Center for Mennonite Writing

CMW Journal

Serial Fiction

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  Making Ghosts

  by Karl Schroeder

  What stands out in memory is that first picture of Maier's idea. I am standing at her right shoulder, and she leans forward over the RISC station and taps the mouse a couple of times. The nineteen inch monitor lights up with a three-dimensional image like a mist of ...

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  Chapter 1

  by Judy Clemens

  “This here’s my daughter Katie. She’s thirteen, and lives for marching band. Plays the flute. You wouldn’t believe the way they work them kids. She’s in better shape than I ever been.” Evan the trucker laughed and patted his sizable gut, which almost touched the steering ...

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  Review Essay: P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Mystery Series

  by Kyle Schlabach

  Blood of the Prodigal (1999), Broken English (2000), Clouds Without Rain (2001), Cast a Blue Shadow (2003), A Prayer for the Night (2006), Separate from the World (2008).

  -- Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

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  Chasing the Bonnet

  by Beth Graybill

  A few years ago, when conducting dissertation research on Amish women in business, I visited a gift shop and noticed a rack of romance novels with pictures of Amish women on the cover. I asked the Amish business owner, “Do you sell a lot of these?”

  “Yes,” she said, “the ...

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  “A Whisper of Satin”: The Infant Dress Leitmotif

  by Michelle Thurlow

  Although best-selling inspirational novelist Beverly Lewis is understandably credited with "g[iving] birth to" the lucrative Amish fiction genre in 1997 with the release of her inaugural adult novel The Shunning (Gorski, par. 9), Lewis was not the first author to write about horse-and-buggy Plain folk, nor was ...

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  Mennonite and Amish Serial Fiction: An Informal Bibliography

  by Ervin Beck

  Joe Springer, curator of the Mennonite Historical Library at Goshen College, wants the library to contain all books ever published by and about Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites. He not only knows the MHL catalog, but he combs both rare book and new book catalogs and seems to remember whatever he ...

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  Poetry Feature: Six Poems

  by Jeff Gundy

  We are pleased to publish for the first time a selection of six poems by Jeff Gundy, author of the award-winning Spoken Among the Trees (University of Akron Press 2007) and four other poetry collections. In these poems the worlds of popular culture—suggested by references to Ronald Reagan, Jerry ...