A Life in Motion

16. Retirement and Return

— 437 — 16 Retirement and Return . . . We, we who are chained to the walls of our childhood, salute you and we give you our prayers while you surge ahead like the storm of a ship that ploughs itself into the distance of a new land, a land your yesterdays can only imagine. Do not forget us Yvette Christiansë,“Generations” At the end of 2000, I was ready to retire, seventy-one years old, and aware ironically that I had, over the past thirty years, learned how to be a publisher just as publishing was about to change even more radically than it had during all my years. From time to time in the 1980s, seeking relationships with printing firms and wanting to understand the process, I visited both large and small firms in the Midwest staffed by people who set type, produced pages then sheets, and ran them, sometimes on small and slow machines, other times on large and rapid ones. At the Feminist Press we had no computers until the late 1980s, and even in the early years of the 1990s, Women Writing in India had been set in hot type. It was late in the 1990s before we began to set the interiors of our books on computers, though we were still sending covers out to designers who often worked by hand. In the 1970s when the press started, local bookstores were as — 438 — common in communities as local drugstores, and we rejoiced as some 140 feminist bookstores were founded through the decade supported by the same movement that read feminist journals, newsletters, and newspapers. Who among us remembers when a bookstore named Amazon in Minneapolis threatened a lawsuit when the giant bookseller Amazon first opened its online bookstore ? Who among us imagined that most bookstores would vanish before two colossi—Barnes & Noble and Borders? Most of all, who could imagine that books as weighty objects manufactured from paper would turn into ephemera to be summoned by a click of a button? Who suspected that even as newspapers folded their book review sections, websites and bloggers would take the place not only of print reviews but also of word-of-mouth“hand-selling” in mom and pop bookstores? So at the end of a thirty-year education , I was, I can now see clearly, leaving at the right time, though I didn’t then know it. The search committee for a new executive director held two meetings with me. I suggested that they needed someone from the staff on the search committee, and they chose Jean Casella, the editorial director. I urged the committee to consider belief in our mission as more important than publishing experience, since we had a staff drawn from the publishing world. I advised them to search for a visionary academic who could learn the economics of the publishing business, rather than a publishing professional without handson teaching experience who would not be alert to the needs of college classrooms still revising a patriarchal curriculum. In short, I wanted the Feminist Press to continue to be mission driven. They heeded my suggestions, but their search brought in candidates who made Jean Casella decide that she ought to apply. Jean was an experienced editor with a discerning literary taste who had been with us since the end of 1995. She came after a decade of working in other small presses and as a freelance writer and editor. She had also written a book with a prominent journalist , who regarded her as an exceptionally gifted editor. The committee chose Jean even though she admitted quite openly in a meeting I was asked to attend that she had almost no fund-raising — 439 — or financial management experience. Board members suggested that, during the remaining nine months of 2000, she and I work closely on financial matters and fund-raising to improve her proficiency . Despite my own advice, I found myself feeling pleased with the decision, for during the five years I had worked with Jean, I had come to respect her intelligence and honesty. I also thought that having her succeed me would, in effect, produce a seamless transition , especially since I would continue to be present in our offices for a few years as the text editor for Women Writing Africa and as the person responsible for the project’s financial management and reports to Ford, Rockefeller, and the board. But then, a few days later...