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In This Issue

Some books are so wonderful that we want to read them over, or even again and again. Authors sometimes capitalize on this kind of success by writing a sequel, or two, and suddenly a series has been born. Children still love the old Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series. Pre-teens and teenagers today relish the Harry Potter and the Twilight books and films. Many adult readers are fans of the books by Alexander McCall Smith in his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, 44 Scotland Street and Isabel Dalhousie series. Most recently, The Millennium Trilogy by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson has become very popular.

This issue of the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing focuses on this burgeoning phenomenon by focusing on fiction that has appeared in series written by Mennonite or Amish authors, or written about Mennonite and Amish people, whether by Mennonite-related or non-Mennonite authors.

A minimal definition of “series” might be a sequence of at least three books that deal with overlapping characters in the same historical and geographic setting. The narrative may or may not be continuous, although by including characters from other books their stories are at least implied. Usually books appearing in a series can be read in any order, which militates against a narrative that continues to unfold from the first through the last books.

Among the Mennonite authors who have been given the most attention in recent years at conferences and in journals, the three novels by Armin Wiebe about Low German Manitoba culture, often referred to as his “Gutental novels”—The Salvation of Jasch Siemens, Murder in Gutental, The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst—is the only true series that comes to mind. Rudy Wiebe’s Sweeter than All the World is a sequel to The Blue Mountains of China and Sandra Birdsell’s The Ladies of the House is a sequel to Night Travellers. However, a sequel seems to be something less than a series. And Birdsell’s books, later published as the one-volume Agassiz Stories, really constitute a long novel of stories.

This issue of the journal foregrounds other authors who have found enthusiastic audiences and distinguished themselves by writing Mennonite-related serial fiction. They are Mennonites Judy Clemens and Karl Schroeder, non-Mennonite P. L Gaus, and the many Mennonite, Amish, Old Order Mennonite, and non-Mennonite writers who supply the U.S. and Canadian mass markets for romance and detective fiction about Mennonite and Amish people—sometimes called bonnet fiction, or buggy fiction. The most successful of these writers is Beverly Lewis. My bibliography in this issue is an initial attempt to identify these series. Notice that, although it features mainly series of “bonnet fiction,” it also includes the series by Judy Clemens, P. L. Gaus, Karl Schroeder, Armin Wiebe and the earlier writer A. E. van Vogt.

Karl Schroeder’s short story “Making Ghosts” was first published in On Spec (Hard Science Fiction Issue), Spring, 1994, considerably before his “Virga” series of four science fiction novels published by TOR Books from 2006-2009. Luddites might not be able to follow all of the sophisticated cybernetics on which the story is based, but the story deals clearly enough with how the “virtual” representation--or creation, or re-creation--of a person relates to the human desire for immortality. When we die, can we live for eternity in virtual reality? There must be something about the water of the Brandon, Manitoba, community from which Karl Schroeder comes. It is the same community that produced A. E. van Vogt, regarded as one of the best writers in the “golden age” of sci fi, and, before him, Douglas Hill and E. M. Hull.

Judy Clemens offers the first chapter of her newest book,The Grim Reaper’s Dance, second in the “Grim Reaper” series, which was released on July 1, 2010, by Poisoned Pen Press, the premier U. S. publisher of detective fiction. Poison Pen has published all five of her Stella Crown mysteries and has given Judy a contract for the books in her second series, which features the paranormal detective Casey Maldonado, whose close associate is Death. No doubt this series will draw a following, too, but her fans might well complain if she abandons Stella Crown, the tough-talking, cycle-riding Mennonite sleuth featured in her first series.

About her second series, Judy says: “During 2008 and 2009 my father was very sick from cancer. Death became a regular partner of my days as I considered what was happening to my dad. When I began writing about Casey, Death came along as a natural companion. When reviews began coming out describing Embrace the Grim Reaper as a paranormal mystery, I was surprised. Death was such a real part of my life, I hadn’t thought of it as being anything supernatural. I now see that of course it is a paranormal aspect of the book! I write Death as a genderless being so people can imagine it as they will. Most people think of it as male, but I’ve had one person who seemed surprised it would be anything but female! It’s fun to hear people’s thoughts on what Death looks like to them.”

P. L Gaus was too busy writing his seventh Ohio Amish Mystery novel, all published by Ohio University Press, to contribute new fiction for this issue, but Kyle Baldanzi Schlabach offers a critical, interpretive survey of the series. Kyle is well qualified to present Gaus, since Kyle is a native son of the same area of eastern Ohio that Gaus represents in fiction, and Kyle has also taught detective fiction at Goshen College.

