Kickstarter
On Kickstarter, Daphne Carr writes backers of Best Music Writing 2012 to tell them “the project will not be published.”
That does not necessarily explain why it has taken additional time to write to you, but I hope you understand that this was due to a sort of panic about how to save the title. It is something I love and have held dear to me for my entire adult life. It is my profound sadness to have failed with it.
Reached by phone, Carr reiterated many of the points in her Kickstarter post. “This is the love of my life, and I really wanted it to work,” she said of taking over the Best Music Writing series, “and I’ve been grappling with the realities that it’s not, so this is very painful.”
I asked Carr whether her involvement with the Occupy movement, mentioned in H. Drew Blackburn’s post in Vice about the situation, had any impact on the book’s failure. “I’m not really sure what that question means, but I think its not an either/or situation, and I don’t think that it has any bearing,” she said. She has been involved in Occupy but “not to the detriment of anything in my life.” She didn’t want to talk about the work she was doing currently but said that “people don’t live off of editing anthologies ever in the history of the world.”
In her Kickstarter post, Carr said she’ll publish the list of works selected for the book and will repay people who collectively contributed more than $17,000 to its creation: “I have done the number crunching, and given my current revenue streams, it should take about three years of monthly payments to backers.”
On the phone she said she’d heard from some of the people who’ve donated and “I hope that other people who have concerns about money will reach out to me as soon as they can.” I asked her if she thought the Vice piece, which said some of the people who were working on the project have had no contact with her in some time, was fair.
“If you’re asking if I think it would be in Best Music Writing, I would say it probably was not heavily researched,” Carr said. She said she’d used the money she raised for the book to pay people involved. She said an idea that she saw passed around on Twitter, “that I’ve absconded with this enormous fortune and run off to Central America seems like a dark thing to joke about.” People “who’ve been involved with the project knew that the money had been spent” on producing the book, she said.
I asked about the people in the article who said they hadn’t heard from her. “I think it’s fair to say I was irresponsible in my contact with the donors,” she said.
Previously: Best Music Writing editor disappears, along with cash raised for series
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