Tagged joe biel

Joyce Brabner, you are missed.

Joyce Brabner passed this week, one of the most important progenitors of rethinking comics and a very influential person in my personal life for decades.

I watched her struggle for name recognition despite innumerable accomplishments of her own, seemingly because she didn’t take the famous surname of her husband, Harvey Pekar. I cannot tell you how many times I watched her ask “Are you familiar with me?” in a clarifying sense. Indeed, in 2009 when she called our office, she didn’t recognize my voice and asked “This is Joyce Brabner, do you know who that is?” We hadn’t talked in a few years so I was rather startled and it took me a minute to return to that time in my life.

Joyce had no shortage of personal accomplishments on her own, dating back to before I was born. She created prison literacy programs and used the power of comic books to impart what was going on in the real world in a way that was less threatening. She collaborated with Alan Moore and did activist work around AIDS, animal rights, and child abuse. If she was here she’d be insisting on clarifying many of the finer points of each of these things before we moved along the presentation. To most people, she is Hope Davis’ version of her in the film American Splendor. Fear not, upon first mention, she will tell you each and everything that she finds inaccurate about that depiction. And it always made me smile.

Later that day, when I said “I spent three hours on the phone with Joyce Brabner,” Elly’s mind exploded. “How do you know Joyce Brabner?” Burying the lede just like Joyce taught me, I said “We go back” and left it at that. To many, when Hollywood makes a film about your family, you enter the limelight in a new way.

I remember in 2001, she called to say “They’re making a movie about us. You should invite us to the Portland Zine Symposium. HBO will pay. We don’t need money. Just an invitation.” I didn’t believe it. Why would HBO make a movie about the most normal family on Earth? But it was great, because after that I really got to see Joyce shine for the next five years. Their family was everywhere, with Joyce in front, negotiating the deal, Harvey standing behind her right shoulder, and young Dani behind Harvey’s right knee. It was almost like a defensive position while Joyce made things happen and made sure that they were treated fairly in all of their dealings. In the classic lineup, Joyce was the one that I related with the most. We have both been painted as difficult because we’re the ones that the logistics hang on and other people rely upon us to be resolute and firm. The last time that I saw them in that era was at the Wisconsin Book Festival in 2006 and then we lost touch for a few years, perhaps because they faded from the limelight. Harvey had struggled a bit on stage that night. We didn’t talk for two years afterwards.

Joyce was of course much more than the movie cartoon character. She was a masterful conversationalist and remains a very important inspiration in so many aspects of my life. She believed sturdily that if someone was in need of help and willing to give 50%, she would give the other 50%. It was a powerful lesson as a young person, in a city that yet felt hopeless, where people were willing to turn the other blind eye to suffering. But I made an effort to ring her up when we were in Cleveland. She taught me to aim higher and be more ambitious.

It didn’t even occur to me until writing this that she is likely where I got the idea not to have kids because I am busy raising other people’s kids. She would have a better way to package that sentiment, but the ideas are the same. And it’s a powerful one that I still carry with me until today. We were peas in a pod in many ways. During one lunch, we both had someone else on-hand to write down notes for us to have later. Once we both noticed this, we realized how funny it was.

When people in the comics industry were dismissive of me, she would call them up and tell them to feature me. And they would listen. She told Publishers Weekly to do a feature about Microcosm in 2011. And they did. She told Diamond Comics to give us another chance. And they did too.

In 2014, she called me as she walked out of the Farrar, Straus and Giroux offices in NYC. “I don’t want to work with them anymore. I want to work with you.” She dedicated her 2014 book, Second Avenue Caper, to me. She sewed and sent me a custom Harvey doll with the Microcosm logo as the chest piece instead of American Splendor. Ten years later it lives in my window, next to my Henry & Glenn dolls. In 2015, she wrote the foreword for my memoir and said very kind things about me publicly at times when I was struggling.

When we hung out in 2019, it was the first time that I really saw Joyce struggling. She had always been so unbelievably unstoppable and powerful. Joyce was younger than my parents, but time was as much a constant as the trials and tribulations and her ability to overcome. She got better, and we resumed our jovial banter.

We published her book, Courage Party, minutes after COVID began in 2020. It is a powerful book for kids about how to navigate life after violence. We were largely reliant upon library sales just as their budgets shriveled up for the pandemic. Courage Party, while not commercially successful, brought us another one of Joyce’s gifts in artist Gerta O. Egy, who we have gone on to do many books, decks, and comics with.

Undaunted by one unsuccessful title, Joyce began proposing new books to us. She wanted to write a history of gangs. And then years later, she called her editor and suggested that the story of gangs wasn’t her story to tell. Joyce was capable of changing her perspective too. She had innumerable children’s books in the wings. She saw her greatest work ahead of her.

