on my desk and jump up and down and scream in order to get my (male) supervisors to hear my thoughts and ideas on policies relating to my job, policies that often involve knowledge or skills that only I possess. (Fancy that!) And when I worked in the same office as my (male) supervisors, I got mistaken for the secretary an awful lot. But I’ve been lucky that workplace outings have never taken place on The Block, I’ve never been sexually harassed at work, and if my coworkers make off-color jokes and remarks about women, then they do it well out of my earreach. Good thing too.

But now geek culture … I am, of course, part of the Tolkien writing fandom, which is predominantly female, and I’m not going to go into whether sexism/misogynism exists in that community … not in this post anyway. And I’m in the SCA, which is a pretty equal mix of men and women. I’ve had a few SCAdians make comments about my looks, but they were always people I knew well enough to know that they meant them playfully and not offensively, and they knew me well enough to know that I would take them as such. Fair enough.

I also spent a few years as part of the subculture surrounding a popular tabletop game that shall go unnamed. I built and painted models while my husband and friends played the game. It was not uncommon to walk into the small store where we played to find it packed with twenty or thirty people and yet be the only woman in the store. (A few moms and wives would drift in and out but, in my years there, I knew only one other woman who participated as actively as I did.) I used to tell my husband that I sometimes felt, walking into the store, like half the heads would pop up from the tables, noses would start twitching, and the guys would begin gleefully muttering, “Estrogen! We smell estrogen!”

The gaming models primarily represented men, but when women were depicted, they were always buxom to the extent that hauling around that much extra boobage would make walking difficult, much less weilding a sword and exacting fancy fighting manuevers, and they were usually scantily clad or–in a few instances–unclad entirely from the waist up. Needless to say, we few female participants didn’t get the same eye candy from the gaming models that depicted men.

What of behavior? Well, possibly the most blatantly offensive act of sexism I’ve yet faced occurred in that store while I was working on a painting project. I was minding my own business, working on my current project with a few other guys at the table with me. I was wearing a knee-length dress with a halter-type top that tied behind my neck. At one point, I realized that one of my table-mates was crawling under the table. Thinking that perhaps he’d dropped something down there, I looked underneath the table at him and realized that he was trying to look up my dress. Spurred on by his behavior, the fellow beside me took the opportunity to reach behind me and try to untie the halter top to my dress.

I don’t believe that these guys were trying to frighten me much less assault me; they thought that they were being funny or perhaps paying me a compliment. That didn’t make it right, and when one of my friends who was a store employee later heard about it, he was livid. He was much angrier than I was. Interacting with most of the participants in this particular game always felt like instructing young children in the proper ways to behave in public. The two incidents that afternoon were much the same: No, guys, it is not okay to behave that way toward a woman. Even if she is your friend. Even if you’re just playing around. If you like how I look, telling me that my dress is pretty or that I look nice in it it is a much more effective and civil compliment than trying to take it off of me.

I don’t know if it ever sunk in. My husband and I both grew frustrated with that particular community in a large part because of the rampant immaturity and asocial behavior, and we no longer participate. I still have a closet full of models that I would like to paint someday, but then illumination scratches that part of my brain that demands fine motor skills just as well. I might live out my life quite happily with a bucketful of unassembled Elves in the closet in my study and my old paints mainly serving to provide convenient pop-top containers for gold-leaf sizing.

But when I read that post today, my years with this group came back. And I wondered how typical my own experiences (and, apparently, those of female employees for some of these companies) really were. Anyone have thoughts, insights, or anecdotes on this? How do other predominantly male geek communities treat female participants? What do you think is behind this tendency, if it exists?

