Kerth History
What exactly are the Lois & Clark Fanfic Kerth Awards?
After many years of reading and writing about our favorite Lois and Clark characters, we FoLCs (Fans of Lois and Clark) decided that having an awards ceremony would be a fun and terrific way to honor those Lois and Clark fanfiction writers who have moved and inspired us over the years with their talents.
In February/March of 1998, Leanne Shawler mentioned an idea she’d seen in another fandom — awards for fanfic. There was immediate enthusiasm on the L&C Fanfic List. The first step was to come up with categories of stories.
With some help from the list, Leanne Shawler and Pam Jernigan came up with 28 categories. Nominations were restricted to stories that had been uploaded to the archive prior to the end of 1997. Then Leanne very bravely offered to compile the nominations. That herculean task done, we had a list of nominees, and we were ready for voting to begin.
Various FOLCs helped with the voting process. Some set up webpages (you could find all the nominated stories through Genevieve’s site, and Peace set up both a voting form and a list of Kerth Nominees with short bio information on nominated authors) and some others helped Leanne to count the votes.
While votes were being counted, discussion turned to the possibility of doing a fancy awards show in real time, on IRC. Pam thought that was a very cool idea, and volunteered to coordinate the ceremony. Luckily for her, several FOLCs agreed to help out, most notably Erin Klingler, who helped immensely and ended up being the mistress of ceremonies for the show.
The first ever Kerth awards ceremony was held March 28th, 1998 with an enthusiastic crowd. At one point, over 70 FOLCs were in attendance.
The following year, Leanne bowed out of participating, so Erin took over as coordinator. She and Pam also added Kathy Brown (due to her position at the time of editor-in-chief of the L&C fanfic archive) to form the Kerth committee (K-Com).
We continued to run the awards on an annual basis, with lots and lots of help from lots and lots of FOLCs. After a few years, we also added Annette Ciotola to the K-Com, due to her position as webmistress of Annesplace and her general all-around techie genius. Wendy Richards and Hazel (and later Meredith Knight) formed the Kerth quiz team for lots of fun quizzes on the fanfic list.
In early 2002, Pam realized she was too busy with her real life to continue coordinating the IRC ceremonies, so starting in 2003, she turned that over to Annette. Also in 2003, we added KathyM as an independent vote counter to help Erin. In 2005, Erin and Kathy agreed that they, too, had done enough and were ready to ease out of their positions and let other FOLCs take over the job.
We were fortunate to have several brave volunteers, and so the new Kerth Committee will be Kaethel, Yvonne, Tricia, and Annette, with support from Elena and KathyM. We expect a smooth transition and look forward to many more years of great awards.
In 2017, news that the Kerth Awards might not happen due to scheduling conflicts for the KCOM resulted in a change of leadership. NostalgiaKick (Felicia Dexter) and Deadly Chakram (Victoria Morrissey) began compiling the eligible list with the help of LabRat and Lauren. Shortly after, Folc4evernaday (Valerie Wilson) joined the fold, assisting with organizing multimedia, and graphic design. Annette remains on with web design and maintenance.
In 2023 (the 25th anniversary of the Kerth Awards!), the committee changed hands, with KSaraSara, Darth Michael, lovetvfan, and AnnieM running the show. Annette remained on in an advisory role and was joined by KathyB. In 2024, AnnieM needed to step down due to RL obligations, and the role was filled by JadedEvie.
The 25th anniversary (and the addition of Darth Michael as Technical Coordinator) brought with it some amazingly helpful automation features! We’re now able to automate the list of eligible stories from the TOCs on the message boards.
written by the Kerth Committee
Erin, Pam, Kathy, Annette, Kaethel, Yvonne and Tricia
Updated by Valerie Wilson, Felicia Dexter, Victoria Morrissey, and Annette Ciotola
Updated by KSaraSara, Darth Michael, lovetvfan, and JadedEvie