When I discovered that Our Cancer Year was out of print, I called her and she was shocked to learn this. I looked it up on Bookscan and I swear that the sales were over 200,000 but when I looked again years later, after NPD turned it into DecisionKey, the numbers dropped 95%. We spent the past few years creating a situation where she would give me power of attorney to leverage all of the out of print books back from the Big Five publishers who had the rights but took the books out of print. She liked the idea that, unlike a lawyer, she didn’t have to pay me. I did it because I cared about the people; the work; the legacy. In many cases, the publishers didn’t know that Harvey Pekar had died in 2010.

I followed up with her a dozen times. For years, we have been on the brink of reissuing quite a few books that are maddeningly out of print and it was “I just need to conquer this cancer first and then we’ll deal with that.”

Most recently she got excited about a deal to publish the first four American Splendor comics in Brazil for the first time. She called me to ask if we’d re-issue the same book in English simultaneously. Of course, I heartily agreed. She said that she would connect me with the other publisher to work out the details. I waited.

I talked to her on the phone a few weeks ago and we made some plans to have lunch in October. She closed our phone call to say “Get all of the time with me now that you can. I don’t have much left. I’m just joking. But not really.” I wasn’t sure how to take it. Joyce had a dark and heavy humor. And like all good humor, it’s couched in reality. It resonates because it’s very real, revealing a greater truth that we cannot say in other language.

I knew something was wrong when Joyce still hadn’t connected me to the Brazilian publisher a week later. She doesn’t leave loose ends, even at the worst of times. She doesn’t leave money on the table. I figured that I’d give her a little more time. Turns out that we didn’t have it.

To the very end, she was worried about setting up each project to benefit other people. She taught me so much about mutual aid as a young person. She built a nation of imitators but there can only be one.

Joe Biel awarded PubWest Innovator 2024 by Andrea Fleck-Nisbet (A People’s Guide to Publishing)

In February 2024, in Maricopa, AZ, IBPA’s CEO Andrea Fleck-Nisbet awarded the PubWest Innovator Award to Microcosm Publishing Founder and CEO Joe Biel for “Reimagining what publishing can or should be” and “Exceptional efforts to develop new skills that expand publishing into the future.” Here is Fleck-Nisbet’s speech and Biel’s Q&A period from the awards ceremony.

Get the People’s Guide to Publishing here, and the workbook here!
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People’s Guide to Publishing: How Amazon Has Changed Publishing

For many years, new publishers and authors have posed questions to us about distribution. They want to know why distribution is so expensive and exclusive. It’s a much more complicated answer than they were expecting so we’re going to break that out in a weekly video series over the next few months.

(more…)

We are Breaking Up with The Big Boys


We’ve been holding on to a bit of news lately, and we’re excited to finally share it with you all! Here’s founder Joe Biel with the details…

Joe & Ruby deliver books by bicycle.

Starting January 1, 2019, we will be managing our own distribution just like we did for over ten years. Not only will we no longer need to move thousands of books back and forth between warehouses, creators get paid more for each book sold. And we won’t be selling to Amazon. Why. you ask? Well, my grandparents were German immigrants who came here in the 1800s for labor unions and worked to achieve the 40-hour work week…which was then abolished in our lifetime. When Microcosm was just getting off the ground in 1997, I interviewed Ian Mackaye of Dischord Records. He explained that a publisher is only as independent as their distribution is. He was seemingly taking a jab at “independent” labels who handle all of their manufacturing and distribution through a major but his point sticks. 

Microcosm has always tried to work with independent companies, because they feel most comfortably aligned with our mission, values, and goals…but we’ve watched over the past dozen years as each independent distributor gets gobbled up and responds to the demands of the increasingly demanding monopolies.

We’ve watched as our peer publishers either throw in the towel or sell to one of the monopolies, neither of which we are willing to do. We feel that independents need to be independent and the best way to do that is to build an outpost of our own, a shining star where we can continue to thrive instead of relying upon the whims of any global corporation.

So we are returning to our roots to create the world that we want to see within our weirdo clubhouse. 

We will be parting ways with Legato/PGW/Perseus/Ingram in January and have already built new warehouses and software to make this possible. Few events in the history of Microcosm have improved our morale and brought our staff together like this has. As always, our intent is to expand our distribution at the same time. Our new sales people (now a team of four) excitedly understand our books and have more time and focus to dedicate to them. For the first time ever, our back catalog will receive as much attention as our new releases. Within a few years, we intend to begin offering these services to other publishers.