I often say that I hated The Silmarillion the first time that I read it, and that much is certainly true. Fresh from my first reading of LotR, I wanted more of the same and, mistakenly, believed that The Silmarillion would meet my expectations. I remember clearly to this day standing in the aisle at the bookstore, in the fantasy section, reading the blurb on the back of the book that mentioned how the Silm was the story of the early history of characters like Elrond and Galadriel. I know them! I thought. They weren’t my favorite characters, no (believe it or not, I was a Hobbit fan before being seduced by the much more turbid history of the Elves), but like the sight of an acquaintance can make an unfamiliar journey more comfortable to contemplate, so the attested presence of Elrond and Galadriel reassured me that I wouldn’t become adrift in the pages of The Silmarillion.

Which is, of course, exactly what happened.

The Silmarillion isn’t a wonderfully written book. It’s not particularly enticing or absorbing. While there are passages that make me sigh with the happy contentment of a wordsmith who has just encountered a perfectly constructed phrase, there are just as many that I have had to read multiple times, mentally diagramming the sentence, to even understand. And most of the lines that get heavily quoted in the House of Felagund are throwaway quips. “Travel lightly but bring your swords!” my husband and I avow each Wednesday before we head off to German longsword practice. “Get thee gone!” I’ll snip at the dogs when they’re being annoying. If I’m in a particularly foul humor, “thou jail-crow of Mandos” might be further appended to that. The Silmarillion certainly isn’t my preferred book to read, even though I’ve probably read it more times than any other and I read parts of it several times a week for my research. But when I hunger for a book where my mind can drift into new worlds and savor the author’s words, it’s not The Silmarillion that I pick up. It’s usually a Romantic- or Modern-era novel for classic/mainstream literature or Ursula K. LeGuin, Neil Gaiman, or Peter S. Beagle for fantasy.

So what is it that makes this book so damned special? Clearly it is. I first read it almost six years ago and yet my passion for it shows no sign of waning.

For me, there are two kinds of books. There are those that I read for the chance to become lost in the author’s vision. The Lord of the Rings was that way for me. I remember leaving Frodo and Sam at Shelob’s lair and shouting, “Noooo!” at the book like some character in a hammed-up melodrama. Then there are those books where the author’s vision stops just shy of satisfaction and leaves me contemplating more questions than the book answered. That is The Silmarillion.

Once I managed to wrap my brain around the Silm (and the fact that it wasn’t LotR), I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Fëanor, especially, bothered me. At first, I couldn’t quite figure out why it was that he fascinated me; why I couldn’t stop thinking about him. There was a cult of personality around him; there was a certain injustice in his story that stung me deep; there was my own identification with some aspects of his character; there was his obvious fallibility; there was–most of all–the feeling that I couldn’t quite articulate that I wasn’t getting his whole story.

In writing about what motivated and inspired J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor Shippey writes that “One sees that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realise, on the literary and historical map …” (38). There are facts–information known, attested, documented–and there is the space between where little or nothing is known. What lives in those shadowy spaces between what we know? Staring hard into them, one begins to fancy that something moves there. There is a form of life and reality, existing just beneath one’s awareness, just out of reach of what one can “put a finger on” and document as fact.

When I read The Silmarillion, I found myself staring into a lot of those shadowy spaces. And the more I read and the more I learned, the more I saw moving there, just out of reach of “fact,” though not imagination. It was not the “facts” of The Silmarillion that so intrigued me. It was the possibilities of what lay in those unknown realms between.

Tolkien studied medieval languages and literature, and the problems we face, in studying The Silmarillion, are much the same as the problems that he would have routinely encountered in his own studies. There is the question of authorship, to start: The Silmarillion being a posthumous work that was still very much in-progress at its author’s death, we have no idea what a “Silmarillion” would have looked like had Tolkien just five more years to complete it more to his satisfaction. Even attempts to trace what was JRRT’s and what was editorial intervention/invention proves challenging: witness Douglas Charles Kane’s Arda Reconstructed. We often have multiple versions of the same texts where each has changes and additions that the others do not. The versions of the text are often imperfect. JRRT was fond of writing drafts in pencil and then writing over them in ink. His handwriting was, at times, worse than Luxeuil minuscule. He liked to compose drafts in a seemingly random fashion in notebooks and on the backs of unrelated papers. He liked to fold his work inside of newspapers. He possessed–like medieval writers–a maddening unawareness of the value of his own work would one day hold for students of that work. And then there are the historiographical questions: If an author takes great pains to invent, declare, and even create histories for his imagined narrators, then are we as readers supposed to ignore that information and take his words at face value? Or are we–as I advocate–supposed to keep the narrator’s point-of-view ever in mind and the story they present only one tiny drop in a vast ocean that comprises “truth”? Suddenly, a book is not a story but history and myth. The more I read, the more I found myself asking these questions and the deeper the shadows became and the more they shimmered with imagined possibilities.

