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...About the Emily
Chesley Reading Circle
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Media Coverage | ||
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Stranger than fiction ....continued She also mentions authors, such as Anne Rice, who forbid fan fiction -- and it's here that the issue gets complicated. It's one thing to write stories based on characters created by a long-dead author. Martin Amis once mused, after reading Pride and Prejudice: "I found myself thinking I could do with a 20-page sex scene, with D'Arcy acquitting himself uncommonly well." Although the Jane Austen-based stories at www.pemberley.com are unfortunately not very lascivious, there's little stopping one from fulfilling Amis's literary desire. When it comes to living authors, however, some feel it imperils the source of their livelihood. American fantasy writer Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, for instance, has been embroiled in legal battles surrounding her St. Germain series of historical vampire novels. "I have absolutely no sense of humour about copyright infringement," she writes. Yarbro has dealt with four instances of infringement during her career, including one where a fan story was printed in a magazine against her express wishes and the writer even mentioned as much in an introduction. Although Yarbro has managed to settle these issues out of court, she points out that in the U.S., "willful infringement, meaning you know the writer has said no and you do it anyway, carries with it a maximum federal fine of $250,000 and a maximum of five years in a federal penitentiary." When asked whether non-profit on-line fan fiction constitutes at least a grey area, she responds: "I think it is nonsense -- and that is a mild word for the one I would prefer to use -- and that fans who do it show a profound disrespect for the writer and the work they misappropriate in such cases. If fans want to write, they should make up their own stories with their own characters. That's what fiction is all about." Even more potentially litigious are stories concerning real people. For instance, the "slash" variety of fan fiction deals with homoerotic relationships between characters or people who often are ostentatiously, even vociferously, straight. Many of these stories are written as fantastic pornography for and by women, and many are amusing, whether intentionally or not. Consider the following passage from the story Silent Tears by "Chaos," about Eminem and Fred Durst (of Limp Bizkit infamy): "Em could feel tears building up in his eyes. Fred saw it also and hated himself for causing Em pain. 'Fred, can't you see I love you? What do you want me to do? I love her and I love you, she gives me the chance to be with both of you but, no, you don't like that idea,' Em said and let the tears fall. Fred could see the tears falling from Em's face and couldn't help but take him in his arms. Shhh . . . I'll try it okay? But if I don't like it then I'm sorry.' " Touching as the story is, Yarbro's comment about making up one's own characters can be a point well taken. Some fan writers have branched out: Jekkal, for instance, is "currently attempting to write an original novel using the most difficult and time-consuming method I know -- writing by hand." Then again, one can always "discover" one's own author, which is what the Emily Chesley Reading Circle has done. The group, based on-line at www.emilychesley.com, is dedicated to the promotion of the work of a "little-known" early 20th-century writer of "speculative fiction" in London, Ont. The site provides biographical details, academic insight, and even unpublished manuscripts by a forward-thinking (but somehow unrecognized) author. Mark Rayner is the group's "acting secretary" and a lecturer at the University of Western Ontario's Faculty of Information and Media Studies. He and his London colleagues have crafted an impressive on-line compendium of Chesley's bawdy adventures and literary endeavours, and even provide some of "her" writings on their site. The group has put out a call for Chesley-inspired academic papers on the Internet, but Rayner cautions those interested in writing fan fiction based on the work of an author who may herself be fictional. "One thing we have learned about the Chesleyan oeuvre is that it is volatile stuff, not to be trifled with by the 'unlearned' scholar. That said, we can imagine that Emily would have no compunctions sanctioning whatever consenting adults decided to do in the privacy of their own homes (electronic or otherwise)." It seems the Reading Circle is well-placed to put the whole issue in perspective. As Rayner notes, "Emily wrote an interesting novel called The World Wide Waste that hypothesized a world devoted to an electronic device (fancifully termed, IntraVision) in which the population of the world was hypnotized by its own incipient dreams of banality. "Predictably, this story was not a roaring success." Story courtesy of Mike Doherty, originally published in the Globe and Mail. |
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