Sara Ryan

My dad was active in the sf fanzine community in the 1950s and 60s. Every so often I post excerpts from his zines. He was 26 when he wrote this. the loud and the mundane: “Had a mimeograph salesman in to see me today,” said Randy. “You ever hear of a Gestetner?” We were sitting [...]

So Father’s Day, for me, is a day to think about how much I miss my dad. I have lots of days like that, only rarely underscored by national celebrations, and on those days, I often read Dad’s writing. Sometimes, like today, I choose to share it with the Internet. Here he is at 27, [...]

This is from my father’s sf fanzine Bandwagon #4, autumn, winter 1957. Dad was 27, living in Columbus, Ohio. I’m posting it for the usual reasons, and also for Jeff: the man who reads dictionaries: After some years of struggling along with two or three battered and inadequate dictionaries I have at long last come [...]

From time to time, I’ll be posting things my dad wrote, because I miss him, and because I think they’re worth sharing. This one, a bit of social history about amateur publishing, is from his submission to the National Amateur Press Association, “Experiment #1,” in March 1989. I’m transcribing it from a dot-matrix printout. (And, [...]

Background for this post: In the late fifties and early sixties, my father Richard Ryan published fanzines as a member of FAPA, the Fantasy Amateur Press Association. Members wrote about sf/f, each other’s zines, current events, and (as with all zines) anything else that crossed their minds. I have copies of the zines he produced, [...]