CMW Community
The CMW Community offers a space for readers, writers, students, and scholars to interact around the subject of Mennonite writing. It houses the CMW Journal Discussion as well as the CMW News.
Recent News Stories
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Ruminate Magazine Poetry Contest
March 27, 2012RUMINATE Magazine is currently seeking submissions for our annual Janet McCabe Poetry Prize with an award of $1000 to the winning poet.
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Carrie Snyder's The Juliet Stories just published
March 18, 2012The Juliet Stories, a novel in stories by Carrie Snyder, has just been published in Canada by Anansi. Juliet, a precocious 10-year-old narrator has just moved to Nicaragua with her parents and younger brothers. While the parents work in human rights causes, the children are left free to discover their own adventures. Read a review in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
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Conrad Grebel Lecture Series Highlights 50 Years of Mennonite Writing
March 18, 2012This spring Hildi Froese Tiessen, Professor of English and Peace Studies at the University of Waterloo, Conrad Grebel University College, organized a series of nine lectures celebrating fifty years of Mennonite Writing in Canada. To see the series and browse the titles of the presentations, see the program on the University of Waterloo website.
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From Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball
March 17, 2012Todd Davis has just edited a new essay collection that brings together two subjects dear to his heart: basketball and the poetic eye. Published by Michigan State University Press, From Fast Break to Line Break includes essays by a variety of poets from Stephen Dunn and Quincy Troupe to Mennonite-connected writers Jeff Gundy, Mary Linton, and Davis himself, author of three poetry collections and whose poems have been featured on The Writer's Almanac. You can hear Davis read his poem at the publisher's website.
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Joanna Wiebe's BIRTH MOTHER, a memoir, just published
January 21, 2012Joanna Wiebe's memoir, BIRTH MOTHER, has just been published as an ebook or kindle download on amazon.com.
BIRTH MOTHER is a memoir about Wiebe's experience of giving up her son for adoption in 1969. It's also a travel book, a coming of age story, and a Mennonite memoir with recipes.
From the amazon.com description:
Six years ago Joanna gave up her baby son for adoption. Now it's Christmas 1975, and she longs to celebrate with her rural Kansas Mennonite family, but the relationships are tense as they struggle to understand:
• why, after having a ...
Letters Home: An Informal Report on “Mennonite/s Writing: Manitoba and Beyond”
Thank you for your comment on the Center for Mennonite Writing website, Mr. Peters. You correctly point out that Di Brandt was not officially shunned from the Mennonite Church. Shunning is a word that has a number of different meanings. In the letter about the 2009 Winnipeg Mennonite/s Writing conference to which your comment was appended, the term was used as a metaphor for the estrangement Brandt had previously described as feeling after she had published her writing. (Note the emphasis on the writer’s subjective experience here.) However, the warm welcome Brandt received from her relatives at the community center suggested a healing of this rift, and it was beautiful to behold. No scholar I know claims that Brandt was shunned from the church. I understand how this could be confusing, though, given the multiple meanings of the word in different contexts. Keep in mind that imaginative literature is not biography or history, and critics are interested in the text and how it is constructed, rather than how much of it is made up. A biographer or historian, of course, would be interested in the source and accuracy of a writer’s stories.
Letters Home: An Informal Report on “Mennonite/s Writing: Manitoba and Beyond”
This article is absurdly fantastic given than none of Brandt’s family actually belongs to a Mennonite group that practices shunning if it belongs to any Mennonite church at all. Her shunning story is a complete fabrication. There is a reasonable expectation in scholarly work that one is to independently verify information. The credulity and ignorance (and arguably bigotry) displayed by the literary community regarding Brandt’s “stories” represents a good case study on how religions get started. A good Thesis project would be to interview all the Mennonite scholars that have written on Brandt’s work and ask them why they never bothered to question a single one of the many obvious whoppers.
Are You a Little Dutchman?
Yes, this German nursery rhyme and game was very much a part of my childhood—and a tradition that I carried on with my children and grandchildren. For us it was “Huppe, Huppe, Reiter.” The child straddled the parent’s (or grandparent’s) foot, and held onto the parent’s hands. The parent bounced the child up and down in rhythm with the rhyme. At the end the child bounced high and fell off the pretend horse. There are many dialect versions, nearly all of which have a grim outcome. One of my favorite can be translated: “Huppe, Huppe, Reiter. Schimmel won’t go any farther. If he falls into the brush, he is eaten by the snails!”