Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good
The United States begins its summer season a little ahead of the solstice with Memorial Day weekend.
The end of May also brings my year-long writing experiment to a close.
Thank you so much for reading and learning with me since last May. I’ll be writing again in a few weeks.
Subscribers will hear first what’s next for me. If you know someone who’d enjoy reading, please invite them to sign up too.
See you soon!
Earlier this fall, I visited Oakley Cabin, a small wood and clay structure in Montgomery County, MD, that once housed the enslaved house, farm, and crafts workers of a White Quaker doctor. It’s the last of three cabins in that area, and the county has taken it on as a preservation site. Earlier in the fall, I took a little time to tour and write about it.
A new subscribe-to-access publication, The Porch Magazine, has just published that article. The writers and editors behind The Porch are designing it to hold space for slow reading, careful thinking, and hopeful engagement with the world around us. I think we’re going to succeed. Subscription funds pay for staffing, operations, and writing; that’s it. The only way we’re growing rich from this is in spirit!
My own newsletter subscribers get a weekly digest email of my informal writing and the occasional update from me. If you’d like to get that in your inbox, let me know. The next subscriber-only update posts Friday now I’ve snatched a few moments to write it!
Last fall, I spoke to the Society of Adventist Philosophers about how the Adventist community handles “the word” and how our commitments to literacy and logos influence our approach to informing, persuading, and communicating.
Working on that paper sent me trekking through the library of Plato, especially the Phaedrus dialogues where Socrates and his interlocutors explore what the new art of writing might mean for older forms of rhetoric and other arts, like memory.
Socrates here is a writing skeptic, and we know this only because his student Plato frames him as such in writing. Because of Plato, we get to enjoy Socrates, even if our dear teacher once thought we’re not “the right sort of people” because we write:
In the garden of letters, [he who knows the just and good and honourable] will sow and plant, but only for the sake of recreation and amusement; he will write [thoughts] down as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age, by himself, or by any other old man who is treading the same path. He will rejoice in beholding their tender growth; and while others are refreshing their souls with banqueting and the like, this will be the pastime in which his days are spent.” —The Phaedrus
Thousands of years post-Plato, we’re still writing things.
More: I’m writing. A descendant of a people once explicitly barred from writing and other language arts is writing. I’m writing a lot, stretching my ability, testing my discipline, hoping that I improve in the process, trusting that the people who most need the Word behind the word will catch it in these words.
I write for so many reasons.
At the top of the list: I write because I can. I’m feeling a rush of gratitude to my parents who conspired to teach us writing for information and writing as craft. My mother made Mummy Writes What I Remember journals for my siblings and me, and she sat with each of us almost daily, recording what we could recall until we were old enough to train our attention and write our memories for ourselves.
Mum’s diligence meant that I was writing well before I went to school: no later than the age of four. A decade later, my father let me loose on his calligraphy set, reviewing my attempts to form pretty letters. I didn’t train long enough to master the art, but it hasn’t stopped me from seeing writing as a craft and not a mere utility. Thanks, Mum. Thanks, Dad.
Next on the list: I write because I should. Writing has been part of almost every job and trainee role I’ve ever held: legal assistant, opinion writer, editor, teaching assistant, parliamentarian, editor again, graduate assistant, policy writer, grant writer, rhetorician, technical communicator, still-an-editor, researcher, contractor, fundraiser, program manager, writer-who-speaks-too, consultant and business owner, communications coordinator, and program director.
Writing is the tool I use to cast visions and reshape organizational matter at the levels of the work unit and the funding request. I use it to articulate what my colleagues and I are all about, to imagine what more we can become together, and to connect us with the communities around us.
Writing is also the tool I use to recover from organizations behaving badly. Whether I write privately or publicly, writing is my means of making sense of the insensible and nonsensical so I can still show up at the common table open-hearted. I don’t mail every letter or send every email—thank God—but I still write!
And finally: I write because I must. About a month ago, I shared with one of my communities how societal silences shaped my early sense of who I was and how I fit into my ethnic, religious, and national cultures. I wrote about growing up not seeing my whole self in the mirror of these cultures; I wrote about what it has meant for me to discover affinity communities as an adult through fictional and nonfictional literature. Writing, others’ writing, allowed me to encounter them and therefore encounter myself.
