About Us
The voice wants to be
a hand and the hand wants to do something
useful. What did you really want? Someone
to pass this with me.
- Richard Siken, “Unfinished Duet”
On March 15th, poet Richard Siken—author of Crush and War of the Foxes, and editor at Spork Press—suffered a stroke. Since then, Richard’s publishers, friends, and readers have mounted a fundraising campaign in order to support his financial needs and help him live as healthfully as possible while he recovers. You can find the campaign at Gofundme here (all transactions conducted in USD).
Richard is himself a ficwriter, and has written with great insight on the intriguing and transformative potentials of fanwork and fandom spaces. And for so many of us in fandom, Richard’s poetry has in various ways been a well of inspiration from which to draw—work that we value highly, that has in turn enabled us to create and motivated us to keep creating.
Given the above circumstances, we’d like to take the opportunity to give back. Fandom for Siken is an online fanworks auction designed to raise funds to supplement the Richard Siken Stroke Recovery Fund. In terms of operations, we’ll be working in a similar vein to Fandom Trumps Hate and the AO3 Charity Auction, following the below process:
- Creators sign up to offer their work (i.e. fanfic, fanart) for auction.
- The auction winner donates their winning bid amount directly to the abovementioned Gofundme campaign.
- The auction winner sends the moderators proof of their donation (e.g. a screenshot or a copy of their receipt) for confirmation and documentation.
- Once the moderators notify the creator that their bidder has paid, the creator may then work on the requested item.
Donations from all bidders will be coursed exclusively through Gofundme. We won’t be handling any of the money ourselves, to ensure that all proceeds of the auction and of the adjacent snail mail project go to Richard Siken.
Fandom for Siken is the brainchild of May, Ewa, and Meg. We come from various fandoms and backgrounds, but are united by the fact that our favorite poems stab us in the vitals on the regular.
