![]() Unable to do so, we instead setup a mail-order and warehouse location in Bloomington, IN in March 2007. 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.Īlso 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. I was frequently having to reject submissions that I knew would sell because of the way the conversation had gone within management. 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. 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.Ī 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. 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. ![]() Whoever had the strongest personality would determine management policies by simply being the loudest voice, imposing their views on others.Īfter 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. And that was partly my fault.We were constantly negotiating everyone’s feelings. 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. No one had been on board for ten years like I had, so most people weren’t invested in the same way. Unfortunately, it immediately created a slew of greater problems. 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. 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. 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: People frequently ask about the confusing developments at Microcosm since we published our You Can Work Any 100 Hours Per Week zine in 2006. 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. ![]() ![]() As a result of this, we, the staff of Microcosm are constantly barraged with questions about this situation. Joe Biel, the sole founder of Microcosm, is autistic but was not diagnosed until he was 32 years old. A Statement From Microcosm Januby Microcosm ![]()
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