When Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association turned to their third President this month many asked what problems the organization is having to cause this result? Michael Damian Thomas supplied a plentiful list of SFWA’s issues, which follows below.
However, the two presidents’ resignations cite the needs of their families as their primary reason for leaving office.
CHANGE AT THE TOP. Chelsea Mueller resigned August 15 as Interim President of SFWA, just two weeks after stepping up from Vice-President when SFWA President Jeffe Kennedy resigned on August 1. Both Kennedy and Mueller said the need to take care of family members overhwhelmed their resources.
Kennedy said:
…However, the last several months have been particularly demanding in my personal life, and I have come to the realization that I can no longer provide the focused attention SFWA needs from its President. Without going into too much detail, I continue to be the sole caregiver and financial support for my disabled husband, whose progressive condition is worsening. In addition, my stepfather of twenty years passed away suddenly, widowing my elderly mother for the third time, and I am in the process of taking over all of her finances and care….
Mueller said:
…Many of you may already know, but my husband was in a major motor vehicle accident a couple of months ago. The journey after that, as well as caring for our small child, has severely limited my bandwidth. I had intended to forge on and make as much time for this organization as I could.
However, I am out of spoons, and must use those I have to care for myself and my family….
Anthony W. Eichenlaub, SFWA Secretary, has taken Mueller’s place as the new Interim President. Mueller’s and Eichenlaub’s statements are excerpted in the File 770 post “Mueller Resigns as Interim SFWA President; Eichenlaub Takes Office”.
SFWA’S PROBLEMS. Michael Damian Thomas, urging SFWA members to seek out the details in the members-only Forum, gave X.com readers this list of issues troubling the organization:
It is fairly winding! One employees left & wasn’t replaced. One employee asked for accessibility accommodations, didn’t get them, gave 90 days notice, & then was immediately shut out of their SFWA email account. (That one gets more and more complicated.)
Multiple committees seem to have had members forced out or resigned, including Griefcom. There is a general pattern of these committee members saying there was little or no communication from the Board. Now we have multiple Board members resigning. Lots of claims about NDA stuff.
A check was issued to a charity antho and then the antho was told to not cash the check and destroy it, as the payment was in error. There is a lot going down!
Here is what File 770 has learned so far about those issues.
One Employee Left and Wasn’t Replaced
This is a reference to Deputy Executive Director Terra LeMay, a longtime SFWA employee whose status is a matter of controversy and is discussed in the next section.
SFWA’s other employee is Executive Director Kate Baker.
One Employee Asked for Accessibility Accomodations; Gave 90 Days Notice; Was Shut Out of Email Account
Michael Capobianco, a former SFWA President, said in a comment on a public Facebook post on August 15:
I’m following along as best I can considering that everyone involved (and a lot of new Board members that aren’t) are on a rollercoaster ride of resignations and can’t tell anyone what’s going on explicitly because of the overbroad NDA’s they signed. It looks like it may be leveling off, but there are still a lot of members who are pissed off about the treatment of Deputy Executive Director Terra LeMay, and there’s no sign of a resolution to that problem, which could cascade into other problems of staff and Board behavior.
Jon Del Arroz’ Fandom Pulse newsletter has published – although misattributing the quote to the wrong author — the text of a SFWA Forum post on the subject in “SFWA Whistleblower Exposes Private Online Forum Post With Frustrated Members Demanding Jeffe Kennedy Be Ousted As President” [Internet Archive link]. The post was not written by Michael Capobianco, as asserted by JDA. The quoted post (dated August 2) says:
“The immediate event that kicked this off was Terra LeMay being terminated from her staff position after putting in a 90-day notice due to being denied reasonable disability accommodations, and then banned from Discord and blocked from accessing her SFWA email (presumably by Jeffe [Kennedy]) after she asked for an explanation on Discord in the ask-the-board channel.”
As of August 15, Terra LeMay’s status is that she still is employed by SFWA. She was not fired. And her terminal date would be 90 days from when notice was given – which was on June 30th — not that day. LeMay’s Discord access has been restored, but not her email account. She remains an employee, apparently without duties.
The following commentary is provided by a longtime SFWA member under condition that they remain anonymous. The source is reliable, and in a position to have direct knowledge of the information. (They are not anyone named in this post.)
Most recently, on June 30th, the SFWA employee Michael Damian Thomas mentions put in a notice of resignation. This notice expressed that the actual date of resignation would be negotiated between the two parties, but (per the terms of an existing employment contract) would be no later than 90 days. This employee is well-loved by the SFWA membership as someone who is always helpful, effective, and thoughtful, and has done a ton of great work for the organization, as well as holding a significant amount of institutional knowledge. The employee expressed their intent to continue working until the resignation date to ensure as smooth a transition as possible, but two weeks after that was abruptly locked out of SFWA email and other work accounts, which were all needed for job purposes. When the employee asked why this had happened on the SFWA Discord, someone (it’s not clear who) deleted the messages and banned the employee from the server. The first that most board members heard about this is when people started to demand it be addressed, so it definitely seems like someone in a position of power in the organization was acting on their own, without these being approved board actions.