Today, writing is how I carve my own reflection into my cultural mirrors. Writing is the way that I reshape that early story and make new endings out of it. Writing is what I offer the world, no matter what, in the hope that young ones as young as I once was will have at least one more reflection in their mirrors, one more token of their peer group and the communities beyond the kin they can touch.
I write because some of you still want to read. I also write regardless of whether any of you ever want to read.
But I’m glad that you do read.
Thank you.
Allowing yourself to change is a complex thing if only because it’s as easy to become attached to our own work as it is to become accustomed to our daily routines. Just as others come to have expectations of us, we also come to have expectations of ourselves, and so when we find ourselves growing and changing despite those expectations, it can be hard to adjust and embrace the new us that’s emerging.
This morning, I came across an old advice column from one of the humanist Patheos blogs. A former Christian songwriter wrote in with some distress about hyper-religious fan praise for his oldest work, work he has since outgrown himself.
Because I recorded a couple of Christian albums, years ago, both certified gold, I have a following; people recognize me and assume I’m still a Christian. I have a Facebook fan page, where I can let fans know what I’m up to. But so many of them are devout Christians who post messages like, ‘Continue to do the Lord’s work!’ and ‘We thank the Lord for your ministry!’ But I don’t have [a] ministry! If they merely write ‘God bless you’ or something, that’s fine. But I’ve been deleting the more sanctimonious messages, because I just can’t stand them.”
This was the columnist’s response:
For centuries, artists and composers have been producing both secular and sacred art and music. For many of them, it is impossible for us to know how devoutly and sincerely they believed in the religion they were glorifying. Certainly many did, but it is likely that some did not. For some perhaps, it was never more than a gig; they did it for the money. They had to paint landscapes or saints; they had to write quartets or hymns. They had to eat.
But that makes no difference. Regardless of their private thoughts and innermost feelings, by their talent and their hard work they produced great things. Their creations give both believers and skeptics experiences of awe, astonishment, inspiration, insight, and sheer pleasure…
You don’t have to refute their beliefs or reinforce them. Take a couple of deep, slow breaths, and thank them just as you do the less overtly religious ones. Allow everyone to admire any work you have done for whatever reason they have, in whatever terms they use.” —Richard Wade
Creating steadily for years and having a rapid growth process means outgrowing your own stuff sooner or later. In fact, one of my mentors has said that should be the goal: to be at least a little strange to your Five-Years-Younger Self. I’m sure I’m winning that game!
Creating steadily for years also means generating entire audiences of people whose responses to your work you can’t control. I’ve been writing on the internet for at least a decade now, and while I closed my original weblog, there are still traces of it and my forums phase online. And I’ve been writing and speaking offline for more than twice as long. I gave my first sermon when I was 18 years old so there are still people whose perception of me is fixed to that event.
A funny thing happened with that sermon. I wrote it for oral delivery and, with some encouragement from relatives and friends, revised it for print and submitted it to a religious journal. The editor at the time took pity on me and paid me for it, but it didn’t actually run for another five years.
By the time it ran, I’d forgotten about it: it had simply become That Time I Wrote A Thing And Got US Dollars In Return. I was on my way to a congressional internship when the journal’s office asked me for an updated bio, and when it ran, I reread it.
I was mortified. It was, I thought, facile. And hokey. And the theology in the last two sections was dead-wrong.
But that wasn’t what the publication thought. It wasn’t what readers around the world thought. It wasn’t what a reviewer thought.
I wanted to hide, and my audience wanted to send me flowers.
Shortly afterwards, the same office asked me to contribute to a new project, so I was able to express some of my new wine in a wine-skin that was less stale. But if they’d never done so, I would just have had to make my own peace with an old version of myself showing up in the mirrors of Google.
Even today, I still run into people who associate me with the first article and not the second, or with congregational work I did in England, Jamaica, or West Texas, not anything I’ve contributed to in the mid-Atlantic over the last few years. There are people in the first group who don’t follow my work now, and others who actively resent my growth arc over the last decade and a half.
There’s a generosity that’s necessary to get through this. This morning I called it “grace,” but I’m not sure that’s right. It’s not unmerited. It’s not disproportionate. It’s not arbitrary or unfair.
Instead it’s truly a generosity of heart, an openness and spaciousness we can offer ourselves and therefore also offer others. There is room enough in this world for me to grow and for others to experience. I not only can’t stage-manage their experiences; I also don’t need to.
