The Methodology of Assemblage: Baby's Breath

Written on Monday, August 12th, 2024 @ 4:41 p.m.

I intend for this methodology to be revisited, revised, and re-routed as I continue to consistently tend to Assemblage: Baby’s Breath. Please occasionally check back in with how the bank of Assemblage is being shaped by this rogue river of methodology outlined below.

Previously revised on Wednesday, March 26th, 2025 @ 10:47 p.m.

First Name Basis

Since starting Assemblage: Baby’s Breath, I have made an intentional choice to write the first names of the folks whose work, methods & words have moved & carried me so much that it feels like I know them.

Mattie, Toni, Saidiya, vanessa, Claudia

Traditionally, how I have been trained to be taken seriously in my writing is to refer to these folks by their last name following the first mention of their full name.

So I may write

“Toni Morrison reminds us…” & then refer to her another time in my writing as “Morrison.”

For me, there is a certain amount of distance & objectivity in this academic standard. It’s the way I was told serious thinkers write, show respect, & in turn, are given respect in their respective fields.

“Saidiya Hartman sat in her wayward garden…”

& then refered to a second time as

“Hartman knows the value of an unruly life.”

Within my private writing, & the writing I publish on the altar of Assemblage I only refer to these people by their first name. Granted, if I ever meet these people in real life will I call them by their first name? I would like to hope so. I’ve always been known as the wild, nasty attitude-having, disrespectful child anyway. I write more about this in What is Assemblage & have included an excerpt below.

Growing up, I was often referred to by older Black womxn family members has wild or having a nasty attitude simply for demanding to be seen and heard. I talked back frequently, asked lots of questions until I got an answer I was satisfied with, & never took any disrespect (even from elders).

So I suppose my departure from the traditional Southern ways language demands respect would be no surprise. I would like to hope that despite my academic training & conditioning as a Southern Black girl where yes ma’ms and Ms. Rainkens are expected I could transform my striking serpent tongue into a garden snake. A snake that keeps the pests away & day by day we would come to be known to each other as fierce protectors of the home we are tending to.

A few months ago my mother told me it had been decades since she heard someone say her name.

It has always been baby sis, Mother, babe, a pen name, or sometimes she is not referred to at all. As I ponder this puzzling fact, I realize that I have never heard the first names of most of the women in my family. Despite having beautiful names I don’t hear them ring through the air often. Amongst my favorite names are:

Daisy

Viola

& Gail.

My mother told me it had been decades since she had heard someone say her given name.

Now, later in life as she is reprioritizing friendship she told me the previous statement to express with glee how wonderful it is to have someone say her name frequently & earnestly & have it ring through (ring true) to who she is.

So I am also thinking about the power of being recognized by your chosen or given name. This requires a sensibility that the formality of surname references robs us of. Utilizing folks’ first names in my writing practice is a way to give the utmost respect to a name that rings true for them & ultimately lets me work from spirit first. My method of being on a first-name basis with folk on the page allows me to honor how their being, past/present/future of when I’ve come to know them, has shaped me.

So while I’m trained to refer to vanessa german as german, Claudia Rankine as Rankine, & Mattie Nelson as Nelson (read more about Mattie in What is Assemblage) after our first introduction on the page—here on Assemblage: Baby’s Breath, they will be continually affirmed & acknowledged as vanessa, Claudia, & Mattie. This is not how I’ve been trained to ensure my work is taken seriously. It is, however, how I desire to be in relation to the folks I’m gathering to make the Assemblage that is my life.

Footnotes

This brings me to footnotes, another academic tool I am trained to respect & follow suit. Within Assemblage, I seldom use footnotes & as I’m writing this I am uncovering that the reason why is because I believe they are disruptive to the circular flow I am creating with my words. I don’t want my writing pieces to work in the very hierarchal model I am adamantly crafting a separate distinct life away from.

When you read a piece on Assemblage, I’m trying to guide us to undo a cornrow together. When someone is cornrowing your hair, it may not make a lot of sense how their growing hands are braiding. However, for a brief moment, when you undo the cornrow you can almost feel each motion from small individual pieces that were gathered & held tight to the scalp to make the complete cornrow. I don’t want to interrupt the unraveling of what I have woven by utilizing footnotes.

That’s why anytime you see text that is blue in Assemblage, I encourage you to click the hyperlink to a source that I have woven in for you to discover as you are unraveling. An Assemblage hyperlink is hair jewelry removed before undoing the braid. Assemblage hyperlinks are the grains of rice you didn’t know the ancestors’ growing hands had planted within the braided freedom maps guiding you home. Assemblage hyperlinks, traditionally called in-text citations, zooms into the stitch of the braid I’m writing to acknowledge that I have gathered far & wide in order to hold what I’ve come to treasure.

Sonya Clark, The Hair Craft Project: Hairstyles on Canvas, 2013  Silk threads, beads, shells, and yarn on canvas

Quilted Syllabi: Meet Us In The Clearing?

