Category Archives: Writing

Ten Sentences about Mennonite/s Writing Ten

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  1. On the flight home from Winnipeg to Vancouver, I scan my notes and discover they’re so pathetically cryptic, they’ll be useless for saying anything meaningful about the conference sessions.
  2. Nevertheless, I can state the facts: this was # 10 in a series of conferences called Mennonite/s Writing, held every 3 years or so, and this time at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Manitoba, June 13-15, under the theme “Words at Work and Play.”
  3. The conference happened against the news of nearly 300 dead in an Air India crash, Israel attacking Iran, ongoing National Guard/ICE craziness in Los Angeles, yet here we were, maybe 110 (?) of us, thinking and talking about writing, for in her keynote, Julia Spicher Kasdorf said her response to global concerns is to become more local, and these days, this was our local.
  4. I really enjoyed the conference — the sessions and keynotes of course, but also the collegiality, the many conversations with old and new friends, a happy sense of belonging because even though I don’t label myself a “Mennonite writer” (what does that actually mean, never mind these regular gatherings trying to figure it out) I still know that in some real way this is my tribe and besides, they’ll have me, which is always a happy and satisfying thing.
  5. The keynotes were highlights: Magdalene Redekop in an almost poetical trail of insights and juxtapositions on “translation” — a task we all take up in our lives — and David Waltner-Toews tackling “the meaning of everything” via science, that is, each of us “an unstable patchwork at our very core” yet interconnected, and Julia Spicher Kasdorf ruminating on Mennonite identity, noting “identity politics reduces complexity” and “identity work can wear a body out” yet calling us — stirringly — to commit to writing as practice and conversation.
  6. I very rarely — honestly — notice what people are wearing, though there were several memorable, if minor, exceptions this time, for I glimpsed a well-known writer in his pyjamas in the residence hallway and I think they were blue and white, and Di Brandt wore a garland of (cloth?) red flowers and leaves on her head during her presentation, and my longtime friend Sarah Klassen looked classy in a neat, belted teal dress, but I do notice space and felt the conference metaphorically balanced by having parts in the aged, wood-toned ambience of the Great Hall and its connecting corridors and other parts in the newish light-filled Marpeck Commons.
  7. Most of the sessions ran concurrently with others, which meant that every choice meant missing something else, but the personal program I selected began wonderfully with David Elias on his grandfather’s brother and Elsie K. Neufeld on her work as a personal historian and Linda Umble on reading Mennonite texts, and ended as wonderfully Sunday morning with three poets — Jeff Gundy, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Ann Hostetler — reading their work, and in between I presented too (“Thinking about Oneself: Desire and Discovery in the Personal Essay and Memoir”) alongside Mary Ann Loewen who gave a memoir talk about herself and her granddaughter, both of which went well, we thought, and provoked some good discussion..
  8. A good number of younger people attended, and some presented, as in a session I attended featuring readings by Joelle Kidd, James Bergman, and Geoff Martin (whom I had “met” before, in a manner of speaking, when essays we’d written sat side-by-side in The New Quarterly — his was the winning one!) and it was great to hear new and younger voices in the mix.
  9. On the Thursday evening before the conference began, In Search of a Mennonite Imagination, edited by Robert Zacharias, containing key texts in Mennonite literary criticism, was launched at McNally Robinson Booksellers and I bought it, all 700+ significant pages of it, and later some other books besides, not as many as I may have wished but more than I could carry in my full backpack, but then a friend who lives in the next town over kindly offered to transport some of them, including the massive tome, in his luggage.
  10. The conference included an optional “literary tour” of Steinbach, which I selected to do, and it was interesting to see places associated with writers such as Miriam Toews and Patrick Friesen and ended with a delicious faspa at the Mennonite museum, where my final “Mennonite” sight of the weekend was a sculpture of the famous Dirk Willems story, which makes me wonder — in terms of two words Julia Spicher Kasdorf set against each other —  whether it represented, and could be told, as “continuity” rather than “rupture.” 

The mysterious Irene P., etc.

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Earlier this month, I was a panelist at a Delta Literary Arts Society (DLAS) event here in Tsawwassen, with writers Raoul Fernandez, Debra Purdy Kong, and S.J. Kootz. Along with an honorarium, each of us was gifted a book from “the abandoned library” of a woman known as Irene P.; mine was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. “Do books long for a new owner?” asks a note pasted into the flyleaf. Assuming they do, “Just such a case has brought this book to you… once one of thousands in a collection owned by one Irene P.”

I asked the event organizer about her. She didn’t know much beyond the fact that when the woman’s house sold, there were thousands (6000, did she say?) books left behind, and hundreds about writing which somehow came to the DLAS and are used as unique thank yous. With all that advice on her shelves, did Irene P. write? I don’t know that either; hers is a story still to be told perhaps, but at any rate, I now have her 1995 edition of the Lamott classic, and it gives me pleasure. Since I already own the book, I’ll pass my copy on to someone else. And I think I’ll see if I can’t get more information about our mysterious donor.

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Speaking of writing advice, I recently read a small (80 pages) book by Stephen Marche called On Writing and Failure. Marche is no slouch, he’s written books and essays for all kinds of prestigious magazines, but he’s honest about the reality of the life: rejection. He kept track of them, he says, until they reached 2000, and hardly notices any more. He offers examples from other writers, and the point of it is not the promise of some inevitable arc to success, but his subtitle: On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer. The book is full of quotable quotes:

English has provided a precise term of art to describe the writerly condition: Submission. Writers live in a state of submission. Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing.

In an environment where some 300,000 books are printed yearly in the U.S. alone, and only a few hundred of those are what could be called creative or financial successes, there’s certainly no urgency for anyone to join the ranks. But if one’s there already, nothing for it, he says,81l-0zGg3GL._SY522_ but to keep at it, to keep submitting the work. “No whining,” he insists repeatedly. “The desire to make meaning…is a valid desire despite the inevitability of defeat.”

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And, speaking of small but profound books, Sue Sorensen’s new poetry book, Acutely Life (At Bay Press), is an absolute delight. Whether she’s considering Freud or a musician or art or gardening/marriage or Mary the mother of Jesus, Sorensen registers on the page with both brilliant wit and deep emotional insight. Somewhere I read (though I can’t find the exact quote), one doesn’t interpret poetry as much as experience it. That’s how it’s been reading this book. I intend to read/experience it again.AcutleyLifeCover_(1)_800_1257_90

Paths forward

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My week at a writing retreat at St. Peter’s Abbey, Muenster, Saskatchewan ended yesterday, but I have to say, I wasn’t ready to leave. I had finished the writing that I came to do, so it wasn’t that I needed more time for that, but perhaps one more day — to read in the College library, listen to the bells, join in Abbey prayers, walk? But, in the words of the cliche, all good things must come to an end. And there’s always the road ahead.

Is there anything more enticing than a roadway between trees? Any kind of path, in fact, that pulls into distance, into the future?

And so I followed the highway to Saskatoon, away from the roadways and nearby rail line of the Abbey, and now I’m at my sister’s house, where the bed is decidedly more comfortable than the somewhat monkish one in the Scholastica building. Another sister lives in Warman, so I’m spending the weekend here, and so far it’s been lovely to catch up with both of them. There will be more of that catching up and seeing nieces and nephews and babies before I set out Monday for Calgary, where I’ll stay at my brother’s place, and then, D.V., my trusty steed, aka my red Escape (currently covered in prairie dust, though my brother-in-law has graciously offered to wash it this afternoon), will be turned westward and home.

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Trusting that all will be well until then, let me thank you who came along via these posts. May whatever path you’re on open beautifully before you today!