About “The Stories We (Re)Tell”
The Stories We Re(Tell): Creating New Narratives Through Fanfiction is an oral histories project that seeks to document how fanfiction writers interrupt, interpret, re-imagine, intersect, expand upon, and diverge from canon narratives.
Film, television, games, bestselling books, and other forms of media often require a prohibitive amount of funding to produce—from production costs to authorial advances to marketing expenses. Because of this, canon is frequently produced by the few (determined by privilege or luck), even if it is deeply loved by many.
Fans, however, are not powerless. Through fanfiction, they can interact with canon narratives—whether they choose to:
- interrupt the story to take it a new direction
- interpret canon through new, previously untold perspectives
- re-imagine it from endless “what if” possibilities — from small tweaks to transporting characters to alternate universes
- expand upon canon to continue stories that have ended or fill in missing scenes
- diverge from canon to give the narrative a new direction — or a different ending
These possibilities give fans the ability to explore perspectives, struggles, relationships, storylines, and identities that are not always visibly represented.
This oral histories project seeks to explore how fanfiction intersects with and diverges from canon—through different narrative-based storytelling elements, characterization, varying levels of canon-compliance or canon-divergence, personal connections, and so much more.
About the Interviewer
Lore Whittemore is a Media and Public Engagement Master of Arts candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder who is interested in exploring how narratives are structured in serialized mediums like television and multi-movie franchises — and seeing how fans intersect these canonical narratives to interact with those stories to construct their own.
Lore has also written fanfiction for 10+ years, mostly in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and has attended comic conventions for the past 9 years.
How to Participate
If you would be interested in being interviewed to have your experiences with fanfiction and creating new narratives through this medium preserved through oral history, please indicate your interest when filling out the newsletter form or reach out to Lore Whittemore directly at Taylor.Whittemore-1@colorado.edu.