 |  |  |  |  |
the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by Tim W. Brown
Fleeced by FC2:
Government-Funded Vanity Publishing
PART TWO (Click here to read Part One)
How much public money has FC2 received in recent years? Over
$300,000 according to its tax returns. FC2’s Form 990 for FY
2003-2004 (the latest information publicly available) indicates
FC2 received from 1999-2003 $171,179 in grants and other
contributions and $141,834 in support from government
institutions, that is, FSU and ISU. FC2’s total budget in FY 2005-
2006 was $127,893, a typical year for the press judging by its tax
returns and grant records. Public monies accounted for $57,020
of this amount.
I should make clear that the universities and granting agencies
supporting FC2 don't appear to be guilty of anything other than
being played for suckers by FC2. Reeser views her school's
relationship with FC2 as an educational opportunity for ISU
students. Through his organization's affiliation with FC2, Ross
seeks to expand UA Press' fiction offerings. Both of these are
worthy goals in and of themselves. And I understand how Florida
wishes FC2 to prosper in the hope it will shed a little cultural
light on the often benighted Sunshine State.
Yet, with all this good will extended to FC2, look at what the
press has done and witness how it has betrayed its benefactors.
After Berry took the helm as ED in 1999 one of his first official
acts was to preside over the organization during the publication
of his book, Dictionary of Modern Anguish, in 2000. In 2001 FC2
published Cris Mazza’s novel Girl Beside Him while Mazza
served on FC2’s board of directors. Although he isn't currently
on any FC2 board, Jeffrey DeShell is a former board member,
and he was instrumental in setting up FC2 in its current
incarnation in 1999. For this he has been rewarded with
publication of his forthcoming novel, The Trouble with Being
Born: A Novel about My Parents.
Three authors on the current FC2 board of directors, Lance
Olsen (its chairman), Kate Bernheimer and Michael Martone,
have books listed under the "Current Releases" heading of FC2's
home page, Nietzsche's Kisses, The Complete Tales of Merry
Gold and Michael Martone, respectively. FC2 published an
earlier book of Olsen’s, Girl Imagined By Chance, in 2002, while
he served on FC2’s board of directors before his elevation to
chairman.
Additionally, FC2 uses public money to underwrite readings that
feature, you guessed it, board members of FC2. For FY 2005-
2006, FC2 applied to the Florida Department of Cultural Affairs
seeking state funds amounting to $1,800, including airfare and
“motel,” to send Martone, a creative writing professor at
University of Alabama (FC2’s publisher, remember?), on a
reading tour around Florida, accounting for nearly one-third of
the year’s total travel budget of $6,700. In 2001, then board
member Mazza flew down from her perch as creative writing
professor at University of Illinois-Chicago to read at the Miami
Book Fair on FC2’s, that is, the taxpayers’, dime. Berry sent
himself on at least one excursion in 2000.
Plus don’t forget that board members are rewarded career-wise
from having their books published by FC2 – in the form of
tenure, promotion and other academic perquisites.
FC2 offers two methods for submitting manuscripts. General
submissions are first considered at the ISU Publications Unit.
After passing muster with ISU grad students and interns they are
forwarded to FC2’s editorial board. Manuscripts may also be
“sponsored” by a Collective member, bypassing ISU and going
directly to the editorial board. This is where being a friend or
colleague or fellow Associated Writing Programs conventioneer
of an FC2 board member pays off: he or she can smooth the way
for your manuscript’s acceptance.
“[T]he editorial board reads [manuscripts] and decides whether
to publish them or not,” says Berry. Manuscripts “are not
reviewed blind [sic]. This is because so many of those who submit
to us have established reputations, and we believe that
publication decisions should be made, not only by considering an
isolated text, but by considering it in relation to a body of work
or author's career.” Of course, it’s also a convenient way to know
whether another FC2 board member has a book under
consideration, giving you the power to do that person a
tremendous favor by voting for it, which might someday help
your future submission’s chances.
Answering questions about the high number of FC2 authors who
are also board members, Berry states, “Over the last 8 years
slightly fewer than 1/3 of the books we have published have been
by authors who have never published a book with anyone before.
Approximately 2/3 of the books we've published have been by
authors who have never published with FC2 before. About 1/3 of
our books are by authors we have previously published.”
Let’s look at Berry’s magical one-third fraction another way.
FC2’s web site currently lists nine titles in current release. Of
these, three, or one third, were written by members of the board
of directors. You could take this one third, extrapolate it across
time, multiply it by $300,000, and determine that every five years
FC2 spends $100,000 of taxpayers' money on publication of its
board members' books. This may not be a huge amount of money,
but neither is it chump change.
