“Look how beautiful the water is. Look how beautiful it all is” — my sister’s words, like cupped hands before me. A beg. Midsummer had returned for the first weekend in September. Lake Michigan, aqua and crystalline.

Before us, suburban parents with sunscreen backs stood watch over the surf. Their children ran, sand-bucket fists or empty palms, along the shore. To carry oneself with such freedom — I hardly remembered. I watched an old man with sun-spotted skin plod wearily into the water, body tensing in the waves, then relaxing again. Many decades his junior, and I could hardly weather the waves. My limbs, too weak. I could hardly carry myself the two blocks from door to sand.

I could, however, climb out of bed this morning. And it struck me that I should be grateful for this pittance — a day with lighter symptoms; a tease of summer; the earth, grainy between my toes.

“There will be more days like this,” my sister pleaded.

“You must be around to see them.” She was my older sister and had known me before I knew this world. The two of us in our youth, all wide eyes, and matching dresses. Bruised knees and grass-stained jeans. Limbs like newborn calves. So bemused we had been by the simplest of abilities. To reach, to grab. To run and climb. She had watched me discover hands. Watched me make a mess of them — sweet potatoes, mashed peas. In a video from my first year, I sit in a highchair. My cheeks, rouged with something orange. Suddenly, a little girl’s voice, tinny in the background, “I think I’ll call her the messy woman,” she shrieks.

And now, here we were, visiting our parents on the shore of Lake Michigan, some 26 years later. Women, yes. Messy, but not in the way she had meant.

She had watched me discover hands and here I was, too fatigued to use them. My fingers, too weak to plant a beach umbrella. Too numb to cut with fork and knife. I had been debilitated by long COVID for six months by then. On bad days, confined to bed. On better days, sedentary beside my loved ones. Trying, fumbling. Failing to translate into words how it felt to exist in my body.

“What did it feel like?” I ask recovered patients. “The brain fog?” As if the world were a video game, they tell me. Like a new dimension. Like stepping into a separate realm.

“What did it feel like?” I ask. “The fatigue?” Like being weighed down by sandbags. Like being pummeled by gravity and starved of oxygen, too.

“What did it feel like? The worst days?” Like being poisoned. As if an alien were inside of me, gripping my intestines with the strength of another world.

A new realm, an alien, a poison, a body laden with sandbags and starved of oxygen, too. Metaphors, all of these. But in illness, I wanted none of them.

A litany of great writers tells us we should not make a metaphor of illness. No poem, no imagery. No flowers to color the margins of this despair. One could trace this lineage to Susan Sontag — her blatant eschewal of metaphor in illness literature:

“My point is that illness is not a metaphor. And that the most truthful way of regarding illness — and the healthiest way of being ill — is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking,” she writes in her 1977 essay “Illness as Metaphor.”

When Sontag wrote those words, she had just finished three years of treatment for stage 4 breast cancer. A radical mastectomy, extensive radiation, and 30 months of chemotherapy. To list cancer treatments alongside Sontag’s name — something uncanny, if not disturbing, about this affiliation. For the very vocabulary of illness narrows a person. It streamlines complex being into generalized body. One sees the word “chemotherapy” and imagines a port, a vein, or a shaved head. The word “mastectomy” and a breast or a surgical instrument. In cancer, and in all illnesses, a person is reduced to simpler forms. To body parts and their associated instruments.

One can hardly imagine Sontag — all black everything (“the dark prince,” recalls writer Judith Grossman in The New Yorker), her gray streak in black hair. A stoic, thinking expression on her face. This revered woman of letters, this woman so emblematic of a life of the mind — now, a body.

In the early months of illness, I too saw illness as void. Illness as pain, pure and unanesthetized. Illness, emptied of any meaning we otherwise seek to weather this place, this life. Illness, isolated from anything touched by the well.

I clung to the words of Sontag and her successors. After all, whom else might I trust? Who else clutched, in their hands, the white sheet of the ghost they had once been? Who else knew what it meant to lose the person they thought they were — beneath the skin and blood they thought they knew?

The purpose of the George Bennett Fellowship is to provide time and freedom from material considerations to a person seriously contemplating or pursuing a career as a writer. As Writer in Residence, the Fellow lives in Exeter and makes him- or herself and talents available in an informal way to students interested in writing. >>> Learn more about the George Bennett Fellowship

Editors Note: This article was first published in the Winter 2024 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Growing up in segregated Charlotte, North Carolina, James Coleman ’66 witnessed injustice and discrimination — and was moved to fight it. During his senior year in high school, Coleman worked for local civil rights lawyer Julius LeVonne Chambers, who successfully litigated a case forcing the Charlotte public schools to desegregate. “His office and home were bombed,” Coleman says. “To me, that meant he was threatening the status quo, and that being a lawyer was a way to do that.”