Not all of what I gather ends up making it into the final piece as an Assemblage hyperlink or source. However, all of the materials I gather inform my writing of that piece or serve as a benchmark to think alongside the material in a future piece. I stitch all of these sources together into what I am calling quilted syllabi. These quilts are inspired by the communities who practiced quilting as a way of life—who are artist even when society deemed them to just be crafty folk gathering scraps to make a whole. They also serve as a growing garden to visually tend & document the overflowing pieces I write.

Quilted syllabi are a textured & interdisciplinary way to engage with source materials so that the information may be metabolized over time—however long it takes. Quilted syllabi can also be described as an ever growing love letter to honor the sites of memory, people/places/materials, that gather us. The Quilted Syllabi can only be accessed by enrolling in The Clearing Membership. By enrolling, you gain access to a conservatory of critical thinking through vernacular citational practice & study. Each Quilted Syllabus includes attribution, guided prompts/questions, & additional resources for you to use to individually explore. When you enroll in The Clearing you also receive invitations to private live Clearing Ceremonies discuss Quilted Syllabi to laugh, cry, & grieve together.

Much like this methodology, as Assemblage: Baby’s Breath grows so do the Quilted Syllabi. In this once private practice that I now invite you to become a part of, it has been interesting to see which sources find themselves in more than one quilt & where my mind wanders off to. Let’s wander & wonder together through our individual & communal exploration of these innovative syllabi within The Clearing.

Poetry

I’ll admit, before I recently started publishing my work I did not feel moved to. The main reason why was because I adore how my work sounds out loud. I love reading my work to people & the sense of embodiment that comes from that experience.

Poetry must be read out loud

Poetry is an oral tradition & as such I read other Poets’ work out loud & I will read my own poetry out loud

Poetry must be read out loud

Poetry read out loud re-affirms the power of my words, how I move through the world, & crushes interiority so that I may take up space & hear my words ring through (ring true)

Poetry must be read out loud

On Revision

On the substack platform, once I publish a piece & send the email you see only that version in your inbox. Your inbox notification of the piece is unfixed. If I make any changes to the piece, once it is in your inbox, those changes are only reflected in your browser/the Assemblage: Baby’s Breath site.

More often than not, once I send the piece to your inbox I am still sitting with it. I may change punctuation, delete/add sentences, add whole paragraphs, delete images, & make whatever other revision I deem necessary. Mere hours after publishing last week’s piece, I had already gone back and expanded the introductory sentences to the poem into a paragraph.

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Assemblage: Baby’s Breath is a living publication, whose roots remain the same, but whose limbs and extremities are shaped by the changing world. In that sense, the archive page is a site of activation & challenge to cement knowledge in the written word that turns into static law. I encourage you to read each piece in the browser to get the most updated version of the text & frequent the archives to see what may have changed. To do so, simply click on the title of the piece delivered to your inbox to read it on the Assemblage: Baby’s Breath site.

One of my favorite writers, also hailing from the U.S. South, Kiese Laymon frequently revises & republishes his works. In an interview on The Ezra Klien Show Podcast between Tressie McMillan-Cotton & Kiese, Tressie expresses amazement at how he takes the liberty of revising his work.

“And in your ethic of revision, you show us over and over again how hard that work is, how hard it is to go back and change something, to make it more reflective of who you are as you mature. And you have done that brilliantly and impressively with “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America.” So you bought back the rights to that book. And you revised, basically, the whole text, Kiese.”

Tressie then moves the conversation toward an in-depth exploration of Kiese’s “ethic of revision” by citing an awe-inspiring quote from his 2021 Vox Article entitled What We are Owed: Kiese Laymon on Black revision, repayment, and renewal.

“I thought he was talking about revision, a word our professors and high school teachers believe necessitated us, reducing all of our Black rhetorical abundance into meager ass absolutes. In my own sloppy work on and off the page, I was beginning to understand revision as a dynamic practice of revisitation premised on ethically reimagining the ingredients, scope and primary audience of one’s initial vision. Revision required witnessing and testifying. Witnessing and testifying required rigorous attempts at remembering and imagining. If revision was not God, revision was everything every god ever asked of believers.”

Several pieces published on Assemblage: Baby’s Breath are revised from something that I already published or wrote years ago. Some examples include:

Meditation on "i was born with twelve fingers" by Lucille Clifton

A Salve for Black Folk Shamed for Resting

Generational Blooper of Black Girlhood

This is an active practice that I will continue doing & using my discernment to decide if the revision warrants a separate repost or a simple edit in the already published text. Revision is also having grace for myself in showing up weekly to publish on the altar of Assemblage. Utilizing the “ethic of revision” helps me bear witness to my own growth & foster trust in myself knowing that there is no true mastery & I can always come back to gather what was & what presently is. As I wrote in Meditation on “i was born with twelve fingers” by Lucille Clifton, the first place I cited Tressie & Kiese’s conversation, “So here I am, once again, making myself available to the task of believing”.

Please remember if you choose to quote this piece, share this piece, or any piece on this publication to always CITE BLACK WOMEN. Please always include my name (Kay Brown she/her pronouns) and a link to the publication of the Assemblage: Baby’s Breath substack in your sharing practice.

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Lastly, remember, that referrals are now available! This means you get to speak the name Assemblage: Baby’s Breath out loud to your community while receiving unique grounded gathered gifts from me. Thank you for being here 💙.