From the Greek manthanein meaning “to learn,” and poly, of course, meaning “much” or “many,” it’s an understatement to claim that Marc Estrin was a polymath. Marc labored tirelessly as an editor, a musician, a composer, an author, a publisher, an artist with the Bread And Puppet Theatre, and a political activist. He wrote 17 novels and two memoirs and died at age 86 on the tenth of August, 2025.
According to what I’ve researched from Shelf Awareness, and Seven Days (the links are below this paragraph) Mark and his wife, Donna Bister, creators of Fomite Press, https://fomitepress.com/ were in their fourteenth year of running what they called their postcapitalist publishing company. Or, more specifically and playfully, what Marc in his canny way called "Occupy publishing."
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/life-lines/obituary-marc-estrin-1939-2025-44262778
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/arts-culture/author-and-activist-marc-estrin-dies-at-86-44208501
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Estrin
https://breadandpuppetpress.org/collections/fomite-press
Before this venture into book publishing, the couple, along with fellow Vermonter, author and activist Ron Jacobs https://www.counterpunch.org/author/ron-jacobs/ spent close to seven years producing the Old North End Rag, a monthly neighborhood newspaper they started in 1996 as a way to distribute the Burlington Vermont’s Neighborhood Planning Assembly's agenda. They used cartoons and articles to attract interest. A fabricated story in an April Fools' issue announced that Burlington’s City Market was going to start selling cigarettes. This allegedly prompted a call from the city's Community & Economic Development Office.
Author Ron Jacobs
Published in CounterPunch magazine on August 13th just two days after his death, Mr. Jacobs wrote a tribute titled, “Marc Estrin's Fictions of Alienation” https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/13/marc-estrins-fictions-of-alienation/ that summarizes Marc’s work, and reveals something of the man.
Jacobs wrote: "I don’t want to make Marc sound too serious because he wasn’t. Consciously or not, he reminded me of the trickster more than once. While our work may have been serious, his approach reminded me of a quote attributed to Emma Goldman about dancing and revolution. I never saw Marc dance, so this seems like a more honest paraphrase: 'If I can’t laugh, I don’t want to be in your revolution.' "
I savor viewing Marc’s work this way, as the ongoing testimony of a literary trickster. Jacobs is quoted in a Seven Days interview that "I will write a tribute to him once I gather my thoughts. I'll miss him as a friend, editor and co-conspirator."
I like that label, as well – co-conspirator. I look forward to Mr. Jacobs next tribute.
To learn more about Marc, and some of the ideas and motivations behind his work, by all means visit his website, https://marcestrin.com/.
It’s full of oddities such as Marc, explaining The Insect Dialogues, one of his nonfiction books, but writing of himself in the third person:
"In 2016, Marc Estrin decided to publish Kafka's Roach, the unedited version of the manuscript that a dozen years earlier Fred Ramey had acquired, edited, and published under the title Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa. Estrin's decision raises questions about the editor's role in the life of a book, the trajectory of one author's career, and whether a published novel is a stable thing anymore. All of that is worth a wide discussion, and so Ramey asked his erstwhile author to engage in a colloquy. The Insect Dialogues is the record of the e-mail conversation that ensued."
Published in 2002, Marc’s novel Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa riffs on Kafka’s character in his classic story, “The Metamorphosis.”
In a review for the New York Times, Ken Tucker wrote: "Estrin plucks the bug, which was tossed into the trash at the conclusion of Kafka's tale, and lets him live on in a book that is a sort of ‘Ragtime’ for roaches," adding that Marc "has music in his prose."
As co-publisher of Unbridled Books, Fred Ramey has stated in an interview, recalling their exchange and editorial relationship: "It's been about 25 years, since I published Marc's debut novel at BlueHen/Putnam. (I published it a second time at Unbridled Books.) In all, I published, I think, six of his first seven novels. Marc was prolific and irrepressible, but he was not in any way uneditable. On the contrary. What he wrote was always brave and imaginative and unexpected. After he and Donna founded Fomite Press, he would often encourage my work as he did for so many people. I think that was an extension of his activism. After 25 years of our exchanges, I imagine I'll keep wondering about all the books Marc didn't get to write."
