“What’s the wackiest thing you’ve done at Kenan?”

A few days ago, at my Kenan farewell lunch, one of my co-workers asked, as I was part-way through chewing a french fry, “What’s the wackiest thing you’ve done at Kenan?” Caught off-guard, I tried to steel myself when my mind was actually pirouetting in ten different directions—mostly around the word “wacky.” I became hyper-attuned to context: things I might describe about my job as “wacky” to my friends would likely differ from things I would share with my coworkers, and vice versa. And events that may have felt wacky to me at the time were likely not wacky to others involved—after all, perceptions naturally bend across a spectrum of personal experience.

For example: I helped lead a group of Duke undergraduates around Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic for a week, despite my lack of intimate knowledge re. the immigration and citizenship dynamics affecting Dominicans and Dominican-born Haitians as well as my several years’-untested Spanish. The students seemed to have a blast, but I was tense the whole time—tense in my confusion of how to comport myself while there, and tense in helping to ensure the students’ safety. (In the end, it was taking a risk to use my modicum of Spanish that helped me feel more connected.) I accumulated just enough knowledge about something totally unfamiliar—genocide studies—to write a successful proposal for a multi-tier humanities working group. My second week of work at Kenan, back in 2013, happened to be the same week as Project Change, for which I was to assume a leadership position for a high-intensity and immersive student-centered program. I had no first-hand knowledge or experience with PChange. One of my first Kenan Insider posts tried to grapple with the surreality of that week: “How is leadership possible when you have no idea what you’re doing? The answer comes through a trust in improvisation. As a dancer, I find contact improvisation thrilling because spontaneity is the operating principle. There is no other way to proceed but to make choices in the present moment: how my body could fill the negative space created by yours; how my movement could connect with yours if I initiate with, say, my hip—instead of the more typical choices: an arm, a leg.

Working in the capacity of postgraduate fellow at Kenan for nearly two years has been similarly thrilling, and sometimes terrifying, and ultimately clarifying. Not only have I been exposed to and been forced to reckon with that which I do not understand or know inherently; I have also studied and presented, through various events, work and ideas that I love; these events in turn have allowed me to determine why I love them (and want to defend them) in the first place. A film series on the American South. A nonfiction-centered visiting writers series engaging two women writers whose words, and practices, I deeply admire. These programs helped me continue my long engagement with bolstering the visibility of the arts—and particularly the underrepresented arts—on this campus. Seeing 150 people—including a handful of my friends and colleagues—fill the Nelson Music Room for Leslie Jamison‘s reading felt like a love-letter back to myself, a freshly-graduated Dukie, passionately demanding that other students—and everyone, really—take more seriously the things they love so as to open up the possibility of connecting with others over them.

On that note, perhaps one of the “wackiest” things I’ve done at Kenan is buy more than 100 new books for the Kenan library. (Yes, we have a library.) I bought one half through Amazon and one half through The Regulator, which is and will continue to be one of Durham’s finest gems even as the downtown landscape changes. I walked in on a slow afternoon earlier this week and two booksellers very graciously curated piles of their own that they thought Duke students, staff, and faculty would enjoy reading. My self-created dictum: relatively contemporary titles; a good balance between fiction, dynamic nonfiction, poetry, and graphic [novel, memoir, etc.]; special attention to writers of color and women writers. Those books, which represent their selections combined with my own, are now stocked at Kenan and available for your perusal. They are perhaps the best thing I can leave behind. And I’d be remiss not to share a list of those books because those books are for you.

—MD