A number of members have demanded that employee’s access be restored and they be given an apology, but that has not happened even a month later. Nobody has heard from the executive director in that time, and board members say they are unable to speak about it due to NDAs [Non-Disclosure Agreements] or because it’s an “employment situation.” My understanding is that the employee in question has since contacted the board a number of times with questions which have been ignored or only partially answered.
Committees Have Had Members Forced Out, or Resigned, Including Griefcom
The anonymous longtime SFWA member responded:
Regarding GriefCom, the chair and co-chair of that committee resigned after being told their work would have to expand to writers not in SFWA due to its nonprofit status. I think this happened a year ago or more, and don’t think it’s related to the current situation. In fact, a number of writers I know received very condescending and dismissive emails from the former GriefCom chair which essentially blamed them for problems they were facing with publishers. The new GriefCom chair is much better, and I have not heard any complaints recently about GriefCom, so in my opinion this particular case is actually the organization working as it should to serve writers.
There have been a few other committees with people resigning, and the fundraising committee was dissolved in order to set up a new structure of fundraising task forces (which I’m not sure has happened), but I am not aware of any committee volunteers actually being “forced out.”
File 770 has yet to determine who Michael Damian Thomas is referencing as “forced out”.
The list of SFWA Committees (and there are many) is at the link.
There is a general pattern of these committee members saying there was little or no communication from the Board.
The anonymous longtime SFWA member commented:
It’s been almost impossible to get answers about the current situation from the board, or even a very clear picture of what’s going on with other SFWA projects, because every board member and employee was made to sign what appears to be a very, very broad NDA. I have seen one of these, and it does not include any kind of end date, nor does it include detailed descriptions of what the people who signed it need to keep confidential.
I want to note that the current board does really seem to be making a good faith effort to fix the issues around transparency and communication. I believe they are also setting up a special election for some time in the next couple of months, and both Chelsea [Mueller] and the new interim president [Anthony W. Eichenlaub] did make some good steps down that road when writing the membership. Chelsea provided a list of topics the board will discuss in the next four months, and Anthony has been above board as well in scheduling a special election and explicitly asking the membership to hold him accountable. Anthony was serving as secretary before this, and he’s also been working his way through the backlog of board meeting minutes at the same time as being interim president.
While I definitely don’t think the organization is out of the woods yet, I’m hopeful that these are signs it’s moving in the right direction.
Multiple Board Members Resigning
Beyond the two presidents who have resigned, File 770 has not yet identified other board resignations.
However, SFWA has lost several other highly visible workers over the past year. Five employees and a contractor have left.
Beth Dawkins (volunteer coordinator) was a part time employee not a contractor. She gave two weeks notice on July 1.
Kathleen Monin (event coordinator) was also a part time employee. She gave notice later on in the first part of July.
Oz Drummond (bookkeeper and CPA) was a contractor. She resigned at the end of December, stayed a few months longer in a more limited capacity until March 2024.
Rebecca Gomez Farrell (former communications director) was a part time employee and resigned in October of 2023.
Emily May (publications director) was a part time employee and resigned earlier in 2023, shortly before or after the Nebulas.
No new employees or contractors have been hired in that time.
Another volunteer known to have stepped down this year is Mishell Baker, from her lead position on the Estates Project, but that was unrelated to the current situation. (Pixel Scroll — March 5, 2024, item 7)
Claims About NDAs
The anonymous longtime SFWA member said above, “It’s been almost impossible to get answers about the current situation from the board, or even a very clear picture of what’s going on with other SFWA projects, because every board member and employee was made to sign what appears to be a very, very broad NDA.”
Author Jenny Rae Rappaport is urging SFWA members to sign a Petition for bylaws amendment to forbid NDAs. The supporting statement follows.
In the last several years, SFWA has begun requiring its Board members, employees, and key volunteers to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to ensure confidentiality. However, recent events have shown that these NDAs cause more problems than they solve. Because the NDAs are overly broad without clear limits or expiration dates, they leave employees, Board members, and volunteers uncertain about what they can and cannot say without potential legal repercussions. Even more concerning is that these NDAs have created distrust between SFWA membership and the Board, and an environment where the perception exists that bad actors can mistreat others and violate SFWA’s bylaws with impunity.
