My name is Antonio Bellini. Well, not really. My name is Dan McGillen, but I am known to some as Antonio Bellini. Sometimes people include the title Lord in front of that, but I don’t get bothered one way or another about it. I’ve been active in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), a medieval reenactment/history group for about five years now. Six years ago this past spring, I started going to the Barony of Sternfeld’s dance practice, which was being led by my then girlfriend, Alice/Colette the Seamstress (who I’ve since married). I went to my first event (Baronial Border War) in Ionia, Michigan, back in Early Summer 2008. When I first started, I didn’t totally understand what the group was about or what we were trying to accomplish – and what little understanding I did have was full of inaccuracies and misunderstandings – but I did at least think that people were doing interesting and novel things and I wanted to see more.
Going back a bit further, I’d first heard of the SCA about ten years ago, but the person who told me about it originally scared me away from even considering attending or participating before I ever set foot near an SCA activity. This is someone who was part of the group who thought I might be interested.
This is an important point that bears highlighting, I think. People need to consider how they describe our hobby to people who are not involved – it turns out the SCA has a lot of things going on that I’m interested in but I would never have given it a chance because I was given a false sense of what it was about. Indeed, had I not met Colette, I probably would not have ever gotten involved. She has been part of the SCA since approximately the year 2000.
Other than dance practice and going to an occasional event, I didn’t do much the first year I was around the SCA. By the end of that first year, Colette had moved in with me and had decided to put in a bid to be the Autocrat for Grand Pageant, a dance event Sternfeld used to hold annually. Knowing that I would be helping her out with a lot of the elements of planning the event (it’s hard not to when you live with someone), we put in a bid together as co-autocrats. Because of that, we needed to attend the Baronial Business Meeting each month and also started attending Fighter Practice. The event happened in Fall 2009, and after it was over our involvement could have very easily stopped. Dance Practice was starting to be very poorly attended, and without that or an upcoming event to plan for, we might have disappeared completely. Except two things happened that year – the first thing was that we went to my first Pennsic War. Colette had been several times before, and I’d heard good things about it, so was excited to go. It ended up being an amazing experience – nothing else I’ve done has been quite like it. That probably wouldn’t have been enough to cement my involvement however – I probably would have kept going to Pennsic annually and not given a fig about the SCA. The second, and arguably more important thing was that we started to get to know people in our local group. We made a lot of acquaintances and started coming around more often. We also made closer connections with a handful of people and started spending time with some of them, even in some non-SCA contexts. And that, as they say, is that.
Which actually leads to my second point – attracting new members and keeping them is really hard. So much of what we do in the SCA is social activity – if new people don’t make new friends and connections quickly, they will stop coming. It’s our job as ambassadors of our hobby (and like it or not, we all have to be, or our hobby dies eventually) to get to know new people personally, make them feel welcomed, and connect them with people they will have commonalities with.
In SCA terms, I’m still a relative newbie – I’ve only been around six years, and only really been active for five of them. Compared to some of the people I know that have been in for 30 or more years, it doesn’t even compare really. But I have been involved. I’ve been the Web Minister for the Barony of Sternfeld since May/June 2010, and picked up the role of Chronicler for Sternfeld this spring. I’ve worked at most of our events over the past few years, often as a department head. I’ve been to Pennsic five times in a row. In short, I’ve been a lot of places and heard a lot of things. I have heard opinions ranging far and wide about what the SCA is and is not and what we should be doing.
I’ve been seeking out opinions and ideas, and listening more carefully to what people have to say – and it was starting to get me down. I’ve recently heard a peer suggest that creating the Order of the Pelican (however many years ago) was a mistake. Someone else questioned whether we actually needed to recruit new members or encourage new people to come around. I’ve seen complaints that people don’t strive for 100% period perfection in everything they do in the SCA, and conversely, I’ve seen people complain about people being a stickler for authenticity. There’s been a lot of negativity about newbies in general. A lot of people seem to think that there’s only one way to play this game – their way – and all other ways are wrong. And that’s not the attitude I want people to see from our hobby. As a member of the SCA, I would prefer our group be seen as fun, interesting, welcoming, encouraging, diverse and worth the time, effort, and money. I’d like to see our local group grow and for the region, Kingdom, and Society to grow and become healthier. I’d like to see less administrative overhead and more focus on doing fun medieval things!
And that’s ultimately why I’m starting this blog. I’ve got opinions, and I want to share them. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the SCA and what it means to me as an organization. Where is it going? How is it going to get there? What are we doing wrong? What are we doing right? All these thoughts are useful to me to decide how to comport myself and how to guide my own actions and activities, but I also want to encourage others to think about these same topics and even make a difference, no matter how small. I also hope to do my part to make playing in the SCA more fun for me and others – it’s our shared hobby, and if people aren’t having fun, what’s the point?
Before I dive in to what I’ve been thinking about lately, I’m going to repost two previous things I wrote about SCA topics. First up will be a reprinting of a letter I sent to the Board of Directors regarding same sex couples fighting in Crown Tournaments. There was a request a year or two ago for comments and it was a hot-button issue for me. Secondly is an article about Webministering for a local SCA Branch, which was also published in the Middle Kingdom’s Newsletter, “The Pale”. With those two things posted, I plan to move on to new topics…
I have turned off comments completely on this blog – past experience with WordPress blogs tells me I would be buried in spam comments quickly. So instead, I encourage you to email me at danmcgillen@gmail.com if you wish to communicate with me directly about my postings.
Lastly, I assume this goes without saying, but I’m going to go ahead and say it: any opinions expressed on this blog are mine and are not the opinions of the SCA, it’s Kingdoms, or it’s Branches. These are my opinions as a person involved in the hobby – this blog is hosted on my own personal web domain, and has no “official” qualities whatsoever. I hope that others who play in the SCA are able to read it, enjoy it, and take away ideas that can help improve the game for others.