Olden-days Sophia online

Posted on June 20, 2012 by doradueck

Here’s some excellent news. Sophia, a magazine produced by a volunteer collective of mostly Mennonite Brethren women between 1991 and 2003 is now available for reading online, in PDF format.

Thank you, Conrad Stoesz, archivist, for your ongoing interest and efforts to provide, as you put it in a letter some time ago, “a new level of access to the unique content of Sophia.” It was unique, I think, looking back, and I’m grateful – and proud of – the work, friendships, and energy it represents, and grateful too to have been part of the Sophia collective for some time. In 2006, I wrote a brief overview and assessment of Sophia for the Mennonite Historian, but each woman who was involved will have her own perspective and memories, I’m sure. (One of my friends responded to Conrad’s note about the project, “Yikes! Those old rants of mine…” though believe me, she was gracious and articulate.) At any rate, I’m glad the magazine is available this way, and who knows, perhaps some day a grad student who needs a thesis topic will find a fascinating one in these women of the “olden days.” Continue reading →

Learning boreality

Posted on June 4, 2012 by doradueck

I grew up in west-central Alberta, in rolling plains that were relatively treeless, though there were “the woods” where we sometimes played, perhaps half an acre or so in size, exciting and mysterious, and then in my teens I moved to small-town Manitoba and later to Winnipeg, which continued to press into me as “heart’s home” in the prairie provinces the sense of, well, prairie. In recent years I’ve come to understand, however, that as arbitrary as lines on a map may initially be (the provincial boundaries, for example), they form containers by which we know ourselves, and in the case of central Canada where I’ve lived most of my life, there’s a lot more in my container than prairie. Continue reading →

Profound refreshment from another writer

Posted on May 30, 2012 by doradueck

I’ve attended three conferences around writing in less than two months, each one quite different and each one valuable, but now I’m definitely conferenced out! The most recent one, the annual meeting of The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC) in Vancouver last week, was full of practical matters: writing and publishing as enterprise, if you like. It’s a union, after all, so not surprising that advocacy and worker rights, protection, compensation, and assistance would be high on the agenda, and not surprising either that there would be sessions loaded with help on navigating the new world of publishing (which I posted about at my author blog), or that there would be a great deal of emotion in the room at times, or that one might leave energized or overwhelmed or tired, but more likely all three simultaneously. And especially tired, perhaps, if one was a rookie at the annual meeting, as I was, and finding my way into a new community. Continue reading →