There is no legal requirement for SFWA as a 501(c)(3) to use NDAs, for either its legal or tax status. Many nonprofits, both inside and outside California, function perfectly well without using NDAs, either trusting that people will follow the laws about disclosure of personal, financial, and medical information, or using individual confidentiality agreements with the details of what information needs to be kept confidential spelled out.
Accordingly, in the interests of greater transparency for the organization, we, the undersigned members of SFWA, petition for the following change to the bylaws…
We move that Article V Directors be amended by the addition of a new section, to be numbered 10. [The complete wording of the amendment is at the link.]
- Confidentiality and Non-Disclosure Agreements
a. Duty of confidentiality
Members of the Board of Directors, as part of their fiduciary duties, have a duty of confidentiality, which covers such items as private financial information about the corporation (accounts, for example, as opposed to the financial status, which must be disclosed), nor use any of the information for personal gain. This does not need to be further specified.
- Examples of such types of information include recipients of SFWA’s medical fund, information about unannounced Nebula award winners or nominees, information about contracts committee work, and all other information that would identify confidential information about specific individuals.
b. Duty to disclose
Additionally, the members of the Board have a duty to disclose, which means they must share any information they have which will affect SFWA or its beneficiaries (writers of science fiction, fantasy, and related genres), or that will affect their ability to perform their duties….
d. No NDAs
Given that these duties are already codified, no member of the Board of Directors will be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), nor shall any employee or volunteer be asked or expected to sign an NDA. When appropriate, Board members, employees, or volunteers may be required to sign a confidentiality agreement, which must be circumscribed in nature, listing the specific items that will be held confidential and the timeframe for which this will be required.
Any and all NDAs already existing when this bylaw becomes effective will be considered null and void, and no legal action will be considered against anyone who may be considered to have breached their NDA unless they have otherwise violated a law.
For a comparison of how NDA’s are handled by another organization of genre professionals, Horror Writers Association President John Edward Lawson explained on X.com why their organization requires elected officers and trustees, paid employees, and certain committee chairs or volunteers (but not all volunteers) to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. Lawson’s ten-part thread starts here.
Check Issued to Charity Antho; Then SFWA Told Antho to Destroy Check
This complaint is about the handling of a charity anthology originally intended to be underwritten by SFWA, Embroidered Worlds: Fantastic Fiction from Ukraine and the Diaspora edited by Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Olha Brylova, and Iryna Pasko. It was ultimately funded through a Kickstarter appeal.
The following commentary about SFWA’s handling of the anthology is provided by a longtime SFWA member under condition that they remain anonymous. The source is reliable, and in a position to have direct knowledge of the information.
I’ve volunteered with SFWA for close to ten years, and the organization has frankly always been a little dysfunctional in terms of opaqueness and poor internal communications. The last two years in particular, though, have been Kafkaesque, with projects that committees had spent dozens of hours working on being abruptly cancelled by the board with no notice or real rationale, and volunteers being blamed for failing to communicate when they ask what happened.
Because the cancelled anthology project is emblematic of these problems, I’m going to talk about it at a little more length.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the international committee began work on setting up an anthology of Ukrainian science fiction in translation, supposedly with the agreement and approval of the board. (For context, SFWA had previously published a blog post stating that it “stands with Ukraine”). That work included contacting writers and editors living in parts of Ukraine that were being bombarded daily by Russian artillery, drones, and missiles to solicit work, and a couple of these folks put in significant amounts of effort on the project. This work proceeded for more than a year, with committee members in contact with their board liaison and other board members including the CFO, throughout. Committee members also contacted several different publishers before finding one who was interested in the project. As Michael Damian Thomas notes, that included sending the publisher a check to offset costs in printing the anthology and paying authors.
There was no indication at any time that the board disapproved of the project for over a year. Indeed, the project was announced in several different member newsletters. Early in 2023, Jeffe Kennedy [SFWA President] sent the committee chair and the publisher an email saying it was cancelled. I’m just going to quote from that email here:
“We’ve heard that there’s still confusion as to the Board’s recent decision to end SFWA’s involvement with the Ukrainian Anthology project. This email is intended to clearly communicate that to all involved parties.
“At our most recent meeting, the Board made the decision to end the project. There were two main reasons for this decision. The first is that we do not have either the staff time or expertise in Ukrainian cultural matters to take this on. That includes judging whether someone else may or may not be a good fit for editing it. This means it cannot be a SFWA project.
“It also cannot be a SFWA grant because of the extent of work that International Committee members have put into it and the potential credit they may receive as editors in any format. Of course, we recognize that the participating committee members did not know their efforts could jeopardize the grant, but that does not change the end result. Scenarios involving self-dealing and nonprofits are extremely delicate. As soon as we get into parsing shades of exemptions, we’ve crossed into the territory of an appearance of Conflict of Interest. That is our boundary; not whether a situation is legally a conflict of interest, but whether it generates the appearance of one.”
