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Meet THe Team
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The word “fanfiction” covers all sorts of writing featuring and further exploring characters, settings, and concepts from preexisting fictional worlds: movies, TV shows, books. Fanfiction also comes with a rich cultural history, some elements of which have recently been adopted into the mainstream publishing industry via popular tropes like “enemies to lovers” and “there was only one bed.”
And it’s not just the tropes. Some best-selling novels even start off as fanfiction: The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood started off as Star Wars fanfiction; Fifty Shades of Grey was once Twilight fanfiction; and Twilight was once My Chemical Romance fanfiction. Books about fandom (like James F. Thomas’s Idlewild, Esther Yi’s Y/N, and Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Everything I Need I Get from You) are also increasingly popular.
Whether you contributed to Star Trek zines in the 70s or Buffy forums in the 90s, were deep in the Tumblr trenches of the early 2010s, or have never heard of fanfiction, this multi-genre class will help us use fanfiction as a tool towards our original writing projects: an original story starting from the seed of an existing media property; persona poems in the voice of your favorite character; a spec script for an episode of an existing TV show; an essay about your own experiences with fanfiction and fandom, or your connection to a particular character. We’ll discuss the lines between what’s derivative, what’s transformative, and what’s original, leaning full-tilt into nostalgia, obsession, and the media properties we love.
• In-Class Writing Lift: Light
• Homework: None
• Workshopping Drafts: None
Ellie Black is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Poetry at Hendrix College. She received a PhD in Creative Writing (emphasis in memoir/autotheory) and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Mississippi. A finalist for the 2025 DISQUIET Prize in Poetry, she has work published in or forthcoming from The Adroit Journal, Bennington Review, The Common, Washington Square Review, The Drift, and elsewhere. She's currently working on a memoir about her time on Tumblr.
"I absolutely adored Ellie. She weaved together a historical foundation to help us understand the history of confessional poetry, and led an engaging discussion around what is a poet/what is poetry for the group. For such a short class, I could have spent weeks with Ellie, fleshing out poetry and learning more from here."