Coleman has carried the lessons learned that year through his long career as an attorney, both in private practice and government service. As a professor at Duke University School of Law and director of the school’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic, he helps students champion the wrongly accused. “Trying to remedy a miscarriage of justice is one of the highest callings we have as lawyers,” he says.

The summer before interning with Chambers, Coleman attended Exeter for a five-week academic enrichment program. It was a summer of firsts: his first experience living away from home; his first classes with white students and teachers; his first discussions around a Harkness table. Drawn by the educational opportunities Exeter afforded, he returned for a postgraduate year in 1965.

In an essay entitled “Living in the Shadow of American Racism,” published in 2022 in Duke’s Law and Contemporary Problems journal, Coleman recalls writing English essays at Exeter about growing up in a segregated country. A classmate, the grandson of a U.S. president, wrote about traveling with his grandfather. “Such diversity was not the purpose of my admission to Exeter,” he wrote, “but it was a natural consequence … facilitated by the Harkness method, where we were all equal around the table.

After graduating from Harvard University and Columbia Law School, Coleman worked in various positions in the public sector, including deputy general counsel for the U.S. Department of Education. He later joined Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, a law firm specializing in federal court and administrative legislation. Active in the firm’s pro bono program, he advised civil rights organizations and represented clients in discrimination cases.

In his most high-profile pro bono case, Coleman drew heavy criticism for representing convicted serial killer Ted Bundy in Bundy’s final death penalty appeal. “My job is to protect my client’s constitutional rights,” Coleman told the Orlando Sentinel at the time. He went on to campaign against the death penalty, and says he saw the Bundy case as a way to draw attention to the potential for public opinion to exert influence in capital cases.

In another case with intense media coverage, Coleman chaired an internal committee investigating accusations of rape against several members of the Duke University men’s lacrosse team in 2006. Again, he focused on the need to not rush to judgment. “We wanted to make sure the facts were accurate,” Coleman says. “It’s easy to convict an innocent person, and, in a sexual assault case, it’s particularly hard to prove after a conviction that the perpetrator is innocent.” Charges against the team members were ultimately dropped because of inconsistencies in the accuser’s testimony and ethical violations by the district attorney.

Coleman now devotes himself to teaching and working with law students seeking to overturn wrongful convictions, like that of Charles Ray Finch, a North Carolina man accused of killing a gas station owner in 1976. Coleman and his students worked for 18 years on Finch’s case, litigating it in state and federal courts. Finch was finally released in 2019.

“If there’s merit to a client’s claim of innocence and we can pursue the claim, we don’t get rid of the case because it gets difficult,” Coleman says. One of his students on the case became involved in restorative justice work as a prosecutor and was recently named a North Carolina district court judge. “Her career reflects what I hope for my students: that they’ll stay involved in criminal justice issues,” Coleman says.

He describes himself as a “happy warrior,” finding passion in his work but not taking himself too seriously. “It’s the most realistic way to approach difficult litigation,” he says. “To have a sense of humor and not lose sight of the work’s human element.”

 – Debbie Kane

In February 2020, Julie Dunfey found herself in the Galapagos Islands, mulling over whether to produce another documentary with her longtime collaborator, Ken Burns, before retiring. The proposed film would tell the story of the American buffalo, or bison: its significance to Indigenous people of the Great Plains, the devastating impact of European-American settlement and efforts to bring the species back from the brink.

“I was in some tiny museum, looking at evidence of tortoises that had gone extinct,” Dunfey recalls of her time in the Galapagos. “When you’re in a place like that, you’re so aware of biology, animal evolution, this whole notion of extinction. I thought, [the story of the bison] is such an American tale of de-extinction. It’s about our relationship to the natural world, which we ignore at our peril… but it’s also about our relationship to each other, as humans.” Drawn to the idea of sharing one more uniquely American story with millions of public television viewers, Dunfey put her retirement on hold, and signed on to produce the film.

Since she was a child, Dunfey has been fascinated by the American story. At Exeter, where she was one of only 10 girls in the prep class in 1972, she took every history course she could. “What Exeter really taught me was how to think and how to write,” Dunfey says. “It was the defining educational experience of my life.”

Just before starting her master’s degree in history at Stanford University, Dunfey interned at WGBH, Boston’s public television station. Working on a series about the Vietnam War showed her she could tell important stories about history in a more collaborative way, and in a way that could potentially reach more people than the scholarly work she had envisioned for herself. She cold-called Burns, a New Hampshire filmmaker whose work had begun to gain notice at the time. Although he didn’t immediately have a job for her, the phone call led to a nearly 40-year collaboration, with Dunfey moving back to her home state after grad school to produce for Burns’ company, Florentine Films.