What a relief!
The energy I might invest in being embarrassed about past work is energy I don’t have to create something new for today that fits my values and communities more effectively. The attention I might spend on others’ limited perceptions of me is attention I can’t devote to audiences who appreciate and trust my voice and perspectives.
And more: focusing on what no longer fits can undermine our ability to acknowledge and build on the good our past or current contributions have already brought to the world. As Wade wrote to his correspondent, “by [artists’] talent and their hard work they produced great things.”
That good is not diminished because we grew up. And we get to be generous with others who are (sometimes despite themselves) growing up too.
I’m back from the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication convention, a 5-day trip with the academic community I was last immersed in in 2012.
I caught up with colleagues I’d left behind, and reconnected with others who were years ahead of me and now teach as tenured faculty members at universities across the South and Midwest. I also surprised my dissertation chair and watched him at an early morning research panel. He still writes and presents exceptionally careful, thoughtful case studies of inhumane organizational rhetoric.
Between Thursday and Friday I also had several conversations with professors, staff members, and nervous about-to-be-graduates about alternative academic life: their worries, their frustrations, and their options. (I’ll share video of my dialogue with Paula Chambers when I have it.)
I pushed through a day or so of imposter syndrome—the nasty nag of whether I belong and what I have to show for three years in the wild—and as I pushed through that din, I regained a sense of my common bond with those writers, scholars, researchers, activists, dreamers, and teachers who promote freedom through the practical disciplines of composition and communication.
Dr. Adam J. Banks, a writing, rhetoric, and digial media professor at the University of Kentucky, pointed the convention outward and upward on Thursday morning. “Ain’t No Walls Behind the Sky: Funk, Flight, and Freedom” combined music, film, pop culture, and politics, and it confronted ways that composition scholarship turn students into clean, conventionally respectable disciplinarians. Banks spoke as a digital griot
If you weren’t present during this address, no post hoc description will be adequate. But the [as yet un-captioned] video offers a glimpse. Watch it if you can. (39 minutes)
“It’s time for us to travel… We need to build deep and long-term intellectual relationships with university libraries and high schools that go beyond the first year comp trip to the library to learn about source use. And we need to keep working hard on that fourth “C” in our title [Communication]. We have to do long-term work to build more on our relationships with communication programs, schools, and departments. Many of our members attend RSA [Rhetorical Society of America] and ACA [American Communication Association], but how can we take those individual relationships that exist and use them to deepen our programmatic relationships?
“What can we do throughout 4Cs and our home departments and programs to build long-term with Hispanic-serving institutions and tribal colleges and HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges and Universities]? We need greater connection and collaboration across programs and organizations, because even the most brilliant faculty, even the largest writing and rhetoric programs, even a badass organization like 4Cs cannot do this futuristic work alone…
“To evoke flight, even imagined flight, at a time like this might seem fraudulent given that none of us on the ground is free… I’m asking us to think about freedom in this un-free world because the only freedom we will see, the only freedom we will get, is the freedom we take. And the only way we get free is to get off campus, and walk with and learn from those who are out here working in freedom struggle right now…
“One thing this means in our work is we have to focus less on the rhetorical exemplars, focus less on the ‘successful’ movements. Freedom work is funky rather than refined. It is becoming rather than overcome. It is in process rather than proclaimed.” —Adam Banks [27:22-31:14]
I spoke to Adam a few hours after his speech in a room without stage lighting, with no transparent podium and no cued soundtrack.
He’s 100% real. I sensed no disjunction between what he said in his address and the spirit he carries into his teaching, scholarship, and work in the wider world.
And I find that inspiring. It’s what I’ve wanted for myself for years.
Since my early 20s, I’ve sought a fully-embodied experience of wholeness. I’ve sought it in religion, in scholarship, in relationship, in activism; everywhere I am, it’s the same core mission:
Name: Keisha E. McKenzie
Keyword: integrity
Developmental Stage: intermediate
I entered the technical communication and rhetoric program at Texas Tech in part to understand integrity more: what does it mean to live as a whole person and participate in a complex society when you have little more than the coding languages of words, rules, roles, and norms? What does it mean to use these tools to make sense of the community’s rules or live sensibly in relation to them? How does wholeness work in practice, in the government office, in the provost’s office, and at my desk?