Each of Marc's books is so different. So off the wall. Such a mash-up and, in my opinion, refreshingly experimental and daring. And much different from my own, to be sure. He was prolific, but I don’t think he was all that keen on penning conventional realistic fiction, or living a conventional life, but he appeared to like and enjoy reading, editing and supporting authors of all stripes. A quick survey of some of his titles makes it apparent that he approached fiction and nonfiction as needing as much quirkiness, intellectualism and post-post-modern humor and surrealism that any author could dream up.
In 2005, Marc published The Education of Arnold Hitler. If that’s not a tongue-in-cheek title, I don’t know what is.
Other novels include, Golem Song in 2006, The Lamentations of Julius Marantz in 2007, The Annotated Nose, with artwork by Delia Robinson in 2008, Skulk in 2009, followed by The Good Doctor Guillotin in the same year.
In 2011, he published When the Gods Come Home to Roost. And Kafka's Roach in 2017.
Ron Jacobs has also described Marc as a "modern-day Renaissance man." Marc enjoyed, wrote about, played and studied music. He was a theater director in San Francisco, and Pittsburgh. He was a theater professor at the now-closed Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. He was an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister who served congregations in Moscow, Idaho, and in Middlebury, Vermont. He was a physician's assistant, a cellist, a puppeteer who toured with Bread and Puppet Theater, and the first coordinator of the Burlington Peace & Justice Center.
Burlington City Councilor Gene Bergman, a friend of Marc’s who worked with him in the fight for peace and justice, said when interviewed for Seven Days that Marc had “a philosopher's sensibility” and was an “intellectual in the truest sense of the word."
Wendy Coe, Gene Bergman’s wife who co-founded the Peace & Justice Center where Estrin was hired in 1984 making him its first paid employee, told Seven Days that while Estrin could be curmudgeonly at times, he was positive and always thinking about ways to change the world. "He did enough thinking for a thousand people."
I liked learning that Marc could be curmudgeonly at times. Curmudgeons are seldom dull. I’m sure that some nagging dissatisfactions were part of what drove him. Marc, however, never took himself too seriously. https://marcestrin.blogspot.com/
He's pictured above playing in Warsaw in 1972.
The About the author section on the home page of his website proves Marc's ability to laugh at himself with self-deprecating nuggets such as:
"He is baffling, even unto himself."
OR
“Marc Estrin is a writer, cellist, and activist living in Burlington, Vermont.”
OR
“Marc Estrin's world line approximates a cross between a fungal mycelium and a Rube Goldberg device. Biologist, theater director, EMT, Unitarian minister, physician assistant, puppeteer, political activist, college professor, cellist and conductor, he is baffling, even unto himself.”
OR
“Marc Estrin was hired to teach theater at Goddard College, but in this departmentless utopia, wound up also teaching music, writing, Finnegans Wake, math, physics, medical self-help and "crazy courses" like Philosophy for Dishwashers, an audio-based lecture/discussion series to sweeten the life of cafeteria volunteers. Such are the fruits of liberal education.”
OR
“Marc Estrin grew up in a small apartment so full of books you had to walk sideways in the hall. Of these, he read not one -- till age sixteen, when he gave up his literary virginity to Franz Kafka: The Trial was his introduction to the larger life. This explains much. A mediocre student in high school, he was teased by his father into reading The Magic Mountain during the summer before college. Epiphany! The book was for him a topo-map of western thought and culture. With Mann as his guide, he sailed through college and grad schools, making a Hegelian leap out of graduate science into the richer, if iffier area of the arts. The Vietnam war and Bertolt Brecht were his siren callers into political activity, and his professional theater work dissipated into organizing, college teaching and communal living. When these ceased to put food on the table, he reached back into a past life to study and practice medicine. With the computer came the possibility of writing without retyping -- a stimulus sufficient to have resulted in his current crop of manuscripts, published and unpublished.”
