Burlington author, publisher and peace activist Marc Estrin died of heart failure in Burlington on Sunday. He was 86.
Estrin wrote 17 novels and two memoirs. With his wife, Donna Bister, he started and operated Fomite Press, the 14-year-old “postcapitalist” publishing company that returns 80 percent of book revenue to authors.
The Brooklyn native grew up in a small apartment so crowded with books “you had to walk sideways in the hall,” his website biography says. But he didn’t touch any of them until he was 16 and picked up Franz Kafka’s The Trial. “This explains much,” the bio continues.
Estrin “was a modern-day Renaissance man,” his friend Ron Jacobs said. He was a theater director who worked in San Francisco and Pittsburgh; a theater professor at the now-closed Goddard College in Plainfield; an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister who served congregations in Moscow, Idaho, and in Middlebury; a physician’s assistant; a cellist; a puppeteer who toured with Bread and Puppet Theater; and the first coordinator of the Burlington Peace & Justice Center.
Estrin offered various forms of his life story in the “about the author” section of his website, concluding in one of them: “He is baffling, even unto himself.”
In 1998, while visiting Prague with Bister, Estrin left a note on Kafka’s grave inviting the Czech writer to visit if he ever found himself in Burlington. Three weeks later, Estrin sketched out the concept for one of his best known books, Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa. He based the 2002 novel on Kafka’s 1915 classic The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa wakes one day to find himself transformed into a repulsive insect.
“Estrin plucks the bug, which was tossed into the trash at the conclusion of Kafka’s tale, and lets him live on in a book that is a sort of ‘Ragtime’ for roaches,” Ken Tucker wrote in a review for the New York Times. Estrin “has music in his prose,” Tucker wrote.
Golem Song (2006) and The Education of Arnold Hitler (2005) are among his other most successful novels. With photographer Ronald T. Simon, he produced Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater, published by Chelsea Green in 2004.
Much of Estrin’s work was published by traditional publishers. “On a $15 paperback, I make 75 cents,” he told Seven Days in 2011. He and his wife started Fomite Press that year as an extension of their political activism. They never intended to turn a profit. “Occupy publishing,” Estrin called it.
Since its inception, Fomite has published about 350 titles, mostly literary fiction, poetry and “odd birds,” works that elude classification, such as Clark Russell’s Riddleville last year. The company has published about 20 books with Bread and Puppet, Bister said.
Before turning to book publishing, the couple, along with Jacobs, spent nearly seven years producing the Old North End Rag, a monthly neighborhood newspaper they started in 1996 as a way to distribute the Neighborhood Planning Assembly’s agenda — with cartoons and articles to attract more interest. A famous fabricated story in an April Fools’ issue announced that City Market was going to start selling cigarettes, prompting a call to the publishers from the city’s Community & Economic Development Office.
Montpelier painter and sculptor Delia Robinson has illustrated books for Fomite Press. She has known Estrin since she was 16, when he rolled into Danby Four Corners on a motorcycle to marry her oldest sister, Nona Bell. Robinson, now 79, has five sisters, she said, and many men were coming and going through the family’s home in those early years. “But he was the one we never let go.”
Estrin’s marriage to Nona produced two children before it ended. Still, Robinson said, Estrin remained “loyal to our family in a way that was just extraordinarily rich and kind.”
He treated everyone as if their ideas were valuable and worth discussing, Robinson said.
“He really was a person of integrity in many astonishing ways,” she said, “and that included helping other people to try to learn, to jump a little higher and to discover the best things they could do.”
Working as a minister didn’t suit Estrin, his wife, Bister, said. “He thought everyone should go to seminary, though, because he felt like that’s where you meet people who have vision and commitment in their lives.”
Estrin’s online biography credits leftist German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht and the Vietnam War for spurring him into political action. He and Bister participated in peace demonstrations at the top of Church Street in front of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington every weekday for 11 years, beginning on September 13, 2001.
Longtime Burlington peace activist Robin Lloyd called Estrin “a wise soul” and noted the coincidence that the nuclear arms opponent’s death came just one day after the 80th anniversary of the U.S. atomic attack on Nagasaki.
Burlington City Councilor Gene Bergman (P-Ward 2) knew Estrin as a friend and comrade in peace and justice work. “Marc had a philosopher’s sensibility,” Bergman said, and was “an intellectual in the truest sense of the word.”
Bergman’s wife, Wendy Coe, cofounded the Peace & Justice Center and was its longtime finance and operations manager. When Estrin, hired as the first paid staffer in 1984, feared that no one would find the center’s third-floor downtown space, he suggested opening a store to lure them in so he could chat them up and present the group’s petitions. He was against capitalism, Coe said, but he knew how to harness it.
Curmudgeonly at times, yet positive, Estrin was always thinking about ways to change the world, Coe said. “He did enough thinking for a thousand people.”
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2025.
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