This isn’t as staggering a change as it sounds. Reviewing the numbers, we have come to realize that we know better how to distribute our books than anyone else that we’ve tried to partner with. We’ve handled roughly 75% of our distribution even across these past seven years. The simple fact is that the underground is much bigger than the mainstream.

To ensure that we are still actually serving all of the stores and readers that are interested in our books, we’re bringing on Book Traveler’s West (West Coast), Como (East Coast), and Fujii (Midwest) to actively visit and solicit our books to stores. We will continue to be distributed by Turnaround in Europe and will be working with the same distributors in Australia, Canada, and the rest of the world as well. Readers and stores can still buy books directly from our website, microcosmpublishing.com.

​We are redoubling our efforts to sell direct and to independents instead of helping monopolies like Amazon continue to grow at the expense of others. Perhaps more importantly, we will not be accepting their terms that increasingly just serve to crush everything in their path. If you want to help support the indies during this crucial time, go to your local shops and buy books, and encourage your friends to do the same. They will remember moments like this forever.

We hear from people almost every week that our books are saving their lives, and we feel that we have an obligation to extend that as far and wide as possible. There’s an unspoken rule in the underground that what we do is secret but when these rules don’t serve the goals, we have no choice but to break them.

Joe’s next book, A People’s Guide to Publishing, can help anyone inspired by our journey learn the lessons and wisdom that got us here today.
Check out the kickstarter project here!

Read the more industry-jargony version of this news with more details on Shelf Awareness.

Or, if you want to know more about what this’ll mean, check out Elly’s breakdown.


If you ever need help with ordering, please contact Sidnee Grubb | Customer Service (1-503-799-2698).
For press questions, interview or sample requests, contact Cyn Marts, publicity director, cyn@microcosmpublishing.com.

Indie Bookstore Love: The Powell’s Interview

Kevin Sampsell poses beside the book pillar at the entrance to Powell's BooksWhat can we say about Powell’s Books? It’s a huge, used-and-new, independent bookstore in downtown Portland that takes up a whole city block, plus a couple of smaller but still large and equally interesting outlying stores. It’s one of the best things about living in Portland, and any time we need inspiration—professional or otherwise—we head straight to one of their locations to get lost in the stacks. It never fails.

Powell’s has also been one of Microcosm’s longest running customers. Starting almost 20 years ago, when Joe moved the business from Cleveland to Portland (you can read about those early days in his new book, Good Trouble), and continuing to this month when we’re partnering with Powell’s to spread the indie bookstore love. All month, Powell’s is featuring our newest edition of The Zinester’s Guide to Portland at every register. And for a week mid-month, you can see a display of Microcosm books at their downtown store—keep an eye out for it.

For this month, we asked Kevin Sampsell, who we’ve long had the pleasure of working with during his 15 years and counting reign over the downtown Powell’s storied Small Press section. When not curating the zine rack and slinging books, Kevin’s writing, editing, and running his own small press, Future Tense Books.

1. What’s your history working with Powell’s? How did you become the Small Press guy?
I started working at Powell’s at the end of 1997 as a holiday temp but I dug my claws in and worked hard and passionately so they couldn’t let me go. In 1998, I became an events coordinator, which means I get to schedule and host author events at the store, which is a privilege and a thrill. I became the small press guy around 2001. My predecessors were the amazing Vanessa Renwick and the late great Marty Kruse. Running the small press section is almost like running my own store. It’s an amazing experience. I love my jobs.

2. Do you remember your first encounter with Microcosm? Do you have any embarrassing or hair raising stories about our early days in Portland?
I remember Joe riding his bike down to the store with his plastic buckets strapped on with all the zines and books crammed into them. A couple of times the zines would be a little rough around the edges or dirty from the rain or dirt. I’d have to flatten out things or wipe them clean before I put them out on the shelf.

3. What’s your favorite Microcosm book or zine?
I was a big supporter of the Zinester’s Guide to Portland, even in its first pamphlet-size format. I thought it was a good idea, and before Microcosm had bigger distribution, I’d be the one who had to email you guys and ask for more. Eventually, after the more polished paperback editions came out, our main book purchasers wised up and started buying them in chunks of hundreds. It’s been one of our most consistent best-selling books in the store for several years now.
Some of my other favorites over the years have been Coffeehouse Crushes, Indestructible by Cristy Road, Sarah Royal’s The Book Bindery, the About My Disappearance zines by Dave Roche, and Sarah Mirk’s Sex From Scratch.