This is from Elisabeth Crean’s review of Marc’s The Good Doctor Guillotin: An Anatomy of Five, published by Unbridled Books. https://www.unbridledbooks.com/
Unusual elements often fuse in the alchemy that inspires a work of fiction. Burlington writer and activist Marc Estrin cites two catalysts for his latest project, The Good Doctor Guillotin: An Anatomy of Five, that seem completely unrelated: an interest in the case of the Vermonter sent to death row, and the desire to read a popular tome about the French Revolution. Capital punishment is the topic that linked them. Although many heads ultimately rolled during France’s years of political disarray, leaders hotly debated the morality of state-sponsored execution in the revolt’s idealistic early days, just as Americans do today.
Most of The Good Doctor Guillotin is a historical novel, set in the tumultuous years just before and at the dawn of the Revolution. Estrin traces how the lives of five characters intersect at a gruesome hour on April 25, 1792: the first execution by the newly unveiled guillotine. Brief nonfiction essays, in which Estrin opines on past and present political topics, introduce each series of chapters.
“The initial inspiration was the work that I’m doing with Vermonters Against the Death Penalty, which started with the Donnie Fell case a couple of years ago,” Estrin recalls. (Federal prosecutors successfully secured a capital sentence against Fell in 2006 for taking a Rutland murder victim across state lines in 2000.) Book projects often become the “focus for research and reading that I’ve been wanting to do for a while,” Estrin confesses. He’d been “looking for an excuse to read” Simon Schama’s Citizens, a sprawling history of France’s first flirtation with democracy.
This began a six-month path of research. Four of the novel’s five principals are real historical people. “There wasn’t much about anybody,” Estrin explains. “So I had to make up a lot of stuff” to flesh out skeletal biographical materials. The characters feel authentic because they inhabit a world thoroughly grounded in period detail. They also interact with other historical figures about whom more is known, such as Mozart, Robespierre and the Marquis de Sade.
The novelist creates a rich inner life for each character. Most compelling is that of the doctor, who is also a political reformer and ardent opponent of capital punishment. He doesn’t think enough fellow National Assembly delegates can be persuaded to abolish the death penalty, so he proposes creating a swifter and supposedly less painful method than those used at the time: a mechanical decapitation device.
Guillotin doesn’t invent the tall wooden frame with the efficient triangular blade — it is based on Scottish and Italian designs already in use. Nor does he build it; a German piano maker living in Paris does. But, as Estrin writes, “the good Doctor Guillotin [is] a man doomed by laughing fate to immortal scorn. He wanted an egalitarian justice system, a more humane method of execution. In return he was haunted by repulsion and sniggering, by dirty pointing fingers and hands going chop-chop at the neck.” Guillotine is a feminine noun that implies the death machine is the humanitarian’s daughter.
Capital punishment wasn’t outlawed in France until 1981. The last execution took place in Marseille, in 1977. The method? The only one used in that country since the French Revolution: guillotine.
Fomite also published approximately 20 books with the Bread and Puppet theater company.
Donna and Marc worked with painter and sculptor Delia Robinson to illustrate some Fomite books. Ms. Robinson had known Marc since the age of 16, adding to a sense of family that I came to believe was part of Fomite’s mission. "He really was a person of integrity in many astonishing ways,” said Ms. Robinson in an interview with Seven Days. “And that included helping other people to try to learn, to jump a little higher and to discover the best things they could do."
Ms. Robinson appears as a character in Mark’s novel, The Annotated Nose, published by Unbridled Books. The daughter of a Princeton professor, Ms. Robinson grew up next door to Albert Einstein. She knew Vermont poet Galway Kinnell, once her father’s student, “since before I was an egg.” Raised at a time when women weren’t expected to produce art, she trained as a nurse to pay for her paints.
“I can’t paint on a clean surface,” she told Margot Harrison in an interview. “If a piece of paper’s been run over by a truck, that interests me a lot. I have to mess a piece of paper up. And generally I do that with photo transfers. I put down a lot of mess on a page of newsprint, anything, and I glue it facedown on the page, and then I rip it all off and scrub it off. When it looks like a skin disease, I’m very happy. And then I draw on top or paint on top of that.”
