My first email to her
This is just over the top HUGE for several hundreds of us on a messageboard that Dan Peterson constantly spits on and argues with and villifies. Is there any way we can get a verification of you being one of Interpreter's editors? Can you tell me more about it? When you were there, for how long, what exactly was Peterson having you do for them? Financing, etc.? He always accuses us of lying, but so much is odd about the kinds of articles they publish and the quality! Gawd the quality is horrible. Something is wrong with it all, and you might be a key to getting to the bottom of it all. THANK YOU for any ideas you share. I am a former board member of FAIR, to help give you a wee bit of context. More later as we establish a credibility with each other. Sounds like we both have incredible insider stories and knowledge that can benefit those who are trying to figure it all out.
Her response to me
Check out my profile—this is a doxed account—and Google my name in conjunction with Interpreter. If they erased it from their articles they are pretty lousy; I was on their board from 2016-2018. One author thanked me by name at the end of his article because I did such great work in it. I haven’t checked to see if they deleted me from their history or not but Internet Wayback machine remembers all, lol
My response to her
Thank you Jennifer. May I share this on the message board I hang out with? They definitely will want to understand this. By the way, you are a lovely person.
My further response to her
Yep, I see your name with Interpreter. You are famous! Lol.......hope life is treating you very well! It's too bad they treated you the way they did. I guess when you get to be a big shot, perhaps the rudeness level increases? Who knows?
Her permission to me to share her comments
Share away; I doxed myself here for a reason. I was ready to share my story publicly once my name had been officially removed from the records of the cult.
Fun FYI about Interpreter I can share: as I mentioned in my post, the owners, founders, editorial board, and authors were mostly the same people (which is not right—other REAL journals avoid such overlap because that equals major conflicts of interest when deciding what does and doesn’t get published!). So imagine my surprise when, after I became an editor (I started out as a lowly source-checker volunteer; even as an editor I was an unpaid volunteer), I began receiving internal emails for the org asking for donations.
They made them sound really urgent, like they needed our money ASAP! But I soon realized that these emails went out periodically so maybe they weren’t all that urgent. My husband was working on his doctorate at the time and we were recently recovering from unemployment due to company closure so I just ignored them. But only later did it hit me what was going on: not only was the entire journal’s publishing decision process devoid of any genuine peer review process, but because the guys running the journal and submitting articles for publication were also the ones funding the journal, so this was basically one great big vanity press!
Emphasis on the word “vanity” because I quit after one especially heinous article in which the author refused to heed my warnings about how badly done it was—I had given him ideas for fixing/improving it and he flat out refused to listen and insisted on keeping his atrocious article as-is. I figured a higher ranked editor would talk him out of it but no, his hideous article was left in its original embarrassing state! When I googled this diva author to try to get a better understanding of who he was, I learned that he was top brass at Interpreter, lives abroad, so probably is a big donor too. And that is why he gets away with publishing atrocities against editorial advice. In fact when my supervisor handed the article off to me they were wincing and said they knew I would be the one to clean it up because even they were trepidatious’s about posting it. You can look it up—it is Jeff Lindsay’s monstrosity article about Chinese Science Fiction and Joseph Smith and the cosmos. He is all over the map in that article! Imagine trying to edit that as a TBM! I had great ideas for cleaning it up, removing his crazy rant about the CES letter (I told him he could attack it in another article since that was another topic for another day and not relevant to his discussion about Chinese sci-fi —all of our authors seemed really bent on taking Runnells down; it was like everybody’s holy grail) and then more seamlessly integrating Joseph Smith/cosmos into his little book report so that Interpreter didn’t look so crazy for posting that thing.
But in the end he discarded all my ideas and declared that his work would be posted as-is. And because Lindsey is both a board member AND an author at Interpreter, he could toss out such orders like a diva and keep his crazy article as-is. I have never worked at a legit scholarly journal, but I have talked to other people who have and they tell me that what I experienced is beyond absurd—that it is a mockery of the scholarly journal publication/peer review process and Interpreter is a joke. Basically I was never an editor but an unwitting cog in a propaganda machine. Ouch. So I quit shortly after the Jeff Lindsay incident.
PS: interpreter folks were always super polite to me, Jeff Lindsay aside. I think it was because I was one of only two females there so maybe it was a “be nice to the minorities” kind of thing.
I don’t know if I mentioned this in one of my previous posts or not, but when I invited two Interpreter board members who live near me (in Massachusetts) over to celebrate founders day remotely they both ignored the invite. Reminded me a lot of my experience at BYU-Idaho—at BYUI the men were openly assholes to me, didn’t even attempt politeness. So while I actually have fond memories of my time at Interpreter, maybe that is because my supervisor there was a woman; I pretty much never interacted with the men, lol.
End of her comments.
This is me now, Philo Sofee
Interesting how when Lindsay's article first came out how our reactions were so negative and wondering if he had flipped his lid. Now we know he won't even listen to editors trying to help him! LOL! I know we all knew a lot of this, but having an actual eyewitness kinda gives it the damning quality doesn't it. Well, I mean eyewitnesses in Mormonism are supposed to be so very important, so I figure lets go ahead and get some of our own...
