SCA name: Cecily Graham de Inveresk
Mundane name: Meredith Kenton, Pronouns: she/her
Chatelaine: What is your persona background?
Cecily: Most consistently (15 years or so), my persona is lowland Scot c. 1390 and got an upgrade with a name to match a few years ago. In earlier years I had a lot of fancy and romantic background stories for Cecily but I’ve largely settled on lower nobility from a place called Dalkeith, just outside of Edinburgh. Lowland Scottish is easier to research, document, and garb (as they generally took from what England/France was wearing) and has a personal attachment for me because I lived in the palace in Dalkeith for a semester abroad!
Chatelaine: How did you get involved in the SCA?
Cecily: I’m actually a second generation SCAdian. My mom and dad met in the SCA in 1985. My father (Lord Walter de Witte) played in the Midrealm before moving to the East where he was generally active in the late 80s/early 90s serving as Tyger Clerk of the Sygnet for a few years. My mother (Baroness Rosalind Bennett) was active as well but long after my father stopped playing. She ran Pikestaff for several years (I have many distinct memories of drives to New Hampshire and complaints that the interstate only took tokens for tolls and not cash or the emerging EZ Pass) and later went on to be court herald for several reigns including Anna and Brion I (in the East, that is), Darius and Roxane, Andreas and Isabella, Kelson and Geneviere, as well as her assorted garb projects (like working on the coronation for Timothy and Gabrielle II)
Chatelaine: How long have you been playing?
Cecily: The SCA has always been in my life. My first event was when I was 2 months old and was the first time I properly slept through the night. I was actually what got my family playing again – my father had burned out and I asked why we didn’t go camping and wear the medieval clothes anymore. My initial motive may have been the AMAZING wooden playground at the old Boredom War site, but the interest was there.
Chatelaine: What are your passions in the sca?
Cecily: I’m a service junkie like my mother before me, though I’m less prone to be in the feast kitchen and more prone to be retaining or running something – namely children’s activities or classes around SCA culture. A close second passion would have to be commedia del’arte- my love of the art began with iSebastiani and continued into my thesis for my bachelor’s and my favorite combination of the two – teaching it to kids. Though I will say that I have been upping my garb game and have become fully in love with the St. Birgitta cap and how to keep my mundane hair but style it in easy medieval ways. I may need to do more experimenting and put together a class on the topic.
Chatelaine: Are you part of a household?
Cecily: Technically, yes. I have a set of friends that I grew up with at Pennsic in a Romani-themed household. All of us are some kind of second generation SCAdian who eventually grew tired of camping with our parents. This household is incredibly loose and just made of like-minded friends with similar experiences. It’s nice to have a group of friends who know what it’s like to be in the SCA from a young age to bounce ideas off of. Kali Rugo!
Beyond that, I’m closely connected to several households through my work with my mother on the royal-go-round and am a protege to Baroness Ardenia aRuadh, OSC, OP (the protegeing is new – I became her demoiselle when I was 17).
Chatelaine: What keeps you involved?
Cecily: This is going to sound corny, but the SCA is my culture. My family is neurodivergent so we’ve never really fit in with whatever local culture we were living with but we did fit in with this one. It does mean that I’ve missed a lot of “American” cultural touch points (the list of movies/shows/music I’m unfamiliar with is long and baffles everyone) but gave me a lot of other cultural touch points that I hold just as dear and nostalgically to my heart. I’m as culturally “SCAdian” as someone who grew up in a big Italian/Irish/Polish/Catholic/etc. family identifies with that culture.
Chatelaine: Do you have any goals in the SCA? What are they?
Cecily: Ideally, I’d like to start a holistic conversation in the SCA around what it means to be in the SCA, particularly around awards and recognition. In my mid 20s/early 30s, I and many of my age peers had to take a break from the SCA – we were all hard working teens that needed to take a break because of Life (TM) and found that we were spinning our wheels against a lot of assumptions around our age and assumed experience, paired with the fact that many of us worked incredibly hard and never received recognition for that work, again, because of our ages.
As an adult coming back into the SCA, I still hold these scars and see how the drive for recognition causes your average “joined during or after college” SCAdian to feel discouraged.
As an organization and as a culture, we need to rethink how we perceive recognition to mimic “standard” cultures in order to keep folks from burning out if we want our Dream to survive. We need to stop talking about gaining new members and see to the health of the ones we have. With the experience I have of the SCA, as someone who was a child, a preteen, someone who got to see and be part of the first real wave of changing how we view children in the SCA, a teenager, and now an adult, not to mention the buckets of connections I have across the Known World that I can tap into, this is a place where I really feel I can do some good for the health of the Society.
Chatelaine: What kinds of things would you like to happen in the shire?
Cecily: How the SCA operates within the shire is fine and great for some people… but there are whole other levels to the SCA and many different ways to play this game – without having to change the rules. For example, Ardenia saw that I needed mentoring as a teenager but a) she wasn’t a Pelican yet and b) an official “peer/protege” relationship wasn’t something I was willing to have until fairly recently. Being her demoiselle was a great way for us to have that relationship with some formality but outside of the “recognized regalia” structure. Getting involved in a royal reign is a whole other ball of wax and a thrill all its own that is completely separate from the local fighter practice vibe (and I honestly miss it). This isn’t to say that everyone needs to participate on this level, but I would like to see a wider perspective of “how to play the SCA” brought to the local level, if anything to have interesting projects come about.
I would also love to get off Facebook as far as organization goes. Personally, I avoid social media unless strictly necessary and haven’t found the type of discourse that happens on Facebook to skew in a healthy direction.
Chatelaine: Are there any things you would like people to know about you? Mundanely or otherwise.
Cecily: I didn’t mention this too much, only because it wasn’t really biographical, but I did just step into the role of the East Kingdom Chancellor Minor! I’ve held this and similar positions before – Deputy Youth Point Coordinator at Pennsic (and the creation of the Pennsic Youth Theater Program by yours truly), Deputy Chancellor of Youth for the Kingdom of Atlantia, and Interim Chancellor Minor of the East. To be honest, I didn’t really have any big goals in mind at the time but now, with the perspective that only age and time gives, I think I can do some good. I’ve got a lot of cool ideas that several past Chancellor Minors agree with me on and I’m very excited to get to work.
Mundanely, I have a dog who I adopted almost two years ago (I had plans to get a dog in 2020 anyway). His mundane name is Rudy, aka Roo, but his SCA name is Monsieur Robert le Chonc. I routinely bring him to fighter practice in warm weather – he is a little old man, friendly, but is the tiniest bit of chow chow (hence the speckly tongue) so if he sniffs your hand and gives you the cold shoulder or snips because he was pet a millisecond too long, it’s just his nature and he means no harm by it. He will likely warm up and be happy with you in a few minutes.
Wiki Page: https://wiki.eastkingdom.org/wiki/Cecily_Graham_of_Inveresk
Contact info: Cecily can be emailed directly at 241188@members.eastkingdom.org or at chancellor-minor@eastkingdom.org