I graduated from my program determined to apply what I’d discovered to the world outside the academy. And I’ve been applying as best as I can as a new micro-business owner, communication services provider and consultant, as a new immigrant building a home in a nation still deeply ambivalent about my kind.
And I’m fueled to move forward now. I’m often affirmed by the exhortations of Toni Morrison. As I read about one of my New York siblings forced into psychiatric treatment by psychiatrists colluding with the NYPD, I also read a brief column from Morrison about the liberating powers of art, writing, and creation.
Creation is a testament to freedom. Appealing to the boundlessness “behind the sky” is reaching toward a world that doesn’t demand an escape hatch or a parachute. Yet here, in this moment, Morrison says, is the artist and the writer, rebelliously undermining the ideas and ideologies that, full-grown, nurture tyrannies of body and mind.
“There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” —Toni Morrison, The Nation (March 23, 2015)
Because we live in this world and not in another preferred reality; because we join our ancestors in adopting the stories and rites of freedom even when constrained; because there’s nobody as “badass” as Toni Morrison and she is 84 years old—if we’re gonna go down at all, we’re gonna go down making art and writing books… and the status quo will have to deal.
We’re just two months away from the end of 2014, daylight hours are shortening (Eastern Daylight Time ends tomorrow morning), and I find myself turning toward revision and reflection.
For the last few days I’ve been getting caught up in QuickBooks so I don’t have to futz with a million business receipts come January.
And the Maryland Performance Excellence Foundation’s 2014 review cycle has ended: all healthcare applicants received their awards at the Baltimore American Society for Quality banquet on October 16. The MPEF board also recognized me for my work with the examiner team this cycle.
But today’s the first day of National Novel Writing Month. I’ve logged in, launched my daily writing file, and am ready to go. I made it to 44,000 words as a Rebel last year.
Write every day. That’s the heart of NaNoWriMo. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a novel, a play, an essay series, or any other genre.
What matters is the discipline of daily action on a project you care about. Deliver that project from thoughts in your head to words in print. Be the midwife for your own work this month.
Are you writing with the NaNoWriMo community this year? What are you working on?
If you want a break from your own work, catch up on some of my recent writing.
Patheos columnist Sarah Moon has invited her readers to reconsider the liturgy of their tradition specifically or the Christian faith overall. She began Liberating Liturgies with a reflection and update of the Apostles’ Creed. And she’s been a gracious host of the two-part series on baptismal vows and congregational covenants that I published on this site last year.
Part 1, From Vows to Action, is already up: feel free to share about the vows that bind you to your congregation there.
Some of my Adventist peers noted the passage of October 22 a little less than a fortnight ago. October 22 is the anniversary of the Millerites’ Great Disappointment of 1844. The early Adventists who expected Christ’s physical return that October day grieved their disappointment, revised their theology about the timeline, and, within twenty years had reorganized enough to form what is now the Seventh-day Adventist denomination.
A few friends and I wondered that week whether our community might benefit from observing October 22 intentionally each fall: we might take memories of that period as a symbol of community resilience rather than as a family embarrassment to be hidden, explained away, or used to induce perfectionist guilt today.
I don’t think that will happen, at least not at the behest of the General Conference calendar. Revisiting what that date can mean will be up to local members: meaning-making is something we can all do.
So that’s what inspired me to ask my Facebook friends about Halloween (October 31), even though it’s a holiday I’ve never celebrated. Spectrum Magazine’s Jared Wright asked me to write, and what resulted is an article on Jamaican parenting, monsters, and facing up to the parts of ourselves that we’ve rejected.
I’m glad at least some readers understand that the article is only tangentially about All Hallows’ Eve.
Daneen Akers and Stephen Eyer, co-producers of the documentary Seventh-Gay Adventists, have just launched a crowdfunding campaign to support a new project. SGA allowed thousands of people to open a different quality of conversation about Adventist faith and sexuality in their families and with friends.
But pastors and congregational lay leaders still have a lot of questions, and there just aren’t many quality resources available to them.
Check out Daneen and Stephen’s note on the dialogue film they’d like to produce, and support the film at any level you can. They need to raise $20,000 this month to get started, and they’re already 38% of the way there.
Fund good dialogue! And share this campaign with others.