And the more questions I begin to answer, the more questions I find to ask. For me, this is the magic that is The Silmarillion; this is why it’s not the best-written book I’ve read and hardly the most entertaining but my favorite nonetheless: because it invites my imagination out to play.

So happy birthday, Silmarillion. I look forward to commemorating many more.

I come bearing excerpts:

During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. (emphasis mine)

Is anyone reading on this blog surprised by the fact that women are turned on by gay men (or by lesbians, for that matter), or surprised that women who are turned on by gay men (or lesbians) are not likely to report it?

Human Nature then goes on to discuss another facet of the study, which is that some women (a good number, based on the numbers quoted in the study) have rape/assault fantasies. There is much uncomfortable tiptoeing around the question of why. I get the feeling that all involved–the researchers, the blogger–are uncomfortable with this fact about female sexuality and what it might imply about the nature of women and (perhaps worse) mean in terms of fueling those cretins still intent on arguing against the right of women not to be raped, no matter what they wear, how much they drink, or how much the male perpetrator perceives that they “want it.”

But, again, I find myself utterly unsurprised by the study’s revelations. There is, after all, a niche of fandom that writes “rapefic” and “noncon,” and discussion concerns less the appropriateness of this (and never, to the best of my knowledge, dissects what went “wrong” with the authors and readers of such stories to make them enjoy this particular fantasy) but rather how to best flag such stories to protect victims, how not to be exploitative in one’s writing, and so on.

As I read about the study, I couldn’t help but to feel annoyed at the gape-mouthed surprise that some of the study’s revelations met with. None of the study’s conclusions seemed odd to me. Female sexuality is complex. A half-day in fandom would demonstrate that women really do want something more than rescue fantasies and to feel taken care of. If you can imagine it, I can guarantee that somewhere, in a dusty corner of the Internet, there is a woman writing it, probably with at least a handful of readers enjoying it.

I remember Bobby once got an issue of Men’s Health (or something along those lines) in the mail as a freebie to lure him into subscribing. Hey, I’m interested in men, so I picked it up. “What Women Want in Bed” was the subject of one of the articles. Now I was really curious! I wanted to know what I wanted in bed! (Or, at least, what I was perceived as wanting. This is the same urge as listening in on a conversation about myself when those talking about me don’t know I’m there so that I can giggle or blush or seethe later, depending on what was said.)

The only item on the list that I remember in retrospect was that women like it when men make them feel “secure.” The article suggested that men should support their partner’s buttocks or the back of her head to accomplish this. The back of her head?! This calls to mind the instructions given to not-kid-people like me when we’re required to hold babies: “Support the back of the head.” I always have this image that, if I don’t, the head will drop right off from its own weight and go rolling across the floor.

Needless to say, this particular piece of advice nauseated me. These people propositioning my husband wanted to teach him to use the same gestures with me during sex that he would use with a newborn infant, and for the same purpose? I felt vaguely horrified and offended and tempted to write whatever imbecilic (male) author came up with this ridiculous idea to tell him that, no, women do not want that! At least, this woman didn’t.

