I met Hannah and Sam at a deli in Powell Gardens after a morning of hustling around. I thankfully remembered before I left the house that I would need to go to a local music store beforehand to buy an XLR cable to use with my new shotgun microphone, since today would be the first…
I heard Liz ask Zoe about how school was going, and she said her grades were some good and some bad (two A’s, two F’s). Liz then said, “Oooh, tell me about the A’s.” I ordered an iced coffee and came back to the table. I listened as the group chatted for a bit, then…
Operating mostly from an instinct I’ve developed as a pastor (say “yes” whenever you can, especially to invitations to make connections in the community), I accepted mentor Marie’s invitation to volunteer at a yearly remembrance event hosted by a racial and economic justice organization she’s a part of. The event commemorates the death of a…
I arrived early to this second, more regionally targeted mentor thank-you dinner, and passed the time reading in a café a couple doors down from the taqueria. It was the kind of place I think would have felt modestly upscale against the backdrop of the neighborhood’s past identity as a broadly targeted shopping district and…
Although I had already begun to understand my relationship to Tapestry as genuinely inquisitive, the January 2019 training for new Tapestry mentors was the first engagement in which I took proper field notes. This account and many subsequent accounts are drawn largely from those notes, from which I have removed identifying or seemingly extraneous details.…
Although I would not yet apply for Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for my research for many months, and I wouldn’t start taking long-form field notes until my next engagement, I nevertheless think of my participation in this holiday party in late 2018 as the beginning of my formal ethnographic presence with Tapestry. This event…
I arrived 20–30 minutes after the start time Hannah had given me, possibly because Beaumont Square is near where I was living at the time and I was trying to squeeze too many things in before walking over. However, I think I was also operating on the assumption that as a matter of ethnographic presence,…
On October 4, 2018, shortly after relocating to a West Coast metropolitan area, I attended a worship service celebrating the appointment of a new leader serving a regional church role there. I arrived late, because my hometown baseball team was in the playoffs, and I stopped in nearby pub to watch the end of the…
