There will always be conflict. It’s easy to get distracted by fires. It helps to be a calming presence in these situations to keep the organization focused and keep your colleagues at peace.
— Colin Saxton [Source]
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ colleagues
In praise of an editor past
April 24, 2017
When I became an editor at Friends Journal in 2011, I inherited an institution with some rather strong opinions. Some of them are sourced from the predictable wellsprings: William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s foundational mid-century style guide and the editorial offices of the Chicago Manual of Style. But some are all our own, logically tested for consistency with Chicago but adapted to Quaker idiosyncrasies.
One of our most invariable (and contested) formats comes from the way we list congregations. Quick aside for non-Quakers: you will often see a Quaker meeting variously named as “Town Monthly Meeting,” “Town Friends Meeting,” “Town Quaker Meeting,” etc. People often have strong opinions about the correct form. Occasionally an author will insist to me that their meeting has an official name (“Springfield Friends Meeting”), used consistently across their publications and business minutes. But after a few minutes with Google I can usually find enough counter-examples (“Springfield Monthly Meeting”) to prove their inconsistency.
To cut through this, Friends Journal uses “Town (State) Meeting” everywhere and always, with specific exceptions only for cases where that doesn’t work — for example, the meeting is named after a street or a tree or isn’t in the town it’s named for (after 300 years identities sometimes get messy). This formatting is unique to Friends Journal—even other Philadelphia-based Quaker style sheets don’t follow it. We’ve been doing it this distinctively and this consistently for as long as I’ve been reading the magazine. Where does our stubborn naming convention come from?
Fortunately, thanks to Haverford College’s Quaker and Special Collections we have digital archives going back to the mid-1950s. A few months ago I dug into our archives and used keyword searches to see how far back the format goes. Traveling the years back it time it’s held remarkably steady as “Town (State) Meeting” until we get back to the fall of 1962. The October 15 issue doesn’t have consistent meeting listings but it does announce that longtime Friends Journal editor William Hubben was to begin a six-month sabbatical and that Frances Williams Browin was to fill in as acting editor.
It didn’t take her long to make her mark. Friends Journal came out twice a month in the 1960s and the next issue sees a few parentheses unevenly applied to meeting listings. But by the November 15th issue, nineteen meetings are referenced using our familiar format! There’s the “member of Berkeley (Calif.) Meeting” who had just published a pamphlet of Christmas songs for children, an FCNL event featuring skits and a covered-dish supper at “Swarthmore (Pa.) Meeting” and the announcement of a prominent article by “Kenneth E. Boulding, a member of Ann Arbor (Michigan) Meeting.”
I’ve tried to imagine the scene… Browin situated in her new temporary office… going back and forth, forth and back on some listing… then finally surprising herself by shouting “enough!” so loudly she had to apologize to nearby colleagues. At the end of the six months, Hubben came back, but only as a contributing editor, and Browin was named as full editor. Friends Journal board member Elizabeth B Wells wrote a profile of her upon her retirement from that position in 1968:
Her remarks usually made sparks, whether she was expressing an opinion (always positive), exerting pressure (not always gentle), or making a humorous aside (often disturbing). For in her amiable way she can be tart, unexpected, even prejudiced (in the right direction), then as suddenly disarmingly warm and sensitive.
This sounds like the kind of person who would standardize a format with such resolve it would be going strong 55 years later:
She was so entirely committed to putting out the best possible magazine, such a perfectionist, even such a driver, that her closest colleagues often felt that we knew the spirited editor far better than the Quaker lady.
It’s a wonderfully written profile. And today, every time an author rewrites their meeting’s name on a copyedited manuscript I’ve sent them for review, I say a quiet thanks to the driven perfectionist who gives me permission to be “prejudiced in the right direction.” Wells’s profile is a fascinating glimpse into a smart woman of a different era and well worth a read.
And for uber word geeks, yes our Friends Journal style guide is a public document. While parts of its proscriptions go back to the early 1960s, it is very much a living document and we make small changes to it on an almost weekly basis.
Vacation from reality
December 5, 2006
Okay, yes it’s insane to go on a vacation when one is unemployed. But logistically, it’s the best time to go: no juggling work schedules, no finishing up projects before you go, no taking cell phone calls from harried colleagues. Julie had saved up the money and started planning a getaway this summer and reservations were all in place when I suddenly found myself out of a job. We could have canceled but October brought us more than our share of disappointments and we decided to go for it. Three guesses where we are:
h3. More photos:
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See “all the WDW photos”:http://flickr.com/photos/martin_kelley/tags/wdw2006/
For something completely different…
October 2, 2006
In the news front, I’m no longer working at FGC. Reasons are complicated, as is often the case. In eight years I did some good work with some great people. I’ll be missing the hard-working and faithful colleagues and committee members I got to serve with over the years. I’ll be working on building my tech career and look forward to new challenges. Transitions are always a bit scary, so hold us in your prayers in this time.
Confessions of an Anti-Sactions Activist
July 30, 2003
There are a bunch of fascinating rants against the contemporary peace movement as the result of an article by Charles M. Brown, an anti-sanctions activist that has somewhat-unfairly challenged his former colleagues at the Nonviolence.org-affiliated Voices in the Wilderness. Brown talks quite frankly about his feelings that Saddam Hussein used the peace group for propaganda purposes and he challenges many of the cultural norms of the peace movement. I don’t know if Brown realized just how much the anti-peace movement crowd would jump at his article. It’s gotten play in InstaPundit and In Context: None So Blind.
Brown’s critique is interesting but not really fair: he faults Voices for having a single focus (sanctions) and single goal (changing U.S. policy) but what else should be expected of a small group with no significant budget? Over the course of his work against sanctions Brown started studying Iraqi history as an academic and he began to worry that Voices disregarded historical analysis that “did not take … Desert Storm as their point of departure.” But was he surprised? Of course an academic is going to have a longer historical view than an underfunded peace group. The sharp focus of Voices made it a welcome anomaly in the peace movement and gave it a strength of a clear message. Yes it was a prophetic voice and yes it was a largely U.S.-centric voice but as I understand it, that was much of the point behind its work: We can do better in the world. It was Americans taking responsibility for our own people’s blindness and disregard for human life. That Iraq has problems doesn’t let us off the hook of looking at our own culture’s skeletons.
What I do find fascinating is his behind-the-scenes description of the culture of the 1990s peace movement. He talks about the roots of the anti-sanctions activism in Catholic-Worker “dramaturgy.” He’s undoubtedly right that peace activists didn’t challenge Baathist party propaganda enough, that we used the suffering of Iraqi people for our own anti-war propaganda, and that our analysis was often too simplistic. That doesn’t change the fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died from sanctions that most Americans knew little about.
The peace movement doesn’t challenge its own assumptions enough and I’m glad Brown is sharing a self-critique. I wish he were a bit gentler and suspect he’ll look back at his work with Voices with more charity in years to come. Did he know the fodder his critique would give to the hawkish groups? Rather than recant his past as per the neo-conservative playbook, he could had offered his reflections and critique with an acknowlegment that there are plenty of good motivations behind the work of many peace activists. I like a lot of what Brown has to say but I wonder if peace activists will be able to hear it now. I think Brown will eventually find his new hawkish friends are at least as caught up in group-think, historical myopia, and propaganda propagation as the people he critiques.
Voices in the Wilderness has done a lot of good educating Americans about the effects of our policies overseas. It’s been hard and often-thankless work in a climate that didn’t support peace workers either morally or financially. The U.S. is a much better place because of Voices and the peace movement was certainly invigorated by its breath of fresh air.