YouTube star Jessica Kellgren-Fozard on her Quakerism

July 20, 2018

Jes­si­ca Kellgren-Fozard is a dis­abled TV pre­sen­ter with 266,000+ fol­low­ers on YouTube. She’s also a life­long Friend from the UK. She’s just released a video in which she talks about her under­stand­ing of Quak­erism. It’s pret­ty good. She occa­sion­al­ly implies that some specif­i­cal­ly British pro­ce­dur­al process is intrin­sic to all Quak­ers but oth­er than that it all rings true, cer­tain­ly to her expe­ri­ence as a UK Friend.

I must admit that the world of YouTube stars is for­eign to me. This is essen­tial­ly a web­cam vlog post but the light­ing and hair and cos­tum­ing is metic­u­lous. Her notes include affil­i­ate links for the dress she’s wear­ing ($89 and yes, they ship inter­na­tion­al­ly), a 8 1/2 minute video tuto­r­i­al about curl­ing you hair in her vin­tage style (it has over 33,000 views). If you fol­low her on Insta­gram and Twit­ter you’ll soon have enough details on  lip­stick and shoe choic­es to be able to ful­ly cos­play her.

But don’t laugh too much, because in between the self pre­sen­ta­tion tips, Kellgren-Fozard tack­les real­ly hard sub­jects – grow­ing up gay in school, liv­ing with dis­abil­i­ties – in ways that are approach­able and inti­mate, fun­ny and instruc­tive. And with a quar­ter mil­lion YouTube fol­low­ers, she’s reach­ing peo­ple with a mes­sage of kind­ness and inclu­sion and under­stand­ing that feels pret­ty Quak­er­ly to me. Mar­garet Fell liked her­self a red dress some­times and it’s easy to argue George Fox would be a YouTu­ber today.

Bonus:  Jes­si­ca Kellgren-Fozard will host a live Q&A chat on her Quak­erism this com­ing Mon­day. If I’m cal­cu­lat­ing my time­zones cor­rect­ly, it’ll be noon here on the U.S. East Coast. I plan to tune in.

Wheat planting at Howell’s Living History Farm

September 27, 2016

We’ve got­ten into the habit of vis­it­ing How­ell’s Liv­ing His­to­ry Farm up in Mer­cer Coun­ty, N.J., a few times a year as part of home­school­er group trips. In the past, we’ve cut ice, tapped trees for maple syrup, and seen the sheep shear­ing and card­ing. Today we saw the var­i­ous stages of wheat – from plant­i­ng, to har­vest­ing, thresh­ing, win­now­ing, grind­ing, and bak­ing. I love that there’s such a wide vocab­u­lary of spe­cif­ic lan­guage for all this – words I bare­ly know out­side of bib­li­cal para­bles (“Oh wheat from chaff!”) and that there’s great vin­tage machin­ery (How­ell’s oper­a­tions are set around the turn of the twen­ti­eth century).