This is typical of the kind of dismissive, condescending communications I have seen from some former board members to volunteers. Note the passive “there’s still confusion” and the other ways this email makes it sound like volunteers were the ones to blame for the current situation.
The first reason Jeffe cites for the cancellation might sound reasonable on the face of things, but in light of the context above I find it ridiculous. That would have been a good reason not to start the project. It makes no sense at all at essentially the end of the project, given that one member of the international committee at the time was Ukrainian disapora and we had been working with two Ukrainian editors. The board was also not being asked to “take this on.” We already had experts in Ukrainian cultural matters working on it, and had already done all the work Jeffe said the board didn’t have time for.
The second reason is a complete misunderstanding of what “self-dealing” is. The Council of Foundations defines self-dealing as activities that result in disproportionate benefit by distribution of the organization’s earnings to insiders, such as founders, directors and officers. To claim that people who are not founders, directors, or officers of the organization receiving editor credit in a print anthology without any pay is self-dealing is clearly ludicrous. I don’t know if the board genuinely misunderstood what “self-dealing’ meant or if Jeffe was just looking for some excuse to cancel the project, or what.
I emailed the board to tell them how bad this would be for SFWA if they really went through with it, and how disappointed I was that they would seek to blame volunteers for their own decisions (which I felt were without any merit) but I never got a response. I also still have not seen any of the meeting minutes where the project was discussed, despite requesting them repeatedly in the last year and a half, so I don’t really know what the discussion was at that board meeting or any of the ones prior.
This email also asked the publisher to shred the check they had been sent, but did not at any point apologize or say there had been any mistakes made in sending it. The publisher we had selected is a small press which runs on tight margins and which has a reputation for publishing inclusive, thoughtful fiction. Despite the situation this cancellation put them in, when the publisher said they had shredded the check, Jeffe did not thank them or apologize. Neither was there any recognition at any point that this meant people living in a literal warzone would not get paid by SFWA, after a SFWA committee had spent a year telling them they would, supposedly with the approval of the board.
The publisher was still interested in trying to do right by these authors, and several of us who had been on the international committee worked with them outside of SFWA to help bring it to publication. It’s a great anthology from a great press, and I’m proud of it. If you’d like to tell the folks at File 770 about it, they can find it here.
All the same, I remain deeply frustrated at how SFWA handled the situation, and the whole thing was a giant mess.
SFWA’s Good Work Should Not Be Eclipsed.
The anonymous longtime SFWA member wants it known that despite these problems there is good work being done by the organization:
…Also, I want to be really explicit in saying that even though the organization has been having some issues, I sincerely do believe that the vast majority of current and former board members are working in good faith to meet SFWA’s mission of supporting and promoting all genre writers.
The organization has done some great work in the last couple of years, creating more inclusive membership qualifications that better reflect professional writers as they exist today and which recognize historical and current inequities in publishing. I was also part of an effort which won the organization an NEA grant to put out a series of blog posts called “Publishing Taught Me”, a project that highlights the contributions of BIPOC editors and writers to publishing. SFWA does important work in the community as well, supporting other organizations with its Givers Grant Funds, helping authors with GriefCom, contract work, and the medical fund, and working to limit the harm of bad actors in the publishing industry through its support for Writer Beware.
I’m deeply sad that all these great things SFWA does are being overshadowed by what seems to have been one or two people abusing the organization’s lack of accountability and transparency, which could have been avoided without these overly broad NDAs. It makes me feel terrible to think that all those things may disappear if the organization doesn’t fix its issues.
SFWA’s Interim President Anthony W. Eichenlaub feels the same, as he said in his introductory message to members:
SFWA is at a critical moment.
I hope you’ll take a pause to go through all of the emotions you are feeling because you’re right. Whatever you are feeling right now is appropriate because something you deeply care about is threatened. And many of us do love this organization. When it is functioning well, SFWA is truly a force for good, and it is unique in this industry.
SFWA BOARD MEMBERSHIP, BEFORE AND AFTER
As of August 6
- Chelsea Mueller – Interim President
- Jonathan Brazee – CFO
- Anthony Eichenlaub – Secretary
- Christine Taylor-Butler – Director-at-Large
- Phoebe Barton – Director-at-Large
- Noah Sturdevant – Director-at-Large
- Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki – Director-at-Large
- Alton Kremer – Director-at-Large
As of August 15
- Anthony Eichenlaub – Interim President
- Jonathan Brazee – CFO
- Christine Taylor-Butler – Director-at-Large
- Phoebe Barton – Director-at-Large
- Noah Sturdevant – Director-at-Large
- Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki – Director-at-Large
- Alton Kremer – Director-at-Large
Update 08/18/2024: Made additions and corrections based on comments.
