*Kate M.: And then the internet came to my house. And that little dial up connection changed my life. All of a sudden this comic from Japan was at my fingertips! I could find all sorts of websites about Sailor Moon and even more anime and manga. I devoured it all! I became almost as obsessed with these websites as I was with the series I was reading and watching. And soon I wanted to contribute to this community. I wrote my own, very bad, fanfic and went to make website to host the first few stories and fell in love with web design. Soon I was more interested in the web design part than I was in the fanfic (thank god, as I was very bad at writing fanfic). I started making websites about all my favorite series which lead me to all sorts of coding languages and information hierarchies. By that time I was working in my public library as a shelver…and they asked me to help them build a collection of manga and comics and I was hooked. I haven’t looked back since!

*Tessa: For a long time YA was the genre where you could do ANYTHING. Genre-bending, pushing the envelope re: sex and narrative, you could experiment—the only thing you had to have in the story was some kind of teenage experience. I do think that YA has specialized a bit more in the past five years, and it's united by the Teen Experience—regardless of genre—and opening up in huge ways to marginalized teen experiences.

I love the intimacy and immediacy of YA. Most of it, especially the successful books, put the reader right into the heart (narratively and emotionally) of a character, and pull the reader along unstoppably until the last page. YA is the kind of genre where you can hope for and even expect to not want to put a book down until you finish. Not because they’re all action-oriented page-turners, but because you become that character, and invest in them in a way that isn’t always present in other genres.

Did you miss our chat with author Tessa Gratton & Kate McNair of YALSA? If so you can check out the transcript of their talk https://goo.gl/FGo9pM

What things have you been excited to see in recent years, either regarding fandom or work in your genre(s)?

*Catherine R.
I really like fanfiction and its explosion on the internet. I think fanfic is a great way for people to learn the craft skills of writing. Many of my college students fall in love with writing that way: by reading fanfic and then starting to write it themselves. I always encourage them to go for it! I love the supportive structure it creates for imagination and fantasy to run wild. I think that realm is so important. Imagination lets us explore quandaries of desire and justice and truth and conflict: all the central problems of what it means to be human.

*Christina L.
It’s been incredibly exciting to see so many writers from our fandom specifically or fandom in general out there publishing books. Of course we all know the big ones—EL James, Cassie Clare—but there are others from the Twi world that had fantastic voices and ideas and who are now also bestsellers. Sally Thorne, Alice Clayton, Nina Bocci, Leisa Rayven, Mariana Zapata, Amanda Weaver—all of these women wrote fantastic fic.

Did you miss our chat with Christina Lauren & Catherine Roach? If so check out the transcript of their talk! https://goo.gl/8DR1PG

“This issue of Transformative Works and Cultures seeks to address that perceived gap in the fan studies literature by extensively engaging with the Sherlockian fandom that dates back to the 1890s. The essays in this issue shed additional light on the explosion of the fandom by taking a look backward, examining Sherlock Holmes fandoms (for they are all fandoms) through the lens of historical context or with an eye to the fandoms' sometimes fraught cultural divisions.”

Transformative Works and Culture's issue 23 is out, and it's all about Sherlock Holmes fans & fandoms, from historical to present day. Share your favorite articles! https://goo.gl/bOEODC