If I Can’t Laugh, I Don’t Want to Be in Your Revolution

Marc Estrin was one of the first dozen or so people I met when I moved to Vermont in 1992. That happened mainly because a friend of mine lived in the same building as Marc and played music with him. By 1996, he and I were part of a small group of University of Vermont staff members trying to organize a union there. In fact, we held a couple of meetings at his house in Burlington’s Old North End neighborhood. As I got to know him, I began to realize he was much more than a cello player and a physician’s assistant at the University of Vermont’s Health Clinic. His stories about his time as a theater director in San Francisco working with Michael McClure and McClure’s play The Beard led to stories about the Washington Free Community in Washington DC; this group was an umbrella for several antiwar/new left, and counterculture media and arts groups that operated out of a couple of buildings in the District. Considering them now, I realize those stories also told of his invitation to join Peter and Elke Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre which in turn led to Marc moving to Vermont and Goddard College, the late great institution of learning and alternative culture in Vermont’s Green Mountains.

Back to the union drive at the University of Vermont. Suffice it to say, our organizing undertaken with the support and guidance of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) succeeded. In December 1997, the housekeeping, groundskeepers, bookstore workers, and tradespeople voted in UVM’s first (non-police) union. Not long afterwards, Marc and his wife Donna Bister approached me with the idea of launching a newspaper for Burlington’s Old North End (ONE). For those unfamiliar with Burlington, VT., the Old North End is the oldest part of Burlington (in terms of European settlement) and is still very working class. It was even more so in the late 1990s. After a couple of meetings and a grant from a now defunct organization called the Little Red Fund, the three of us launched the Old North End Rag. My son signed on as our tech expert and youth “reporter” for his high school’s community service requirement. I’ve always described the paper’s mission as agitational; we wanted to stir up stuff, get the politicians to notice and do something and get the residents of the neighborhood to organize themselves to change their lot. As it turned out, the paper became something of a community fixture, extending its reach to the rest of Burlington while drawing praise from other Vermont news reporters and anger from various politicians from all three parties—Progressive, Democrat, and Republican. The paper lasted for a few years until the funding ran out.

By the time the ONE Rag folded, Marc’s first novel had been published. Titled Insect Dreams, it received very positive reviews across the mainstream and other media, including a long review and special mention in the New York Times. (A later version of the novel was released under the title Kafka’s Roach). A generic description of the novel might call it a speculative novel about Franz Kafka’s cockroach character from his story Metamorphosis. It is a consideration of the human condition in the wake of the madness of the twentieth century, with a special focus on the development and use of nuclear weapons; and it’s all wrapped up in a tale full of humor, history, tragedy and even love. Insect Dreams would be the beginning of a writing career that includes over a dozen books. It would also provide an essential spark to the founding of Fomite Press in 2011.

There’s a group of poets and writers who have been meeting in different places in Burlington since before I moved to the town. Marc began taking part in their meetings/readings in the late around the turn of the century. He was impressed by the quality of the writing and frustrated that most of it would never be shared beyond the writing group. So he and Donna decided to launch a publishing company. My novel Co-Conspirator’s Tale was their first publication. Since that launch, the press—known as Fomite Press—has published over two hundred books. The list includes poetry, novels, essays, creative nonfiction, and lots of graphic works from Peter Schumann and Bread & Puppet Theatre, with whom Estrin shared a long past. A few of the books have received awards, with the most recent one to be listed titled Beneath the Gaza Sky, written by Shadi Salem and listed for the 2025 Palestine Book Awards.

Palestine was Estrin’s final political campaign. Appalled at the slaughter undertaken by the Israeli military since October 2023, Estrin asked me often in the months following if I thought we were doing enough to stop the genocide. My answer was no, but we were doing what we could. Never satisfied with that answer, Marc would always respond, but are we? Estrin hated war and genuinely abhorred violence. A political mind did not override his humanistic soul; a soul that must have been a primary reason he became an antiwar activist back in the 1960s and remained one until he passed. Perhaps it was this passion that convinced him to become a minister and while at seminary in Berkeley, California join the protests at the Concord Naval Weapons Station. It was during one of those protests—which involved sitting on train tracks in front of trains delivering US weapons to be used in the US-led slaughter in Central America during the 1980s—that Estrin’s fellow protester, Navy veteran Brian Willson, ’s legs smashed by a Navy train that sped up and ran over Willson. For over a decade, Estrin participated in a considerably less dramatic antiwar protest every Friday evening at the top of Burlington’s Church Street in downtown Burlington.

I don’t want to make Marc sound too serious because he wasn’t. Consciously or not, he reminded me of the trickster more than once. While our work may have been serious, his approach reminded me of a quote attributed to Emma Goldman about dancing and revolution. I never saw Marc dance, so this seems like a more honest paraphrase: “If I can’t laugh, I don’t want to be in your revolution.”

Even though Marc told me his work with Bread & Puppet was his greatest achievement, I think that the weekly vigil for peace and Marc’s commitment to it might be the best way to remember him. A smile behind his beard, a sign in his hands and a commitment to peace based in a belief that humanity was better than it appears to be.

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