Center for Mennonite Writing

CMW Journal

Memoir

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  In This Issue

  by Ann Hostetler

  Memoir has come of age in Mennonite literature. Family history, genealogy, and oral history have traditionally been rich areas in Mennonite writing, but the literary memoir is more recent territory. Those hesitating to use the personal voice and to name a portion of individual truth for a wider audience, however ...

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  Friendly Confines

  by Matthew Kauffman Smith

  On the first day of school in 1984, I planned to wear my usual summer clothes: red shorts and a T-shirt that clashed. I hadn’t yet learned that maroon, orange and purple didn’t complement red. The day before school, however, I started to have second thoughts on the ...

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  Cain’s Legacy: Marked By Plain Sorrow

  by Eileen R. Kinch

  All around me was a familiar sea of Plain people. I stood in a hotel ballroom, waiting in line to register for a natural foods conference. A German dialect called Pennsylvaanisch Deitsch flowed in and out of my ears. Most of it I didn’t understand, but every now and ...

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  Are You a Little Dutchman?

  by James C. Juhnke

  In the spring of 1942, not long after my fourth birthday, I saw my grandpa sitting on the weathered board base of the old Woodmanse steel windmill on the Juhnke farmyard.

  I went over and sat beside Grandpa, resting my elbows on my knees like he did. He was chewing ...

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  Jacob and Agnes

  by Loretta Willems

  I had just left the ranch that Stanley and I had leased. I am thinking it was 80 acres of a vineyard. I sold it back to the owner. My brother Henry had just died, so I went to San Francisco to meet Stanley. He was singing taverns for a ...

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  Four Poems

  by Peter Miller

  Lyric poetry can feel at home among prose memoirs. Both genres are fundamentally autobiographical and, as Ann points out in her introduction to this issue, “privilege the individual point of view.” How something is said is just as important as what is said. The author of lyric may sometimes operate ...

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  Memoir: A Troubled Genre

  by J. Daniel Hess

  To clarify what I mean by memoir as a “troubled genre,” I shall first tell a personal story. I will write a memoir about a memoir that I wrote and had published.

  Having been inspired by others’ stories, I decided to write my own personal stories, beginning with childhood. What ...