Writers in the Secret Garden

Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring

Author  Cecilia Aragon and Katie Davis Foreword by  Casey Fiesler
Writers in the Secret Garden

An in-depth examination of the novel ways young people support and learn from each other though participation in online fanfiction communities.

Over the past twenty years, amateur fanfiction writers have published an astonishing amount of fiction in online repositories. More than 1.5 million enthusiastic fanfiction writers—primarily young people in their teens and twenties—have contributed nearly seven million stories and more than 176 million reviews to a single online site, Fanfiction.net. In this book, Cecilia Aragon and Katie Davis provide an in-depth examination of fanfiction writers and fanfiction repositories, finding that these sites are not shallow agglomerations and regurgitations of pop culture but rather online spaces for sophisticated and informal learning. Through their participation in online fanfiction communities, young people find ways…