The Contemplative Concerns of Community Engagement: What I Wish I Knew about the Work of Community Writing Twenty Years Ago

Abstract

The Contemplative Concerns of Community Engagement:What I Wish I Knew about the Work of Community Writing Twenty Years Ago Paula Mathieu (bio) I could not have given this same talk twenty years ago, or ten, or even five years ago. I am finding that experience—a kinder word for age—coupled with a contemplative practice brings humility and awareness, which is as close to wisdom as I'll ever get. I know a few things now that I didn't know when I began community-engaged teaching and didn't even know to ask. While experience will be each of your own best teachers (better than a middle-aged white woman offering advice), I hope that, through my stories, I can share a few lessons about what I now see as the contemplative call of community writing, which is at once personal, political, historical, and pedagogical. If we are going to do community-based work ethically and, mindful of past and present racial and other political wounds, we need to do our work unflinchingly and humbly. And if the "we" includes people who are seen as white, I deeply believe, we need to do this work in intentionally antiracist ways, mindful of the white supremacist systems in which we work, from which we have benefited and continue to benefit, and to ask, even if we see no clear answer: What does antiracist work look like here and now? Point 1: Our Personal Stories Matter. In Other Words, I Carry Pain/Desires/Stories That I Don't Fully Know or Understand (and so, probably, do you) When asked how or why I got interested in community writing, which began with starting a writing group with homeless writers in Chicago in the 1990s, I could always provide answers. These answers were each true in their own way; true but incomplete. It is true that Joel Alfassa's homeless gourmet column, which wrote with humor and love about food that could be prepared without waste on a hot plate in a single pot, struck me powerfully as a fresh and honest way to help privileged people get the smallest glimpse into the mad juggle that constitutes living in poverty. It is true that his writing and that of other vendors of StreetWise newspaper moved me, and I wanted to help out in whatever small way I could—starting with volunteer editing and growing my role very slowly over many months and years. It is true that as a graduate student in Language, Literacy and Rhetoric, I experienced this newspaper, this weekly act of community publishing and circulation, as a unique and vital act of rhetoric in our city, and I was drawn to be a part of it. We all probably have similar stories, of feeling called by a project, being called to do the work. And I was called, and that was the story I was comfortable telling about it. [End Page 38] But until shockingly recently I never connected my pull to work with homeless writers, first in Chicago, then Boston, Montreal, Glasgow, and all around the world, with one March night, when I was nine years old. I was sound asleep when my brother Tom woke my sister Liz and me by opening our bedroom door, shutting it behind him, turning on our light and saying, "The house is on fire. Get dressed and get out." My mind replays those next minutes with shocking clarity, or maybe it's just a memory of a memory recalled thousands of times—a photocopy reproduced beyond recognition. I don't know how accurate my memories are despite their vividness: me reaching into my closet to put on clothes, as 3:30 am in March in the south suburbs of Chicago is frigid, pulling out a green snow suit to slip on over my pajamas, sliding into a pair of Liz's snow boots, which were too big, but strangely uncomfortable near the toe—I would later discover a collar for our dog Woody nesting in that boot as the source of the discomfort. I don't remember Liz fleeing, but by the time I was dressed, I, the youngest of my family...