About the Center for Mennonite Writing

The Center for Mennonite Writing on the Web offers a virtual gathering place where readers and writers can find:

The CMW Journal – a bi-monthly journal that reflects the best of contemporary Mennonite Writing in the genres of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and criticism

as well as:

the latest news about Mennonite writing, continuously updated
variety and diversity among "Mennonite Voices"
resources and links for scholars, researchers, and fans
an ongoing conversation about Mennonite literature
a global reach and contemporary perspective

Dear Readers

A note from the CMW Site Editor

Dear Readers,

The Center for Mennonite Writing on the web was born from a passion for Mennonite literature, generated by the hard work of Ervin Beck, Jeff Gundy, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Hildi Froese Tiessen, Rudy Wiebe and many other writers and scholars to bring literature by Mennonite writers to a wider audience. Hildi Tiessen planned the first Mennonite/s Writing conferences that brought together many writers from the United States and Canada who had heretofore only had a passing acquaintance with each other's work. In these richly packed conference settings new connections were formed, ideas exchanged, laughter shared, and secrets traded. Hildi Tiessen planned the first conference in 1990 at the University of Waterloo, Conrad Grebel University College and edited several special collections of Mennonite Writing. Ervin Beck planned the second conference in 1997 at Goshen College, and Beck and Tiessen together planned the third conference in 2002, also at Goshen. Jeff Gundy continued the conference tradition at Bluffton University in 2006, and the fifth conference will be held in October 2009 at the University of Winnipeg, with a focus on the hotbed of Canadian Mennonite writing in Manitoba. We hope that this website will be a place where the conversations and exchanges can continue in cyberspace beyond the marvelous but time-limited venues of live conferences.

I came to teach at Goshen College the year after the 1997 Mennonite/s Writing conference. At that time, I was editing the collection that was to become A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry . The excitement surrounding Mennonite literature I sensed in the English Department at Goshen College inspired my own work in this area, though the teaching experience, truth be told, also slowed my pace. While there was passion and vision for Mennonite literature at the college, time and funds were limited. After all, the English Department had the whole canon of literature to teach its students, and at a liberal arts college even beloved special-interest courses can only be taught infrequently.

I remember one day standing in the door of Ervin Beck's office in Newcomer Center while he shared some of his dreams for a Center for Mennonite Writing at the college. I had a sense he was looking for someone who would carry on a vision that he wasn't sure would become a reality before his retirement. "Why don't you just put up a website?" I asked him. "You can call it the Center for Mennonite Writing, publish a web journal, collect news items, and offer links to sites of related interest. We have the Mennonite Historical Library, the Archives of the Mennonite Church, and the Mennonite Quarterly Review all housed at our location. We can start collecting literary papers for the Archives, the library already collects Mennonite literature, the Mennonite Quarterly Review has published literary criticism, and we have held conferences here. The web site can reinforce the location and you can run it out of your office."

This was back in the day when I was still new at the college, and full of ideas. Although it didn't come to pass for many years, the idea for the CMW began to germinate and root in my mind somewhere around the summer of 2002. In 2003 I received the C. Henry Smith Peace Lectureship to research the relationship of poet Anna Ruth Ediger Baehr to the Cheyenne Indians. During my research I acquired her papers for the Mennonite Archives. Thus began the first step in creating a literary archive, another dimension of creating a Center for the Study of Mennonite literature at Goshen College.

In the fall of 2006, the Goshen College English Department faculty and a number of students attended the Bluffton University "Mennonite/s Writing Beyond Borders" Conference, some of us giving papers, readings, and chairing sessions as well, not to mention driving the college's new Turtle Top mini-buses and supervising students who also attended. After the conference Bobby Meyer-Lee, who was copyediting The Mennonite Quarterly Review , and I were asked by the Review 's editor, John D. Roth, to help select papers from the conference for an upcoming issue. In the process of selecting the papers, we discovered a number of works that had not suited the scholarly peer-reviewed format for various reasons, but which we felt deserved a wider audience.

The "Virtual Center for Mennonite Writing" concept was rekindled in my brain. A web journal, I felt, would offer many attractions-the possibility of incorporating sound files as well as images, a venue for publishing a wider variety of creative and critical works in the same place, a greater tolerance for informal prose and the occasional opinion piece, and an interactive blog feature. In fact, it has become the ideal venue for a piece such as Magdalena Redekop's essay on "The Mother Tongue in Cyberspace" in the CMW Journal's first issue on Orality, which incorporates much humor from the low German oral tradition-sampled on an MP3 file attached to the article.

But the biggest puzzle was where to find the time and resources to make the Center for Mennonite Writing a reality.

The Maple Scholars Program at Goshen College-a faculty-student summer research program—offered what I thought would be the perfect venue for developing the initial phase of the site. A new faculty member, Kyle Schlabach, brought with him experience from working with the web features of Victorian Studies , a scholarly journal published at Indiana University, and boundless enthusiasm for the project. He discovered Matthew J. Yoder, a talented student of Graphic Design and Communication, who applied to work on the project and who was accepted. Because the English Department sponsored three Maple Scholars projects that summer, which included four students, we ended up having to raise funds to support two of these students. Since the CMW website project was a bit unusual in terms of the Maple Scholars criteria, Matthew was one of the students we had to fund ourselves. Through the generous assistance of the English Department and of history professor and scholar John D. Roth, we were able to sponsor Matthew as he worked with us to create the concept and design for the site, and to begin the labor of translating it into computer code. He also did a creditable job of presenting web design as a form of intellectual engagement to the other Maple Scholars participants.