And I think that’s when I realized that women’s desires and sexuality can’t be neatly organized in the same way that you’d sort nails and screws when cleaning the garage. (Yes, that pun was bad, and intentional. Sorry.) Someone had given this poor columnist the idea that women like to be treated as infants in bed. So, sure, some do. But the thought of well-meaning guys everywhere treating their partners like infants sickened me.

Given the surprise that the whole homosexuality- and rape-kinks met with (and these are fairly common, at least based on the number of women in fandom who regularly write these sorts of stories), I don’t even want to imagine what these people would think about, for example, twincest or Morgoth-tortures-Maedhros-in-Angband fantasies. Or mpreg. Oh my Eru, mpreg. I can only imagine bloggers trying to twist evolutionary explanations for women who like to fantasize about Sam impregnating Frodo and then Frodo giving birth to his hairy-footed Hobbitling through his butt.

But you know what? For the first time possibly ever, I felt like fandom had let me in on a secret that the rest of the world was just catching on to. I felt somewhat savvy, flicking my fingers at the people gaping over all of this and saying, “Rape fantasies? Homosexuality fantasies? You ain’t seen nothing yet!” As someone whose “savviness”–at least in this community–is defined by the ease with which she can defend the morality of Fëanor’s actions using obscure textual quotations learned by heart, this sudden plunge into worldliness was surprising but not too uncomfortable. Having been through the knee-jerk “What? NO!” reaction to the fantasies of my fellow fans, and gotten over it, I imagine that there were a lot more “savvy” women (and probably even more men) squirming at the ideas presented in this study. I felt relatively cool and … well, cool, for once.

Then I got annoyed because it felt like, in the attempt to explain the results of the study, there was a need to defend or legitimize the fantasies and desires of not even some but a good number of women. There was the need to squeeze their fantasies into an explanation that was at once scientific and feminist. Pulling and tugging over the right to explain rape fantasies as “evolutionary” or “narcissistic.”

Feministe picked up on the same study and, in the post, I found a sentence that pretty much summed up why I was feeling annoyed:

There are people … who basically argue that women feel enough guilt about sex, and feminist critiques or evaluations or even explorations of rape fantasies are inherently anti-feminist, because, come on, people get off on all kinds of things and we should just leave it alone; if some women like rape fantasies, let ‘em like rape fantasies.

It seems to me that the same people shocked that women like watching gay men would not be shocked at the fact that men like watching lesbians. Or that some men like being dominated. Or that some men are turned on by pregnant women. I mean, all of this stuff is eight-o’clock sitcom fare. When we discover the same diversity among women, we wince and get tongue-tied and pull out the microscope.

Not for the first time, I find myself wishing the world could take a lesson from fandom and worry less about why people are different and–from each individual’s point of view–weird and just accept that it will always be that way and move on.

One of the thoughts that has crossed my mind and is currently sticking in my mind like a cockleburr and annoying me and refusing to be dislodged is how a similar conflict exists between writing and fandom. I say “fandom” because this blog is largely aimed toward fandom and because fandom is where I am most comfortable, but really, I think it applies to any sort of group that encourages (or is even based solely or primarily on) creativity and is maintained by a collective effort by members of the community. For example, I am also a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and I find many of the same conundrums that I experience in fandom arising there as well.