4. You’ve been a mentor and something of a bellwether for Portland’s small press and zine culture. How have you watched those scenes change over time? What do you predict for the future?
Thank you. I have always enjoyed supporting small presses and individuals through my job. The scene here has grown just as the city has grown–very quickly and with a wide swath. I think we’re slowly getting more diverse and inclusive and there’s a beautiful synergy that can often be witnessed between established writers and authors and newer writers coming up. I think that’s one of the reasons writers keep moving here, because they know something special is happening here. But in the last couple of years, the rent problems are making it a challenge to stay here. It’s a trend (the higher cost of living) that I hope doesn’t continue because when you discourage the creative class—who often come from financial struggle–it results in the sad decline of artistic excitement in a city. I don’t want that part of Portland to be “over”—I want it to to stay a haven for artists and risk-takers.

Daily Cosmonaut: Ruby The Wonder-Couch Sharer

deskrubyOn Valentine’s Day in 2013 I finally brought home Ruby, my medical alert service dog, after years of meetings, phone calls, paperwork, and interviews. She’s been a wonderful angel for most of the time since but every day when we go to work she would be stuck sleeping on my the floor next to my chair. She would periodically look up at me, pleadingly. One thing that I hadn’t realized when I had applied for her was that a dog’s range of emotions is identical to a human’s and that Ruby and I were in a committed relationship. I had to look out for her, make her feel loved, and take care of her.

 

Fortunately, I took quite naturally to this situation. She sleeps in bed with me, leaning against my leg. When I sit on the couch she wants to be napping on my lap. But our work arrangement was not as easily resolved as our home life. I began letting her nap on my lap when I was sitting in my office chair. But she would nervously perk up whenever the chair rotated or leaned and my legs would go numb under her in less than an hour.
I knew that the situation called for desperate measures. Ruby’s work and our relationship allowed me to safely go places unescorted. I swapped out my desk for a series of filing cabinets, attached a monitor arm to one of them, and ordered a mounted swivel tray for my keyboard, mouse, and beverage. I swapped out my chair for the office futon and now not only can Ruby and I take office naps but she can sit next to me all day long and snore as she leans against me, still paying attention to my blood glucose. When we arrive at the office every morning, she immediately bounds over to the futon and pleads me to join her.

A Statement From Microcosm

Joe Biel, the sole founder of Microcosm, is autistic but was not diagnosed until he was 32 years old. As a result of this, we, the staff of Microcosm are constantly barraged with questions about this situation. He removed himself from Microcosm’s management in November 2010 to get a better handle on managing his social interactions and did not return to manage the company until August of 2012. People frequently ask about the confusing developments at Microcosm since we published our You Can Work Any 100 Hours Per Week zine in 2006. The internet, if it’s anything, is a confusing place to get clear and reliable information where you have to navigate innumerable biases, so putting Joe’s story forward to be found seemed like a good idea:

On a rainy day in early 2006, I converted Microcosm from traditional top-down management to be managed by a collective. The staff was not pressuring me to do so, but managing other people was stressing me out something fierce and this seemed like a good way to reduce my own stress load while doing what was “right” politically. I had been raised on didactic politics and because we could only pay minimum wage and asked a lot of people, it seemed like a reasonable and fair thing to do. Unfortunately, it immediately created a slew of greater problems. No one had been on board for ten years like I had, so most people weren’t invested in the same way. I was young and unreasonably optimistic. There weren’t good teaching systems, structures, policies, expectations, and clear historical, organizational, and cultural understandings in place for what people were expected to do. And that was partly my fault.We were constantly negotiating everyone’s feelings. Whoever had the strongest personality would determine management policies by simply being the loudest voice, imposing their views on others.

After being involved in the many various incarnations of Microcosm over the past nineteen years, my tastes and interests changed and sometimes weren’t in sync with the scene’s, the Microcosm collective’s, the organization itself, or the sort of cultural groupthink that was happening around us. One major problem of creating something as a teenager without much forethought is that we were progressively aging out of the youth culture that our fans existed in; the organization couldn’t evolve as fast as it needed to for my own interest. So at various points where I felt particularly out of sync, I would disinvest from Microcosm and try to give other people more room in their vision of how to shape it.

A staff person would say “why don’t we publish this book?” and when we did it was a break from the intentionality of a clear and planned flow of releases and we’d increasingly end up with a storage room full of various unsold books, a problem we’d never had before. Many people came in with different understandings of what Microcosm was and with their own ideas about how it should change, which led to a sort of internal “reinventing” and personality clashes every year or more. I was frequently having to reject submissions that I knew would sell because of the way the conversation had gone within management. Several authors expressed to me that they were told by virtually all members of the collective, “I really liked it but the collective didn’t, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to pass.” I know how rejection feels but this made us look both disorganized and impersonal, and it made it appear like a political rejection or to feel like you were kicked out of the cool kids’ club.

