Article: Midnight Dance / Pathos Anthology Printings Ended When Contributors Couldn't Agree

When you get together for the first time 54 contributing poets and artists without a single publishing agreement, as we did in Midnight Dance / Pathos Anthology in 2004, you're asking for chaos and going to have to be lucky if it's to work. It did work, until the 69th copy of it, when funding was so low that we could not print another copy at the copy places. That was back when we would print out a hard copy on our printer and take it to photocopy places with cover stock for the color cover and use their photocopy machines then hand-bind them at home with a comb binder, which takes hours, then days, then months... it was fun because of the feeling of getting things done, but learning from that I would not do it that way again.

The real problem was the lack of an agreement meant that some people had different expectations from the publishing than we did. There were a few that wanted a free copy, which was hard for us to do but we made exceptions because we felt sorry for those that couldn't afford one, but then that led to issues of fairness and everyone wanting a free copy at that point.

And there were issues with those that weren't experienced in being published, that felt qualms about their work being placed in the same publication with other works that they disagreed with what they represented. While we had nothing in it that broke the rules for what should be in the public eye, that did not stop certain people from withdrawing their works (after it had been published!) because of these qualms.

Plus, the mere organizing of that many people made it very difficult to keep track of who had gotten what copies of the book and who did not. If there were some who did not receive copies of the book at the end, it would have to be edited copies that removed those works that had chosen to withdraw due to their personal reasons. It was a nightmare.