Writing or creating artwork is a selfish endeavor. It is done alone, usually in solitude or silence (as, indeed, I am alone right now in the house with the only sound the humming of my laptop; even the dogs are outside). At times, the drive to write and escape from social obligations drives me to the brink of madness, and I become a truly unpleasant person to be around. Luckily, Bobby understands this and packs me off into an empty room with my laptop and a couple of hours to write. I am not the first writer to lament the words on the page and how they might have translated better into folded laundry or dishes put away or time spent in the company of others who might feel hurt that I am not around. I sometimes feel like an exceedingly selfish person for my writing. (In fact, I should be finishing a school paper right now and even feel a little guilty that I am writing this instead.) For the few years that I participating in NaNoWriMo, November was such a time of peace and relief. It was something official and even impressive-sounding (”I am a participant in this year’s National Novel-Writing Month” *polishes fingernails on the front of waistcoat*), and it was a good excuse to avoid other activities and write instead. I remember when Bobby was playing in a particularly far-off hockey league, and I used to go to all of his games so that he was not driving home exhausted and alone, and I used to take my laptop and write while he was playing. And, sometimes, people I knew would sit down with me and make conversation, and how I longed to say what I was thinking: “Would you just fuck off and let me alone to write?” Only that was exceedingly selfish, so I never did, and who knows how many words didn’t get written because of it. I feel guilty, even now, lamenting those lost words when, clearly, socialization was the right and proper and human thing to do, and people were just trying to be nice to the lonely eccentric woman over by the soda machines. But when NaNoWriMo was going on, everyone was warned up to a month in advance, and I was left alone, and I didn’t feel guilty about it. I was, after all, serving a project larger than myself; it was not so selfish as writing simply because I wanted to.

Fandom, on the other hand–or groups like the SCA–are entities that value unselfishness in the form of service to the community. Forget the above paragraph for a moment and meet Dawn the Archive Owner and Webminister and Volunteer. One of my most passionately uttered values is the importance, as part of a community from which one derives as much enjoyment as I do fandom and the SCA, of contributing in some significant way to that community. Fannish communities are built almost entirely on the contributions of members of that community; if, tomorrow, the co-moderators, volunteers, writers, and reviewers of the SWG all decided that they wanted to leave the time and effort that they spend on their various contributions to someone else, then there would be no SWG. That is the surest way to shut us down.

But the SWG (and many other fannish groups) is by name and definition a group of writers and artists, people whose work is by its very nature selfish and solitary. Almost four years after I formed the SWG, I’d have to say that my only regret, in creating this group for fandom and doing all of the service that that entails, is again, the lost words: the stories that I wanted to write and didn’t because obligations to the community. I am beyond proud, delighted, and thrilled with the SWG and what it has accomplished, and I would never ever unwish it, but sometimes–in the midst of doing the fannish equivalent of changing dirty diapers or playing stuffed-animal tea party–I lament the lost ability to be selfish and wonder what I could have produced in the last four years if I’d never created the SWG.

I have always been proud of my involvement with fandom–and this, quite unexpectedly, has increased the more that I study literature–because I see its collective, shared creativity as more of a return to the creativity that has been natural to the human race since our distant ancestors first started singing verses around the campfire at night, adding and changing where they saw fit. I see the recent turn that creativity–writing in particular–has taken, with its obsessiveness over possession and markets and profit, as the abnormality, not the desire to create based on what has already been done by others. But, at the same time, writing is largely a solitary act. How does that fit into a collective community? For me, I find that I have the same balancing act as that described by mothers who are also writers, who have to make the choice between a crying child and a whispering muse (1), only my choice is between the whispering muse and a webpage that needs updating, emails that need answering, a newsletter that needs writing, announcements that need posting … all of these things that need to be done in service of the fannish ideals in which I believe so strongly and which, almost always, trump my creative ideals, in which I also believe but are easier to defer: They are selfish.

The first creative communities, artists/authors produced songs and stories for the entertainment of an audience that was usually not artistic itself; the artist/author might find able subsistence from this audience: “singing for one’s supper,” if you will. In the modern “real” writing world, markets exist that seek and publish fiction to provide to an audience and, hopefully, these markets compensate writers fairly for their work (excuse me while I have a good laugh at that last point ………….. thanks, I’m better now). In both cases, the artist/author is independent from the majority of consumers of his or her work, and the “community” in which she or he operates is also maintained by people who are not usually themselves artists/authors. Therefore, the creation and maintenance of the infrastructure by which such creativity is produced and shared does not interfere much with the actual production of that creativity.