Dunfey won her first Emmy Award as co-producer of The Civil War (1990), a nine-part documentary that attracted some 40 million viewers — a public television record that still stands. By the time that series aired, she had embarked on starting a family. “Ken and I jokingly say I took a 16-year maternity leave,” Dunfey says. During that “leave,” she had three children, consulted on film projects and served as an Exeter trustee for 11 years, including four as vice president.

She returned to work full time in 2006, helping produce acclaimed miniseries like The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009), The Dust Bowl (2012) and Country Music (2019), all of which drew viewership numbers in the tens of millions. With each project, Dunfey traveled around the country meeting people of all ages and backgrounds; mined libraries and personal photo collections; and worked with cinematographers to capture images that breathed life into different chapters of the American story. “I love going into archives … finding all the things we need, and sometimes finding things that people haven’t seen before,” Dunfey says.

Of all the films Dunfey has produced, she feels especially connected to The Dust Bowl, for which she interviewed many people in their 80s and 90s — around the same age as her parents at the time — knowing she and her colleagues might be the last ones to capture their stories. “That was very meaningful,” she recalls. “These were all people who grew up not knowing how and when the Depression would end, or how World War II would turn out.”

Dunfey celebrated her retirement shortly before The American Buffalo aired on PBS in October. She plans to channel her knowledge and connections made during the filmmaking process into volunteer efforts on behalf of bison rehabilitation.

“My hope is that I can contribute in some hands-on way because I believe very strongly that we need to rewild this animal,” Dunfey says. “It’s one thing to save it from extinction; it’s another to restore its ecological habitat and make it wild again. That’s something that is of great interest to me, and it feels like it might be a good moment.

– Sarah Pruitt ’95

In September, the Rev. Canon Leslie Nuñez Steffensen ’85 joined tens of thousands of people headed to Burning Man, the annual gathering of artists, makers and others exploring community and creative self-expression in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. After 11 years as an Episcopal priest, she says, “My hope was to get back to the basics of priesting and the essence of chaplaincy — meeting people where they are and loving them as they are.” 

Decked out in bright pink hair extensions, matching sunglasses and a “Holy Chic” T-shirt, Steffensen welcomed all those interested in conversation, connection and prayer to her “camp.” As an offering to the Burning Man community, she and her husband, Kirk, had designed and built a labyrinth for visitors to navigate. “I thought the experience would ‘burn the burnout’ from my system,” Steffensen says. “It did!”

A desire to find and build community is what led Steffensen to the priesthood. Like her Burning Man maze, her path was circuitous. She is one of five members of her immediate family to attend Exeter, including her father, Charles Nuñez ’57; brothers Varrick ’77, a retired U.S. Naval officer and librarian, and Timothy ’79, an Episcopal priest; and sister Libby ’93, a teacher.

Service is part of her family legacy. “My parents were very involved in the Episcopal Church,” she says. “We Nuñezes all have a very strong faith and are dedicated to community service.”

Exeter expanded Steffensen’s mind intellectually and its lessons around non sibi equipped her for ministry and public service. “I graduated in the ’80s, when many careers were about money,” she says. “I could’ve had a lovely life simply doing something adventurous. Exeter gave me a sense of a larger purpose.”

While pregnant with her second child, Steffensen reconnected with the Episcopal Church through talks about faith with a local priest. “My faith came through community involvement,” she says. As the Navy moved them to different locations, she volunteered with her local church and held various positions in church leadership, then pursued a master’s degree in theology at Virginia Theological Seminary.

In the mid-2000s, she embarked on a church mission in Dodoma, Tanzania, teaching theology and biblical studies at Msalato Theological College. It was a trip she was well-prepared for. “[Spending] my Exeter upper year abroad in Barcelona gave me this extreme bravery and an opportunity to meet others who were different from me,” Steffensen says. In Africa, she discovered a love for teaching, as well as a facility for translating theology into a different culture, as she helped train Tanzanian students in Anglican ministry.

Once she returned stateside, Steffensen pursued a second master’s degree in divinity and became ordained a priest in 2012. As assistant to the rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Alexandria, Virginia, she ministered to the church’s Latino congregation, La Gracia, helping them develop their sense of leadership and mission in the parish and wider community.

Steffensen’s most recent role drew on her military experience, her commitment to faith and her dedication to serving others. As Episcopal Church canon to the bishop suffragan for armed forces and federal ministries, she provided support to Episcopal chaplains who minister to service members and their families. “It was sometimes difficult work,” she says, noting that military chaplains are under enormous stress, coping with deployments, social upheaval and, more recently, the COVID pandemic. “Mental health issues can affect your work in the military, and I wanted to create a safe space for chaplains.”

Her future plans include returning to Burning Man in 2024. “There’s so much to explore and experience in life,” she says. “Becoming intentionally uncomfortable pushes you into new growth, personally, spiritually and professionally.

– Debbie Kane

This article first appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.