Also starting in 2006, before the bulk of our warehousing was handled by Independent Publisher’s Group, Microcosm set out on an ongoing quest to find affordable warehousing for the volume of publishing it was doing inside inner-Portland. Unable to do so, we instead setup a mail-order and warehouse location in Bloomington, IN in March 2007. This confused a lot of people, who felt that we had “moved out of Portland” even though we still had people and a presence there. Nonetheless, I think people took it as the first “betrayal.” Our fans felt ownership over Microcosm, which made hard decisions even more difficult. Other staff, who interpreted this as a free invitation to move wherever they wanted and keep their jobs, setup an office for promotions in Lansing, Kansas in 2011. Further, due to complications of communication and managing across state lines, all three locations become somewhat fractured from each other and developed tension. Conversations about the simplest things became overly complicated. The overworked staff were frustrated with each other due to distance and perception.The decisions that management was making were causing wages to sink lower each year.

Because we had multiple locations with multiple offices in multiple states, the loudest personalities could still determine management policies by simply refusing to back down.Despite being supposed equals, people were having frequent miscommunications across state lines and attempts at speaking up about this was increasingly futile, even as things moved into absurdity. One person spent their healthcare stipend on a carton of cigarettes. Staff who weren’t working in the same office with the loudest personalities frequently expressed feeling dictated to and managed.

Simultaneously, there was understandable friction that I got the credit when we did something right, even if I had little to do with it. People wanted to interview me, rather than the collective. So there were increasing efforts to make it appear like more of a semi-anonymous group that projected an amorphous image. And I think to the public, it created a lot of confusion because we didn’t seem to act consistently or with forethought. Instead of pursuing a vision we were following watered-down decision making: Actions were taken once a decision was shaped to no longer be objectionable to any member of the collective, rather than making planned out choices set out to achieve specific goals.

Six years as a collective later, Microcosm had spent its entire $40,000 savings and was $37,000 in debt. I removed myself from management and later quit as a result. The collective management of the previous six years had agreed to pay for half of the debt but weren’t paying.

We trudged along on my personal credit cards with people coming and going fast enough that few managers/collective members really understood the gravity of the situation and thought that we always existed in crisis. And everyone has their own weird little unresolved personality issues to play out that they hadn’t quite shed, including me.

Simultaneously, my ex-wife, who had also been an employee until she quit in October of 2006, accused me very publicly of abusing her in our relationship that ended in 2004, in a moment culminated by me being a jerk about spilling ice cream on our couch, having trouble with her drinking habits while I was needing to quit, and a large backlog of self-described “little things.” By being vague and using terms like “emotional abuse,” there was further confusion about what actually went on in our relationship and people related it to the worst things that they had suffered, tending to assume I was responsible for things like physical violence or rape. While I think her pain was real, I’ve done everything that was asked of me to resolve the situation, and have acknowledged that many times over. Rumors and misinformation about what was said or asked of me, and how I had cooperated or not, literally ripped apart the scene. And it spiraled out of control, making everyone involved crazier in the end, and not seeming to make anyone feel better.

I looked up “abuse” and found: “to treat a person with callous indifference or pleasure in causing pain and suffering, especially regularly or repeatedly.” Before I understood the emotional needs of others, I was repeatedly insensitive and callous towards their feelings, hurting people that felt close to me in deep, fundamental ways. I took no pleasure in this. I was confused each time that it happened and ultimately it hurt me too; I cared about these people and wanted emotional proximity with them but had no understanding of how to achieve that. Still, my actions that hurt them. I emotionally abused people that I care about. Taking responsibility for the impact of my actions was the first step towards moving on. I focused on learning how to prevent it from continuing.

I did respond to and comply with 20 demands made of me and, as requested, found “professional counseling (with someone who is not your friend) to deal with your past family issues as well as issues of control, abuse, and manipulation.” I spent four years in therapy, twice per week, at the request of my ex because a student therapist suggested our relationship might have been abusive. Over the course of those years in therapy, evaluating my behaviors and unpacking the baggage of the history of my life, I had a very good experience of resolving a lot of old things, some I wasn’t aware of and some that had long been plaguing me, about ways I was raised and treated. It was, overall, a very good experience for me and I’m glad that I did it, even though it did not lead to resolution with my ex. But the real shocker was that after all that time, my therapist told me that while she did not feel that I had an abusive personality, I did have demonstrated issues with understanding people’s expressed boundaries, which ended up revealing much bigger revelations about my brain neurology that had not been noticed as a child. It was a major revelation in my life and the key to understanding so many mysterious and painful events of my past.