The result is multilayered images that combine painting with photomontage. For instance, in Robinson’s illustration of Alexei Pigov’s “first love,” photos of the New York skyline are dimly visible through the young girl’s translucent image. “I really like that kind of thing, where you can see through to what’s hidden underneath,” Robinson says. “I’m very interested in what’s not immediately appparent. What’s behind the behind the behind.”
Ms. Robinson works mostly in acrylic: “I’m way too impatient to wait for oil to dry,” she says. “I also use a lot of materials you shouldn’t use — kids’ crayons, anything. I like staples stuck into things. I like a big mess. It’s a thick, linoleum-like surface.”
Not unlike Marc’s novels, with their dense collage of high and low cultural references. “My paintings all have these layers. And his books are built in the same kind of way.”
Ms. Robinson goes on to say that illustrating The Annotated Nose “was major for me, because it’s the first glimpse I’ve had of the fact that I am not totally, rebelliously independent. I can do a picture on someone else’s theme and not find that an excruciating or diminishing idea.”
Here is Margot Harrison’s 2008 review of The Annotated Nose.
One spring, Burlington author Marc Estrin attends an unusual midnight gathering at the Flynn Center. The sold-out event attracts a crowd of young people dressed as “zombies, ghouls, vamps and vampires,” not to mention the “plague doctors” — “a large flock of black-gowned, bird-masked figures with yard-long beaks and goggled eyes.” They’re all here to see a mysterious masked figure called The Nose, who bounds onstage leading a rat on a leash and addresses them as “Dearly Afflicted.”
As The Nose informs the audience that he’s here to deliver them from the “contemporary plague,” a mystified Estrin asks his daughter what’s going on. She explains that the performance is based on a bestselling book: William Hundwasser’s The Nose. “This is the cult book’s cult.”
Wondering why you missed such an exciting cultural event? Perhaps because it never happened. The fictional Flynn performance is merely the jumping-off point for Estrin’s latest novel, The Annotated Nose. A comic story on serious themes, it’s built on a book-within-a-book conceit that may tie modern readers’ brains in knots, but would have seemed perfectly normal to 18th-century readers of Sterne and Diderot. In an age of disposable lit, it’s also an elaborately, expensively designed book, featuring 35 black-and-white illustrations by Montpelier artist Delia Robinson.
In 2002, The Christian Science Monitor called Estrin’s first novel, Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, a “new cult classic” and predicted that it would “inspir[e] a companion collection of footnotes and commentary.” While the book was reviewed — and sometimes raved about — from The New York Times to The San Francisco Chronicle to The New Yorker, it failed to turn its author into a household name. Maybe Estrin’s combination of a wildly allusive, erudite style and an unreconstructed 1960s leftist political consciousness simply didn’t fit the times. But it did fit the tastes of editor Fred Ramey, who shepherded Insect Dreams into print while working at mega-corp Penguin Putnam and has since published four more Estrin novels through his independent Colorado-based company, Unbridled Books.
At 69 — he began writing at 58 — Estrin feels a bit like a cult author whose cult has yet to materialize. Thus it seems appropriate that he should write The Annotated Nose, which critiques the very phenomenon of cult novels.
But it’s a bit more complicated than that. In his account of the fictional Flynn performance, Estrin poses as the editor of the book we’re about to read. He tells us the experience inspired him to email The Nose, whose real name is Alexei Pigov. A man who’s lived on the margins all his life, his face hidden by masks, Alexei is both the hero of Hundwasser’s novel and the center of its lucrative multimedia cult (a merchandising triumph involving, among other things, dolls and a Coen brothers film). But he has serious objections to the way Hundwasser portrayed him — so serious, in fact, that he’s prepared an exhaustive series of notes to The Nose, hoping to set the story straight.
Fascinated by “the pain-filled combat of a literary character with his author,” Estrin volunteers to edit The Annotated Nose. This turns out to be a major undertaking, because Alexei doesn’t want his side of the story told in lowly footnotes or endnotes. No, he wants his version of events to confront Hundwasser’s head on: the reprinted cult novel on lefthand pages, the notes on the right.
