My personal writing has often been about my home neighborhood of Kenilworth in Washington, DC. The life of the ‘hood, and my family’s unique position as Amish-Mennonite ‘missionaries’ in this urban black community, features often in my creative work. I’ve written essays and poetry about the neighborhood, completed a self-directed community and oral history project, published a booklet of neighborhood history, and occasionally still noodle on a long-running memoir project.

My parents, Elmer and Fannie Lapp, lived in Kenilworth off and on from 1965 to 2001. White Amish-Mennonites living cross-culturally in a Black, low-income area, they worked beside other volunteers to start and maintain a church. Though my mom and dad no longer lived in Kenilworth, I moved back there from 2003 to 2006 to write about the community and my family’s experience there. Here is some of my work, which is ongoing.

Kenilworth: A DC Neighborhood by the Anacostia River
An increasing fascination with Kenilworth’s past culminated in a self-published, 32 page booklet on neighborhood history published with support from the Humanities Council of Washington, DC and the DC Historic Preservation Office. Famous for its water gardens and later hosting the city dump, the area’s change from farmland to housing projects highlights the history of land use, housing, race, and changing attitudes toward river and swamp areas in the nation’s capital. You can download a pdf of this free publication.

Kenilworth essay in Washington at Home
My essay on Kenilworth history also appears in the second edition of Washington at Home, the go-to book for historical information on DC’s neighborhoods, edited by Kathryn Schneider Smith and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Buy the book to have my Kenilworth essay in print and learn more about the city’s communal history outside of the political spotlight.

Memoir project
When I moved back to Kenilworth in 2003, I pictured myself focusing on creative nonfiction about my family’s life as white, rural Amish-Mennonites starting and maintaining a church in a black, urban ‘projects’ neighborhood. But, while I did some of that writing, I got distracted by the history work outlined above. Or perhaps the history work was simpler than wading through the mixed emotions of memoir? In any event, almost 20 years on, I’m dusting off my digital manuscripts to keep the memoir dream alive…

Stolen cars and flung cookies
My memoir writing got some buzz from an essay I published in the Washington City Paper in November 2006, Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Dodge Caravan. “What’s the son of an Amish-Mennonite reverend doing in Kenilworth Courts? Going after kiddie car thieves,” the subhead teases. The essay draws parallels between my parents’ past positive action in the neighborhood and my own community activism against the then-current teenage crime fad: hot-rodding around in stolen cars.

Kenilworth heroes
Kenilworth has faced many challenges in the last decades, but many neighborhood heroes also stepped up to make the community a better place. Read about three of these heroes, in prose aimed for a younger audience.
Kimi Gray
Walter McDowney
Elmer and Fannie Lapp

My parents made change outside of politics — magazine essay
Though they had moved to Washington, DC — one of the most political cities in the world — my parents stood by the Amish-Mennonite choice not to vote. Instead, they brought positive change to the world through their everyday actions. Read my essay about this choice as published in the July 2017 edition of The Mennonite.

Oral history of family, church, and neighborhood publicly archived
To inform my writing, I recorded interviews with 40 people connected to Kenilworth. Though the oral history project focuses on my family and the Fellowship Haven Church that my parents helped to start, it also explores the history of the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, the Kenilworth Courts public housing complex, and the nearby community of Eastland Gardens. Copies of the cassette tapes and transcribed interviews from the project are archived at the Washingtoniana Collection in the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC.

Samples of other published work on Kenilworth
Finally, here is some other writing about or inspired by my Kenilworth experiences.

Poetry
The War From This Side of the Anacostia River—poem published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly
Turning Over the Corpse—poem published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly

Washington Post essays
Where a Puddle Persists, Lotuses Bloom—a wetland forms from a water main break
“The Siren Call of Disaster at Our Door” and “Wild In the Streets”—two essays about crime and the city

More history writing
Kenilworth: A Northeast Neighborhood by the Anacostia River—short overview of Kenilworth neighborhood history, published in East of the River newspaper
The Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens: Loving Ward 7’s Wetland Park—short overview of the history of Kenilworth’s aquatic national park, published in East of the River newspaper
Of Urban Plantations and the Rural Amish: Ms. Kimi Gray and Mr. Elmer Lapp in Kenilworth—text of a spring 2005 talk to the NE DC Historical Society