As requested, I made a public statement and apology in June of 2009 and several follow-ups to it. Also as requested, the collective made individual statements to Cindy Crabb in 2010 and two group statements in 2011. Further, I engaged with Cindy in an effort to create healing in what is called an accountability process, but lacking proper norms, expectations, and structures for how they are conducted, and having very low success rates, this particular one was further derailed due to being performed completely through a series of interstate emails. This kind of communication was not very suited for demonstrating understanding of complex subjects and creating the kind of emotional proximity and trust that would be required for something like this to work.

Mediation was further attempted by other individuals but once people saw that the situation was complex and not just black and white, they would back away and say they didn’t have time to deal with it, creating more chaos and rumors. Unfortunately, the vast majority of questions from people following the situation have been bullying, yelled, insulting, and assumptive.They began to destroy our morale. It’s been nearly eleven years since my ex and I separated, but to each person who learns about the situation, it’s like an open wound festering with each new rumor and attempt to resolve the situation.

I grew up with a lot of “scene damage” and so when a dozen people I trusted and cared about—albeit most of them knowing little about the specifics of the situation—begin to make demands of me and tell me that contrary to professional opinions, that I am “an abuser” and that my therapist is “not a feminist” when she tells me otherwise, I began to believe it all. Fortunately, around the same time I came to develop a social circle of adults who weren’t involved in the scene and began asking me questions about it and helping to approach the situation in an objective manner. Instead of condemning me, these questions began to help me understand the situation and the way a didactic approach and a mob mentality does not move towards healing. (http://towardfreedom.com/29-archives/activism/3455-the-politics-of-denunciation)

I began to understand the most complicated nuances of all: A person could experience abuse based on their life experiences and how they had been treated before in damaging ways. A person could experience abuse from someone who happened to hit upon their insecurities, however well-meaning. Two people that communicate very poorly could simulate the dynamics of an abusive relationship by failing to understand each other’s statements, motives, feelings, and needs. And the building resentment, hurt, and pain is all very real—intentional or not. And no imposed demands serve to actually heal anyone’s feelings. It just creates more hurt and room for misunderstanding.

Many years ago, I had been involved in the accountability processes of other people and the dynamics that frustrated me so much through other people’s processes are now crystal clear: There is no path towards resolution. As each thing was completed that was asked of me, my friends, my partner, my business, my co-workers, etc, more and more things were simply asked for, and when I asked about clarity, I was told that I should not expect the process or cooperation to resolve the problem, that that was not other people’s agenda or responsibility. And fair enough, but that should have been communicated in the first place and how does a person and a community move forward from such a scar if that isn’t part of the plan and agenda? And that seems to be why people seem to “give up” and splinter off into a different vacuum as an accountability process inevitably fails to comfort people and create resolution.

The modern variation of Gene Sharp’s popular 1968 leftist tactics of “Ostracism of persons” and brigading, or targeting specific subjects for collective harassment and threats, bear remarkable similarity to that of fascist hate speechist Milo Yiannopoulos. It’s just a different kind of violence, even if it’s isolating people away from their communities and doing financial and interpersonal harm.

Feeling unsuccessful, the same public eventually took a new tactic of trying to put pressure on my co-workers to make me do unspecified things or at least kick me out of the collective. That threw the people at Microcosm into a new flurry to “prove” that they did take these issues seriously. Why it was assumed that they didn’t take these issues seriously already, I’ll never know. They did each thing that was asked of them but yet the meme was repeated that they did not and were, in fact, supportive of abuse. And aside from these being some of the people I care about most in the world, the situation was very upsetting because the staff was bending over backwards to cooperate at a time when they were needed to work more and more hours and manage more and more stress and mess.

Simultaneously, my experience and vision could be frustrating and intimidating to people at work who had less of either and desperately wanted to be equals or simply had incompatible visions with the other staff. The whole thing was stressing us all out something fierce.From all points, the staff was really burnt out on it and our fans were bringing the conflict they perceived up to the staff—mostly Jessie—for so many years that it just caused the staff shut to down for awhile. I was fed up and began my exit strategy.

We had very tense all staff meetings in Bloomington in 2009 and 2010 where the entire staff was on the verge of throwing in the towel. Afterwards, several people quit and others lost their collective status due to working insufficient hours or because of repeated policy violations. I took a leave of absence from management immediately afterwards in 2010 to give people some space, get some stress relief, let people direct the future of the organization, and work on a new feature film, Aftermass: Bicycling in a Post-Critical Mass Portland. But I was deeply intertwined, the organization was still lacking cashflow so it was being run on my personal credit cards, and dissolving the relationship wasn’t so simple as walking away. Operations seemed to be getting increasingly disorganized and the mail-order was painfully behind.