Hence the unique experience of reading The Annotated Nose. Perusing the left-hand pages, which narrate a freakish and funny coming-of-age tale, one is continually stopped by superscript numbers that lead one over to the other side. For instance, when Hundwasser presents the transcription of The Nose’s interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Alexei steps in to point out the whole thing is “sheer fabrication.” “Now let me be clear,” he muses, “I would have liked to go on Terry Gross’s show . . . I might even like to go out with her if she seemed open to it . . .”
That’s Alexei Pigov’s tragicomedy in a nutshell. Cursed with a big nose, abandoned by a Gypsy father and neglected by a whorish mother, he uses a succession of masks and assumed identities — ranging from Groucho Marx to Pinocchio to a plague doctor — to hide his unsightly face. A truth seeker in a cynical world, he sees his disguises as reminders of the power of individual expression and protest; his is “a Big White Lie life which might lead us all to freedom.” A lifelong virgin, he also hopes his brand of performance art will help him get girls.
“It actually came from a real situation,” says Estrin of The Annotated Nose, when Seven Days visits him at his home in the Old North End. “My best friend in college was the subject of a cult novel in the ’60s. And there’s been this struggle between the character in this book and its author for the last 50 years.” Another model was a musician friend of Estrin’s “who for 50 years has been trying to get a girlfriend, and his pick-up lines were ridiculous.” (Alexei’s pick-up lines include such winners as “Is it hot in here, or is it just you?” and “I’ll be Beethoven, you be Mozart. Let’s have a conversation.”)
Estrin calls his novel “a straightforward annotated book. People think the book is postmodern or something, but it isn’t.” Postmodern or not, he certainly plays games with the reader — for instance, by putting the book’s illustrator, Delia Robinson, inside the fiction.
In The Nose, Delia is a beautiful dwarf who falls in love with Alexei Pigov. He rejects her because he finds her body as grotesque as his own face. In real life, artist Robinson is average sized. She’s known Estrin since 1964, when “he had driven across the country on a motorcycle with my sister for them to get married in Danby, Vermont,” she recalls. Though the marriage eventually ended, the friendship between the in-laws endured.
Sitting in Estrin’s living room, Robinson says the two of them “have a similar sensibility. And we’re both quite perverse in what we think is funny.” Perhaps some of that perversity went into the fictional version of Delia. Estrin wanted the artist to be a character in The Nose, he says, to justify her inside knowledge of Alexei Pigov. He asked Robinson who she wanted to be. “She said, ‘I’d like to be a dwarf.’ I said, ‘Do you want to be an achondroplastic dwarf or a pituitary dwarf?’ And she said achondroplastic . . . and she said, ‘I’d like to be a nun.’” So Delia became a pint-sized cloistered nun.
While The Annotated Nose is undeniably a funny book, it’s sometimes deadly serious, as when Alexei points out that Americans started worrying about the plague — any and all plagues — after 9/11. Why does the modern world need plague doctors? “The contemporary plague is having to be in someone else’s script,” Estrin says. “Alexei is in Hundwasser’s script. The generalization of that to our lives is, what scripts are we being forced to perform? What characters have been given to us? We are the people who are now bailing out the big corporations and the financiers. ‘Oh, I didn’t realize I was here to do that!’ . . . The question is, why do we believe that’s who we are, instead of looking for more authentic scripts?”
Both Estrin and Robinson speak fondly of editor Fred Ramey, whom they call “Freditor.” “He’s an old-school editor,” Estrin says. “These are people who had dedicated their lives and professions and in many cases their money to nursing American literature.”
But how did he sell Freditor on the idea of a hand-set, illustrated book that retails for nearly $40 in hardcover? “He kept asking me, ‘Can’t we just have endnotes?’” says Estrin. But the author had vivid memories of trying to read the heavily endnoted novel Infinite Jest on a gym treadmill, where flipping pages doesn’t work. “I tried to convince Fred that this was training readers to hold two things in their minds at the same time,” he says with a chuckle. “Someone told me it’s a great book for ADD people.” Ramey eventually gave in, though the book’s unusual side-by-side design created “note clumping” problems that necessitated an “emergency order” for more illustrations to fill empty space. Unbridled is printing 75 copies of a signed collector’s edition with a cover by Robinson, and Estrin says a paperback is also in the works.