Matt not only brought skills in design and computer coding to the CMW project, but a savvy sense of what younger Mennonites would find appealing in a web site of this nature. He felt that both connection to tradition and contemporary understandings of web design and formation were important to the project. His contemporary graphics that interpret Mennonite folk art and images illustrate the importance that a younger generation places in a "rooted" tradition that is also conversant with contemporary style. Another student, Anita Hooley, worked with me during the same summer in the Maple Scholar's project on collecting new work by Mennonite poets. She also spent a great deal of time editing and polishing a site on Mennonite poets that had been created by two of my Introduction to Poetry classes. During the summer of 2008 another Goshen College student, Hope Langeland, finalized Anita's work on the poetry website. This site is now one of the resource links on the CMW site. The contribution of thoughtful students to the site, is, I hope, one of its hidden strengths, and a promise that our work will have relevance to a younger group of readers and writers.

Matt left for a Study Service Term in Peru immediately after the Maple Scholars project, and this could easily have been the end of our hopes for the completion of the site as well, if it had not been for Matt's commitment to pick up work on the project when he returned. Meanwhile, his start on the site was impressive enough to attract the talent and money of several other significant partners. Ervin Beck, having retired from Goshen College and published a book on Mennonite and Amish folklore, Mennofolk , and edited a second, MennoFolk 2 , was ready for another project. He volunteered to guest edit the first six issues of the CMW Journal as an act of faith in our project and began by reading through essays from the Bluffton conference we had selected as possibilities for the web journal.

As Ervin began contacting writers and thus strengthening networks woven during his years as conference director, he found their excitement and enthusiastic responses energizing. One of our contributors, Carl Haarer, also sent a generous donation to the project in honor of Ervin's editing work. Ervin insisted that the gift be used to sustain the continuation of the site. Meanwhile, a generous donation from Robert and Nancy V. Lee in memory of her father, John D. Burkholder, Jr., a 1928 Goshen College graduate with a double major in history and English, enabled us to continue funding Matt as he worked on the site during his senior year.

Our writers have been patient with us, as the site has taken much longer to finalize than any of us thought when we began it. Ervin completed four issues of the journal before teaching in Lithuania for the fall of 2008 and returned to find that we had delayed the site's launch. Matt ended up having to take down and rebuild in a different format a better version of the site that could be more conveniently hosted on the Goshen College web server. He did this under the supervision and tutelage of Paul Meyer Reimer, who taught Matt in an independent study in web design, much of which was dedicated to the final stages of the CMW site. Paul was also responsible for helping to load the site onto the Goshen College server and make sure that it was running.

Finally, we are ready. And we think it has been worth the wait. Meanwhile, I owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues in the English Department and in ITS at Goshen College for their ongoing support. Finally, I am grateful to the Advisory Board who have offered their encouragement, enthusiasm, and news items to make the site as complete as it is.

Now we look forward to participation from all of our readers in the future. At present our writers are mainly from the U.S. and Canada, with a significant writer from Japan, but we hope the web format of our site and journal will attract writers from around the world, as we aspire to reflect the truly global potential of our location in cyberspace.

Sincerely,
Ann Hostetler
Site Editor

Design

The CMW design offers a contemporary vision of traditional Mennonite Art forms. Its elegant simplicity is inspired by the traditional Mennonite folk art of fraktur. Ornamental images based on nature are standard in fraktur, which was often used to decorate book plates, documents, and furniture. Furthermore, natural forms invoke the rural heritage and long association with the soil and agricultural life that are part of the Mennonite heritage. The simplicity of the design is a reflection of the value placed on usefulness and functional forms in a Mennonite aesthetic.

In keeping with its vision to foster a virtual community of contemporary writers as they reinterpret a 500-year-old Anabaptist tradition of lived faith, the site design is inspired by tradition, but takes a bold and contemporary form. The image inside the flower "bud" on the site logo that resembles a circle and a pen stroke was inspired by a traditional image for "work and hope"-that of a figure spading the ground-used in traditional Mennonite iconography.

According to Julia Spicher Kasdorf, the work and hope icon was originally a printer's device that appeared first on the title page of the 1685 edition of Martyrs Mirror , Amsterdam. Kasdorf chronicles the fascinating variations of this image from the seventeenth century to the present time in "Work and Hope: An Anabaptist Adam ," MQR 69.2 (April 1995), 178-204.

Editorial Staff

Ann Hostetler

CMW Site Editor

Ann Hostetler is the author of Empty Room with Light (Pandora Press US 2002), a collection of poetry, and editor of A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry (Univ. of Iowa 2003). She is Professor of English at Goshen College where she teaches American Literature and Creative Writing.

Ervin Beck

CMW Journal Editor

Ervin Beck is the author of MennoFolk: Mennonite and Amish Folk Traditions (Herald Press 2004), editor of MennoFolk 2: A Sampler of Mennonite and Amish Folklore (Herald Press 2005) and, with John D. Roth, of Migrant Muses: Mennonite/s Writing in the U.S. (1998). From 1967 to 2003 he was a professor of English at Goshen College, where he organized two "Mennonite/s Writing" conferences in 1997 and 2002 (jointly with Hildi Froese Tiessen of Conrad Grebel University College). Beck has published numerous articles on Mennonite literature, as well as on folklore, drama and world literature. He is also the editor of the two most complete bibliographies of Mennonite literature—one for U.S. authors , and one, with Hildi Froese Tiessen, for Canadian authors .

Matt J. Yoder

CMW News Editor

Matt J. Yoder is freelance Web desiger. A recent graduate of Goshen College, he lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Advisory Board

Beth Martin Birky, Jeff Gundy, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Bobby Meyer-Lee, Paul Meyer Reimer, Maurice Mierau, Barbara Nickel, John D. Roth, Kyle Schlabach, Duane Stoltzfus, Hildi Froese Tiessen

Center for Mennonite Writing