Berry claims that controls against conflicts are built into the
acceptance process. “Needless to say, no one who is submitting a
[manuscript] to FC2 is allowed to be on the editorial board
during the year of the submission. Our preferred procedure is to
keep such an individual off of the board for a period of two years
or more, but because we often have difficulty getting all of our
submissions read each year, we sometimes ask someone to help
out again before the two year period is up.” This “control”
amounts to a revolving door policy similar to those that govern
relations between the Pentagon and military contractors or the
Congress and lobbying firms, and it’s just as effective in
preventing corruption.
Conflicts of interest are nothing new at FC2, but rather normal
operating procedure going back at least to the early 1990s under
the Unit for Contemporary Literature headed by former ISU
English Department chair Charles Harris, who currently serves
on FC2's advisory board, along with his wife Victoria. Lance
Olsen's wife, Andi, is also on the advisory board – I will leave it
to someone else to investigate nepotism issues at FC2.
In its 1990s heyday, the Unit amounted to a literary junta
masterminded out of Illinois State University, gathering together
American Book Review, FC2, Dalkey Archive Press, the Review
of Contemporary Fiction, and other publications. Harris was
director of the Unit; Curtis White, also an ISU professor, was
director of FC2. Former FC2 director Ron Sukenick published
ABR; Sukenick also directed Black Ice books, a short-lived FC2
imprint. White reviewed for ABR, and he penned a regular
column for Exquisite Corpse, Andrei Codrescu's journal,
distributed by the Unit. In 1998, White was the subject of an
adoring 110-page feature in the Review of Contemporary Fiction
– edited and published by his colleagues at the Unit. ABR
devoted most of its pages to reviews of FC2, Black Ice and Dalkey
Archive titles, basically serving as a bimonthly advertising rag
for Unit-supported books.
The Unit disbanded in 2005, and Harris is now retired, although
he continues as Publisher of ABR. ABR's editorial offices moved
from ISU to the University of Houston-Victoria earlier this year.
FC2, as noted, already had fled to FSU in 1999. It recently was
announced that Dalkey Archive is moving down the interstate to
the University of Illinois, having been rejected by the University
of Rochester to host the press owing to Dalkey's iffy finances. In
short, from at least the early 1990s until 1999, when Berry took
over, FC2 had, under Harris’ tutelage, for a long time been
compromised by conflicts inherent in its relationship with other
Unit for Contemporary Literature entities.
It's a fact that in addition to serving an organization by bringing
one's expertise to it, everybody who serves on a board has some
ulterior motive. Usually he or she hopes to network with other
like-minded people, and sometimes these connections can turn
into a personal benefit, outside, it should be emphasized, of the
organization's purview. Of course, as anyone who's served on a
board knows, it's never as quid-pro-quo as this. There exists an
altruistic impulse as well, and there is genuine satisfaction felt
when seeing how others benefit from your experience.
While there are no hard and fast rules about board service,
generally speaking, people who are invited to serve on the boards
of not-for-profits are people who've achieved a certain level of
success and are in a position to share their experience to further
the organization's mission.
If you're invited to be a board member of FC2, the expectation
should be that you've passed a certain professional pale and are
beyond requiring the organization's resources to publish your
book. Indeed, being on FC2's boards should involve helping
others publish their books. It violates the spirit if not the letter of
not-for-profit board service when the director and board
members have their books published by the press while
simultaneously acting as stewards of the organization.
When you're a private concern, you may, of course, publish
anybody's books you wish, including your own. But at the helm of
an organization that receives so much public funding and
academic welfare, you're acting corruptly when publishing any
book by a board member. The year isn't 1974 anymore, and the
collective model – the hippie equivalent of Mickey Rooney and
Judy Garland producing a show out back in the barn – no longer
applies when discussing an organization whose annual budget
adds up to tens of thousands of dollars.
FC2's decision-making process reminds me of the 2000
presidential race when Dick Cheney was asked by Republican
nominee George W. Bush to find a vice presidential candidate to
share the Republican ticket with him, and Cheney ended up
selecting himself after an arduous search process. Seemingly,
FC2’s board and principals accept this as normal behavior,
because it's been going on for fifteen-plus years. I'd hate to think
that FC2's director and board consciously engage in such amoral
conduct. Yet, certainly, they’re guilty of being oblivious to just
how improper their operations look outside of their cloistered
university environments.
"People maybe are weaker than they should be," comments a
former ISU student who witnessed Harris' antics as long ago as
the 1970s. Competing for whatever funding crumbs are available
to non-profits like FC2 "brings out the worst in people" he
concludes. And though it's impossible for me to look into the
hearts of FC2's ED and its board members to determine whether
they believe they're acting honestly, it's easy to understand how
otherwise decent people might succumb to the temptation of
spending other people's money on their personal projects when
external oversight is virtually nonexistent.
===============================================
Tim W. Brown online: www.timwbrown.com
===============================================
GO HERE TO ENTER THE MONDAY REPORT BOX.