“[The price] was a real concern with Marc, that nobody we know could cough up that much money to buy a book,” Robinson says. All the same, she’s already been contacted by one person who coughed up $195 for the collector’s edition — and who presented her with an odd request. “This is your playfulness coming around to bite you,” says Robinson slyly to Estrin. “He said, ‘There’s a space in the back for Alexei Pigov to sign it, and he’s not signed. I would like to know where I can send this book to get this signature.’ Alexei Pigov is a fictional character!”
Indeed, it seems unlikely that The Nose’s fan will ever get his autograph. But in the world of Marc Estrin — who appears masked in his author photo on the book jacket — stranger things have happened.
Here is a link to the book,
Rehearsing With The Gods. This is a collection of photographs and essays on the Bread and Puppet Theater. The black and white photographs are by Ron Simon and the essays are by Ron Simon and Marc Estrin, with a foreword by Grace Paley.
https://breadandpuppetpress.org/products/rehearsing-with-the-gods
The following is Margot Harrison’s 2012 review of Marc’s ninth novel, When The Gods Come Home To Roost, published by Spuyten Duyvil. https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/
As I was watching American Reunion recently, I was struck by the resemblance between that broad farce about thirtysomethings aching to recapture their glory days and the new Latin-studded, ultra-erudite novel from Burlington’s Marc Estrin.
That’s a slight exaggeration. But at the core of this far more ambitious artwork (a label that probably shouldn’t be applied to anything American Pie related) is the same theme: Aging man chasing youth. Generally in the form of a female decades his junior.
The protagonist of When the Gods Come Home to Roost, Estrin’s ninth novel, is a Berkeley classics professor named George Helmstetter. But his prototype is Faust, the 16th-century academic who, according to literature and lore, made a pact with the devil to regain his youth.
At 64, Estrin’s George has a gorgeous Greek girlfriend in her thirties, yet he finds himself sneaking glances at her teenage daughter. Worse, he’s starting to notice his age. When George is dumped, he faces the terrifying prospect of dating a woman only 14 years his junior.
Thank all the Greek gods that Mephistopheles happens along to rescue our hero from this fate. Because George inhabits the 21st century, Mephisto is a plastic surgeon with radical ideas about rejuvenation. Because this is an Estrin novel, he is named T.J. Eckleburg, after the painted image whose gigantic eyes coldly observe the characters of The Great Gatsby.
This Dr. Eckleburg, however, is no dispassionate judge — rather, he’s an overweening Gatsby himself. And he believes surgeons should give patients the transformations they seek, even if the results are Frankensteinian. “Why shouldn’t we use human powers to explore our human fantasies?” Eckleburg asks a nervous George. “What’s so good about normal?”
Estrin notes in his afterword that Eckleburg was inspired by a 2001 Harper’s Magazine article about Dr. Joseph Rosen, a plastic surgeon at Dartmouth Medical School who’s spoken of (literally) giving patients wings.
That’s fascinating material, fodder for decades of debate. Here’s the problem with Gods: Those issues don’t crystallize — indeed, they barely appear — until George makes his pact with the surgeon at roughly the 180-page mark. And they remain unresolved at the novel’s close, though by then George has done things in the name of his self-fulfillment that could be called downright abhorrent.
Like Goethe, whose Faust is full of satirical detours, Estrin almost seems to have become bored with his plot. But, unlike Goethe, he stretches the preamble to that plot — the rambling soliloquies of blowhard Faust before Mephisto pops up — to ungodly lengths. In Part one, each chapter is followed by an “Intercalarius” (“inserted calendar month,” in Latin) that veers off into a detailed etymology or a musical analysis or a series of emails between characters or an extended allusion.
A few of these tangents advance the plot or deepen its implications, but far too many read like mini-essays on subjects that interested Estrin. Some are brilliant and worthy of anthologizing; still, they slow the novel’s flow. Whenever we are jolted back to the main plot, we’re surprised to be reminded that George — the intellect behind most of these digressions — is about as mature as the American Reunion characters. When rejuvenated George snipes about the stupidity of the high schoolers he hopes to hook up with, he comes off not like a learned professor in a 17-year-old’s body but like a pompous college kid pulling rank on his peers because he can quote Nietzsche.