Lansing-manager Jessie Duke, a Microcosm employee since 2005, was the first person to take up the option to purchase company ownership as a way to appease the critics in 2010. She began running the whole company in 2011 and her and I created an agreement that she would buy out my remaining 50% ownership in 2012. But in the meantime other staffers began insisting that ownership should have no value and she got cold feet about the risk. She has two small children and things had slowly been going downhill since she started (financially, morale, size of staff, etc).
Trying to find a good solution and finding herself as one of three remaining collective managers, Jessie made the decision to close the Bloomington location completely in July of 2011 and move those operations to Lansing, KS. She also unceremoniously fired Sparky Taylor, who created further public outcry, complaining about our organizational culture. These criticisms were founded reasonably on being worked hard for low pay. Expectations and feelings became the commodities that the staff dealt in instead, creating tremendous ups and downs, but mostly disappointments. Eventually Jessie streamlined the mail-order, with the idea that others would buy out the rest of my ownership and figure out a way to develop their own line of credit. I continued to disinvest.

I created a new press called Cantankerous and started having successes with things outside of Microcosm, which was certainly a wake-up call. We built a touring package that I’m really proud of with my partner Elly Blue and chef Joshua Ploeg where we go to your town, Joshua makes seven courses for everyone, and we have movies and presentations about cycling that teach you things like how cyclists pay more than their share of road taxes while motorists pay about 1/11 of their cost to society. It was one of the most successful tours we had done so we kept doing it as I continually disinvested from Microcosm.

Microcosm couldn’t afford its staff anymore so when people quit they couldn’t be replaced and everyone was simply doing more work. I was casually working part time and had removed myself from collective management. I think at some point management just stopped happening and everyone just kept doing their jobs, to their individual level of commitment. Things were falling apart at the seams. Jessie told me that she was having a second son and could not stomach the risk of buying out the remainder of my ownership herself. Other staff felt that funding the launch of the company and growing and running it for the first ten years had no monetary value and that I should walk away with nothing from it.

By 2012, when I came back from two years of managerial leave after quitting, the traumatic events were eight years behind me, I had cooperated with accountability, was doing or had finished the 20 things asked of me, and completed my massive soul searching mission, had been in a happy and healthy relationship for four years, and I was just happy to have a personal life again where I wasn’t continually being asked about my private relationships.

We were still based in two different offices in Portland and Kansas and I had proposed splitting Publishing + Distribution into two autonomous organizations back in our meeting in 2010 just before I took a leave. But the collective turned down the notion. Jessie picked up this idea again in June of 2012 and suggested that since no one else was interested in ownership and rather than her taking the continued risk of buying out the remaining ownership, we could literally split into two separate organizations and work internally in our own offices with our own management. It was something I had long dismissed as outside of the realm of possibility: A solution that left the entire remaining staff happy.

In August 2012, the organization split into two separate organizations.

The collective had managed the organization from 2006-2012 but it clearly wasn’t working. We spent the next two years paying off tens of thousands of dollars in debts created by the collective management. To prevent the cycle of further intense feelings of burn out and frustration, I made an immediate effort to work towards doubling wages and looking long and hard at our finances on how to get things back on track. Microcosm continues to operate like a non-profit, dividing all money beyond production expenses into the wages of all staff and by April 2015 the entire staff’s wages will be doubled from what they were in January of 2013. We had a major organizational re-founding, creating a culture of conflict resolution and acceptance. Being aware of and sensitive to what was going on in the staff’s lives became much easier once everyone was working under the same roof and communicating. The emotional landscape gradually relaxed and people’s morale spiked and they did their jobs with a hungry fervor once again. Our visions can push us to where we each want to go and not have to get approval from half a dozen people of various levels of investment.

I’m embarrassed about plenty of things that I’ve done and regret plenty more, but I would recommend years of intensive therapy to anyone who hasn’t done it. It is like magic to walk through your life without carrying around decades of baggage and make conscious decisions for yourself without voices of doubt guiding you. As a result, since February of 2009, I’ve been in what my partner (whom has repeatedly expressed that she finds nothing resembling anything like what I’ve been accused of present in our life now) and I both describe as a happy and healthy relationship. The Microcosm staff has gone through a major culture change and morale boost. People express their problems or concerns and they are resolved.

I still make mistakes and do or say things that come across as callous, but I feel like it’s been reduced by 95% and I found a balance that isn’t totally crippling to my functionality. At work now, the vast majority of our staff are purposefully people who are not neurotypical. This is for two reasons: One, I communicate best with people like this and relate much better with them without long, involved conversations. Two, these are the kinds of people who, like me, have a hard time navigating communication with most people and it causes a lot of pain that we can avoid by clustering together. And also, it breeds trust because they can relate to the experience of being afraid of hurting someone else through accidentally saying something hurtful and so trust goes both ways. It’s easier to have empathy.