Fandom is different: The same people who are producing creative works are usually also those who are building and maintaining the communities necessary for that work to be produced and shared. Most archive and group owners are themselves writers; most of our volunteers (and all of my co-moderators) with the SWG are also artists or writers, and so whenever they give their time to their group, then that is taking time from their writing. The audience for fannish works is also, largely, the same people producing those works, so whenever I hear of people who review x number of stories for the MEFAs or review everything posted on a particular archive or community, then I can’t help but to think that that contribution comes at the expense of their own creative endeavors. But, of course, they are making a very necessary contribution.

What is the solution here? There is no solution. What is beautiful about our communities–that they are collective and run by those who are themselves artists and writers (versus those looking to turn a profit on the efforts of others)–is also to our detriment: Those who believe most strongly in service to their communities will feel the pull of both obligations, and it won’t always be pleasant, and the “selfish” and creative will most often lose out, which is itself a loss in words unwritten and ideas unexpressed.

I do wonder, also, to what extent this is a manifestation of fandom being a “female space,” as some like to call it (amid much controversy, of course). Most cultures teach young girls to be selfless, to be helpers, to put their needs below the needs of the group. In women, selflessness is still valued, as evidenced by the continued fervor of the debate over whether or not mothers belong in the workplace. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to value more their individual accomplishments, and it is understood that a degree of selfishness is to be expected. (I remember reading once, when I was very young, that American culture teaches us to see psychopathology in the mother who chooses her needs over those of her children but not in the man who uproots his family, takes his wife from her family and friends and his children from their peers and familiar home, in order to pursue a career that will not benefit that family in the least; in fact, might be to its detriment as the responsibilities of said career take him away from home even more than he already is and, possibly, to a city or living conditions that are ideal to no one but him. That might have been the moment when I became a feminist, being as this point has stuck with me across, literally, almost the entirety of my life. I only wish that I could remember where I read or heard it to give proper credit.)

I wonder how these values that are still taught to girls and esteemed in women have shaped fandom, and I wonder how this will affect our creative accomplishments. Is there a connection? I don’t know. There are, of course, men in fandom, and several Tolkien-based writing groups are run by men, and I do not intend to dismiss or diminish their contributions. But the Tolkien-based writing community is 95% female (at least) and so, presumably, the culture of that community is female as well. I wonder, sometimes, what male-dominated fandoms (and they do exist) look like compared to female-dominated fandoms, like the Tolkien fandom. Do they feel the same conflict between personal creation and contributing to the collective? And this goes, I think, beyond something so large as creating a group or archive. Do they drop everything to write a ficlet for a collection dedicated to a friend whose going through a rough spell? Do they read every story participating in an award or fest and leave comments for all the authors? Do they set their own work aside because a friend needs a last-minute “emergency” beta-read? Most of the people that I know in the Tolkien fandom–male and female–have done at least one of these things at some point, but the Tolkien fandom–being dominated by women–would of course have evolved a value system created largely by women.

To what extent are these values female and not merely fannish and expected parts of any collective community?

These are questions whizzing through my head lately.

An Afterword …

I don’t often write about my experiences as the owner of the SWG for the simple fact that such “confessions” seem to result in an outpouring of gratitude and back-pats that I think people feel are obligatory and that make me feel bad and slightly dirty, as though I have solicited something undeserved for an endeavor that I find very enjoyable and gratifying without people feeling the need to regularly prostrate themselves before me. I make a conscious decision to continue as the owner of the SWG because I love my group and am proud of what it has accomplished. I am breaking my personal rule about writing about my experiences with the SWG here because, as the owner of a mid-sized fannish group, I work well as an example for this topic; nothing more and nothing less. This is not a hint of dissatisfaction or a fishing for praise, pity, or gratitude, and I am going to request that people not turn this post into a session of the above. The contributions of members and associates of the SWG that have allowed us to accomplish what we have, despite being a small and very niche community, have been and continue to be gratitude enough.

References

1. Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood,” in The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature, edited by Mary K. DeShazer, 621-637. New York: Longman, 2001.