Estrin is a master of words prone to postmodern digressiveness. But in his best works, such as Golem Song, he maintains focus and brings his conflicts to resolution. Gods feels more like a series of sketches than a finished novel. And that’s unfortunate, because, in an age when face transplants and other radical bodily transformations are within reach, this Faustian story is worth telling.
On May 10, 2007 Mark was interviewed at his home by Phil Trabulsy of Unbridled Books. In the interview he seeks to answer Mr. Trabulsy’s question: "What makes one write these books, and what seems to be their common theme?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toVXuro9klQ&ab_channel=UnbridledBooks
I was fortunate to work with Marc and Donna, publishing three books with Fomite, two of them collections of short stories, the most recent a novel, Answer Only, which appeared this past spring. They stayed true to their mission to return 80 percent of a book’s revenue to its author. Since I don’t live in the United States, I never met either of them in person, but working with them so assiduously online over the years I felt I had gotten to know and trust them. This started back in 2014 with my first Fomite story collection, Off To The Next Wherever, which Marc accepted while I was employed in the Far East of Russia.
Marc and I emailed back and forth regarding some of the stories in that collection, Marc wanting me to expand a couple of them and present more character development, and also wanting to shorten a couple of them, finding that my inclusion of informational political elements was overlong and unnecessary. He turned out to be correct on both counts. I didn’t fight him on any of them and I think what he liked about my attitude, having worked with professional editors before, is that I didn’t hesitate to thank him and let him know that I appreciated and valued how closely he read my stories and critiqued them, always with a goal to improving and deepening them. I viewed our relationship as a professional one and viewed him as a mentor. I never was made to feel I had to change the way I thought about writing fiction, my approaches, or any of my ideas. Marc knew how to see the intent I was after in anything I submitted to him, and he never once tried to alter or thwart that. What he wanted and hoped for was the best possible expression of that intent.
Since 2014, I have often wondered if he ever sensed how much a boost it was for me to open my email on a frigid dark winter day east of Siberia, with snow on the sidewalks piled over four feet high, and learn that a quiet bearded man in Vermont, along with his wife, wanted to accept me into their family and publish the manuscript I’d sent them. He took a chance on me. I felt a debt of gratitude and with everything I sent him hoped it lived up to some imaginary and rather highly unrealistic expectations.
Where, I ask myself, did the man find the energy to extend, as Ramey has put it, his activism? As I continued to work with him and Donna, I’d wait my turn for them to get to a book of mine they’d accepted. I’d marvel at the list of accepted and upcoming titles from Fomite, which at the time of his death included approximately 350 titles. It wasn’t as if they had a big office and lots of interns and readers and a paid staff. He and Donna were fully committed to Fomite as a literary endeavor, a labor of love, and if authors were willing to market their work, do readings or interviews, whatever it took to generate sales, then that meant more royalties for them.
Donna kept all the authors informed, sending out royalty payment listings on a regular basis. It was never about profits first or profits only. They weren’t endowed with grant or foundation money. Fomite was about supporting the authors and literature. To quote from
Seven Days, Fomite was about "literary fiction, poetry and 'odd birds,' works that elude classification."
Marc did many podcasts, too, promoting and discussing his work: https://marcestrin.com/Podcast/Podcast.html
Here below is a sampling of links to Marc’s work that you might enjoy. More can be found online.
https://www.theragblog.com/marc-estrin-the-revolutionary-messages-of-classical-music/
https://www.theragblog.com/marc-estrin-light-unto-the-nations/
https://www.theragblog.com/marc-estrin-up-up-and-away/
https://www.theragblog.com/marc-estrin-georges-messiah/
https://brooklynrail.org/2008/12/books/marc-estrin-with-ben-mirov/
https://marcestrin.blogspot.com/2011/09/i-bet-you-dont-know-what-fomite-is.html
https://www.theragblog.com/marc-estrin-gwot-love/
