End of a Chapter
Two deaths and a birth: a last note from the Substack platform
1.
“Death itself is a music,” Mary Oliver writes in Red Bird. “No one has ever come close to writing it down, awake or in a dream. It cannot be told.”1
I’ve been reading a poem from this collection most days since I came back to the US last month.
While I was drafting what would have been my next post after December’s, my brother abruptly died.2 Clayton left Earth. He left us. And I’ve been staring into space ever since.
I’ve very obviously not been here. But I’ve been writing. Writing death announcements. Writing tributes and life sketches. Writing letters to the companies he did business with. Writing excessively patient replies to corporate bereavement teams, some of whom don’t seem to have common sense as a pre-requisite for service.
One day I’ll tell you about the guy who thought it made sense for my sister and I to keep paying home insurance for someone who could no longer live in their home. Or another guy who was like “Hey, maybe you’ll want to keep his cell phone line active.” Why, so he can still give us a call?! GTFOH.
I’ve been writing two to three journal pages a day, largely on the theme of “Death is outrageous.” I’m writing the last fifth of my Building a Moral Economy manuscript this spring so I can deliver it to my editor this summer. I ordered the five books in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series that feature the character Death; Clayton and I read through the Discworld together and I think he’d be tickled by my revisiting the series now.
But I haven’t been writing here.
2.
I don’t want to be here anymore.
Another jab, jab, hook from Mary Oliver3:
"... slowly or briskly, it doesn't matter, it sounds like a river leaping and falling; it sounds like a body falling apart."
In February, Substack launched a partnership with Polymarket, a company that allows users to trade shares of interest in global events—effectively bets with real currency on real world outcomes in real time: not only who might win a national sports series or election but also whether the US would assassinate or kidnap a foreign leader or start another “military operation” war somewhere. The recipe: stir in washed-up opinion pollsters from the last two decades, shake in some classic gambling, combine equal measures of machine learning, statistics, psychology, and meme stock speculation, and serve with a little Colosseum/Hunger Games blood stakes for flavor.
So now, when people die, you can embed right into your newsletter a futures forecasting graph that shows how likely traders thought those deaths were. Polymarket doesn’t vet whether its users are leveraging insider information to make their trades.
But Polymarket is only one futures trading company. The prediction market seems to be growing.
I want nothing to do with it.
Substack’s corporate team has also made some dubious decisions for a while now. This platform profits from known trans-hostile advocates and White supremacists writing and building connections here, transmuting for their own purposes attention that the rest of us pay to good things: soup recipes and panels on public education, meandering personal essays about the hunting fox and nearly lost languages, rallying cries for reclaiming democracy and liberated sexuality, and art and photography—beauty for its own sake.
I’ve tolerated the background chatter about the platform in part because my corner of this network is a bubble of creativity and poetry from the people of the global majority. It’s Indigenous wisdoms from the Americas and local spiritualities from all over; it’s smart writing on relationships, and careers, and politics. This corner, and the writers I’ve met because of it: it’s been lovely. I can’t even tell you who the supremacists are because I haven’t encountered any of them. I’ve barely had to block a troll in five years. My network ties are tight and good.
And it’s made me lazy.
I would never have sat on a grassy lawn with any of you, slow-sipping orange tea and mumbling, “I haven’t personally seen the snake yet, and we’re all pretty comfortable here, so I won’t move away from where the snake was last seen.” I would never have said “I do believe the reports, and there are a lot of them, but it’s so much effort to break through inertia. Life’s exhausting enough. Also, we were here first.”
I would never.
But I did.
I’m sorry, and it won’t happen again.
As Ars Technica reported last year:
“These [supremacist] groups see Substack as ‘a legitimizing tool for sharing content’ specifically because the Substack brand—which is widely used by independent journalists, top influencers, cherished content creators, and niche experts—can help them “convey the image of a thought leader.”
And they’re right about that intuition, but I don’t want to offer them any shelter round me or the people who might come to see me here. I don’t want to invest my work and by extension your trust in a network like this. I don’t want to be in anything like a position of endorsement or accommodation. Babylon is fallen, after all.
I’m setting up my new publishing flow now. Over the rest of this year, I’ll publish new writing first on my website, mackenzian.com, and use a different system to handle email. Comments here will close immediately, and the content archive here will also close by September. We’ll make a different arrangement for subscriptions on the other side of these changes, and you’ll get updates from Stripe and/or Buttondown if you’re a paid supporter.
So my time on the stack ends here, today. Starting over on my own digital home feels right, and overdue.
Thank you, each of you, for your company over the years, and you’re welcome to join me for a new chapter.
3.
Two endings and a beginning.
Two deaths and a birth.
Over a decade ago, I was called to ministry. I was just starting some public work back then, and so talked to some elders and mentors about it. I set about writing and working in the spirit of the call, and then spent eleven years skipping through some pretty masterful redirections and transmutations of it. In that time, I moved two states, four organizations, and seven jobs, all transformative in their own ways. Then, in the deep dark last winter, I had the quiet realization that it was time to stop skipping, and just say yes.
With that yes now said, I’ll start a Doctor of Ministry program at Wake Forest Divinity School (WakeDiv) this fall. (If you know funding sources I should consider, please reply to this message.)
I’ve practiced informal and formal ministry since the call first came to me in the 2010s: accompanying congregants and ministers in local churches and moderating conversations and supportive circles for lay people and clergy in community groups, nonprofits, and a seminary.
And everywhere I’ve lived, worked, or served, no matter what my formal title has been and no matter how my theology and spirituality have expanded, people have relied on me to hear their stories and acknowledge their wisdom, to discern and share an insight or challenge, and to think with and encourage them as they take their next right step.
This next three years will be a time for me to deepen and reflect on the pluralistic ministry I’ve been practicing and form-shifting all along: a mix of multi-disciplinary scholarship, spiritual formation and care, and local community-building toward a society that works for all of us.
As I’ve shared here, I’ve spent the last year and a half reading, researching, interviewing, and writing for my book in the series Building a Moral Economy (Fortress Press). My book, the last in that series, explores the religious roots and spiritual wisdom emerging from those who are already experimenting with economic relationships that are more equitable, democratic, and ecologically sustainable than the markets and economies dominating the world right now.
As I’ve worked on the first draft, I’ve had some ideas about post-publication projects, and I’ll be developing those ideas in conversation with my new colleagues and faculty at WakeDiv.
Two deaths and a birth: death of the Keisha who had a brother in this life; death of the Keisha who wrote occasionally on a platform that isn’t rowing in her direction; birth of the Keisha who’s going to become both unrecognizable and more of herself at the same time.
This spring I’m celebrating another solar circuit, cleaning out old stuff, and making room for my next turn.
Wherever your next turn takes you, and however unsettled the world around us becomes this year, I wish you lightness, clarity, courage, and a peaceful, rooted heart.
See you elsewhere,
Keisha
Mary Oliver, “Straight Talk from Fox,” Red Bird, p. 11.
Clayton was a beautiful spirit. You can read about his life in the memories book we made earlier this year.
Mary Oliver, “Night and the River,” Red Bird, p. 9.