The Culture Gabfest talks fanfiction & The Fanfiction Reader

The guys on Slate’s Culture Gabfest, a podcast, discussed fanfiction and my book, The Fanfiction Reader, as part of their September 6, 2017 episode “Look What You Made Richard Dreyfuss Do. The blurb for the episode: Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner discuss the 40th anniversary re-release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, […]

The Fanfiction Reader – Reviewed In The New Yorker!

This is mostly a placeholder post for when I stop screaming with joy out my apartment window, but The Fanfiction Reader just got a great, thoughtful, really clued-in review from Steph Burt in The New Yorker (!!): The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction. I said on my Tumblr that this was the first zine […]

50th Anniversary Orton Celebration

There has been fantastic press and many interesting educational opportunities surrounding the August 9, 2017 anniversary of Joe Orton’s death on August 9, 1967 – a death that was within weeks of the decriminalization of homosexuality in England. Perhaps my favorite artifact, however, is the Joe Orton board game developed by students: it’s not every […]

My Strong Opinions (Loosely Held)

This site is still a work in progress but if anyone’s following, I was on the latest episode of Strong Opinions Loosely Held with my friend, Elisa Kreisinger. “Teenage Girls Are Magic.”

Queer Female Fandom, a special issue of TWC

The fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) has just announced the release of their special issue on Queer Female fandom, guest edited by Julie Levin Russo and Eve Ng. This area of fan research is so under-represented; this is an amazing and desperately needed addition to work on fandom. Run, don’t walk. TWC […]

Male Fanfic

Note to self: It occurs to me that I have to write an article about the canon of male fanfic “fixing” the situation of those liberated women: Nora Helmer and Irene Adler, as I mentioned last post, but also Eliza Doolittle, despite Shaw’s endless meta trying to stop them doing it. I bet there are […]

God, I’m so sick of male critics, Part 2

Title occasioned by seeing A Doll’s House, Part 2, a play which is irritating to me in several ways: 1) it’s fanfic, which is fine, except it’s 2) fanfic written by a man that 3) despite being not as clever as it clearly thinks it is, was 4) nominated for best play: I mean, this […]

God, I’m sick of male critics

Once I really get this site up and running, one of the things I’d like to do with this blog is a little reviewing – because my god, am I sick to death of male critics. The disjunction I feel while reading male theatre and film reviews – not all (not all men, etc.) – […]

Will Audible replace the Wednesday Play?

I’m interested by the news that Audible is going to fund emerging playwrights with a five million dollar grant to develop new voices; it reminds me a bit of the days when BBC radio was trying really hard to get new voices on the radio; this is how John Tydeman broke playwrights like Joe Orton […]

I Had It In Me, by Leonie Orton

I Had It In Me is a memoir with a double-entendre of a title worthy of Joe Orton – except it’s by Orton’s youngest sister Leonie Orton, and as you might guess, it has something of a feminist slant. I nearly switched my dissertation topic last minute to focus on Leonie Orton as a kind […]