But Microcosm ran into one more hurdle. In return for getting half of the inventory, a website, and rights to sell the stuff that we get shipped ready-made from the publisher, Jessie Duke’s new company, Pioneers Press became responsible for half of the current debt load for June and July of 2012 that wasn’t paid for by cash flow during those months. So, in return for roughly $20,000, she received equipment and inventory worth over $100,000. She had been running the company for the last few years, had a good handle on it, and had significantly taken and suggested pay cuts to pay off old debt, which she finished paying off in June of 2012. So it was only current debt that needed paid off.

Unfortunately, despite having a new title by our bestselling author, those two months were terrible for sales. We were sent an “Open Letter to Microcosm” that wasn’t based in fact for either of us at the time and while well-intentioned, wasn’t written by anyone who had any kind of direct contact or experience with any of us. It hurt sales when we were desperately trying to pay off debts and then when she launched her own company, she had a hard time starting out. Further, the staff that was moving to form Pioneers were focused on their new job duties while there was still work needed for the transition by raising the necessary funds. Jessie was still getting a lot of criticism for having worked closely with me for many years and I think people saw it as an opportunity to demand that she take a stand publicly against me, now that she had given me back management of Microcosm. Our fans were frustrated and confused with a high volume of seemingly mixed messages that had come from the collective. The staff of Pioneers, while working at and running Microcosm, had issued a series of statements and promises that the public did not feel were carried out to their satisfaction.

People were really attacking Jessie in public and she has a really hard time with that. I tried to be supportive, but she was not paying anything on the debts she had committed to pay off that were on my personal credit card. And within six months it went from “Sorry, I can’t afford it this month” to “I’m not going to pay you.” She had been very supportive of me for years through the worst times of my life and it really hurt when she sent me the “I can’t do this anymore” message. Ugh. I was patient for 18 months but it was wrecking Microcosm. I had to get second and third jobs to keep the credit card bills under control. She was callous about it and was clearly upset. I hope it was something more than the money because that’s more heartbreaking, you know?

Seriously struggling to cover the same huge credit card bills with half of much money coming in, we asked if they could pay at least $100/month, so we could at least see motion on it, and they refused. More than anything, it was frustrating that our friends had left us in a lurch. Fifteen months later, we reluctantly filed a lawsuit against our former co-workers who still owe Microcosm tens of thousands of dollars. (https://microcosmpublishing.com/blogifesto/2013/11/microcosm-publishing-microcosm-distribution-and-pioneers-press-1)

In many ways, the saddest thing is that my community—the only loving family that I’ve ever known—failed me. People who had been invested in the situation weren’t interested in resolving the problem. When I told people that I had been bullied for over twelve years by strangers on the Internet because of the way that my ex-wife depicts our abusive relationship that deny my experience and pushed me until I was suicidal, I get a reaction similar to the one when I was five and told neighbors that my mother beat me. They find every reason to look the other way or worse, try to justify the behavior. People had surrounded themselves with such a brackish cloud of confusing misinformation that they couldn’t see the space between two seemingly conflicting perspectives.

​Two co-workers told me that they had met Austistic people before and that I wasn’t one. I had taken legal action exactly once in my life. When I turned Microcosm into a collective we had $40,000 in savings. After a year I said that if they didn’t start paying at least $100 per month, I would take legal action as that amount of debt was crippling and I had to get second and third jobs to pay it off. Still, I regret it. I was hurt because these were people that I had worked with for years and trusted with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory and equipment to pay their half of the debt. It was hugely discouraging.

One of the few comforts of the legal system, unlike the radical community, is that it gets the facts on the table and involves a fact-checking process. When I’ve mentioned how the “accountability group” approached my situation with intense bias, spent their effort yelling at people who were trying to help, and had agreements that they did not disclose to me, I was told that I don’t have a right to fairness or restorative justice. That conservative attitude makes the legal system seem downright radical in comparison. But we’ve found that it’s also very slow, very expensive, and not designed to benefit people in situations like ours. How does one resolve a situation where they are owed five figures? We may never know and there may be no good answer.

There is a culture of fear and didactic politics around the left’s still largely undefined “accountability” practices. Our communities don’t know how to conduct them, let alone how to heal and move on afterwards. That is why Microcosm has made continual efforts to publish works about how to identify and develop healthy relationships, as well as navigating a continued investment to producing  resources that help people to understand and negotiate power structures and conflict resolution, to reduce the continual application of sandpaper on everyone’s wounds. Our story has no shortage of tumult and I’ve certainly done things I regret, but it’s promising and exciting that we are in a position where we can move forward and offer insight and resources based on our experiences to help others.

Joe has since published a book about his life growing up and not knowing that he was autistic.