As my bibliography indicates, the number of “bonnet” novels published about Amish and conservative Mennonite communities is staggering. Beth Graybill contributes a critical survey of some of the authors working in the field. The essay is a revision of the paper she presented at the "Mennonite/s Writing: Beyond Borders" conference at Bluffton College in 2006. Among other things, Beth assesses the “authenticity” of the authors’ representation of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Amish life, which she is eminently qualified to do since she is a native of “The County” and until recently was director of the Lancaster County Mennonite Historical Society.

Michelle Thurlow focuses on the work of Beverly Lewis, who is arguably the most successful writer of Amish romance novels. In particular, Michelle gives a literary “reading” of three Lewis novels whose unity is supported by symbolic use of infants’ clothing. Michelle’s master’s degree in Christian fiction, along with her experience in teaching it, might lead us to hope that she will continue to keep up with, and publish, about this burgeoning phenomenon.

Indeed, one goal of this issue is to encourage more serious consideration of the extreme current interest, especially by non-Mennonite readers and authors, in Amish and Mennonite romance fiction. When did it begin? What historical and cultural developments have led to it and sustained it? Do the authors “get it right” in regard to Anabaptist theology, culture and experience? Why are the authors mostly non-Mennonites, or people only tangentially related to Mennonitism? What creative contributions are writers of bonnet fiction making to what readers of the CMW website regard as “Mennonite literature”?

Despite budgetary constraints, the Mennonite Historical Library at Goshen College still tries to obtain copies of every such book published, which makes it a beckoning haven for whoever will rise to the challenge of understanding this popular literature.

-- Ervin Beck

In This Issue

At the “Mennonite/s Writing: An International Conference” held at Goshen College in 2002, Elaine Sommers Rich paid special tribute, in absentia, to Barbara Claassen Smucker for the many books she had written for young readers, most notably Henry’s Red Sea (1955). Other than that brief moment, apparently no other serious attention has been given to Mennonite writing for young readers, whether at the large Mennonite literature conferences or in published scholarly writings. This, despite the fact that the earliest successful literature written by U.S. and Canadian Mennonites was for children, stemming from books by Claassen Smucker and Elizabeth Hershberger Bauman in the mid-1950s.

The recent surge in handsomely illustrated books for children by Mennonite writers calls attention to this important area of creative writing and publication. Perhaps this issue of the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing will inspire more such books and the serious consideration that they deserve.

To that end, the CMW editors asked Kathy Meyer Reimer to write a preliminary critical survey of Mennonite children’s books. She decided to focus on the publications of Herald Press, the book division of the Mennonite Publishing House, since most such books have come from that press. Kathy identifies four different “eras” and at least five different kinds of books published for children by Herald Press and, in general terms, relates them to publications for children in secular presses in the U.S. Her survey and analysis need also to be applied to children’s books published by the former denominational Faith and Life Press and by Good Books of Intercourse, Pennsylvania, an independent trade publishing house founded by Mennonites, as well as those published by commercial trade houses.

For very young children, the illustrations that accompany the printed text are as important as the words in the book. We are privileged here to look over the shoulder of graphic artist Ingrid S. Hess as she describes how she proceeds to develop visuals for the books that she illustrates. Her essay is replete with colorful examples of the bold, stylized, “flat” artwork that is a trademark of her style. Ingrid, who teaches at the University of Notre Dame, also agreed to let us publish a presentation she was asked to give, regarding her work, to a meeting of Jesuits in California during the past year.

Barbara Nickel has previously won awards for her books for older children, including fictionalized accounts of classic European composers, drawing on her experience as a violinist. Like Sarah Klassen, the “featured poet” in this issue, she has also published several collections of poetry for adults. “Schnee 1939” is the first chapter of her novel-in-progress, now titled “September Cold,” which, like much Canadian Mennonite literature for adults, draws upon the historical accounts of Western Canadians, who were immigrants to the prairies from Prussia and Ukraine.

Of her plans for the novel, Barbara says: “This is a historical children’s novel that explores the relationship between two cousins who have never met, and their perspectives as German Mennonite children on either side of the Atlantic during World War II. Allegiances to country, family, and faith will be tested in complicated ways as their friendship deepens despite distance in the midst of one of the world’s greatest conflicts. The novel is based on much of my family history. My maternal grandfather emigrated to Saskatchewan in 1921 from the Danzig area, which (since WWI) was a city-state independent from Germany, although much of the population was German. He left most of his family behind, joining a farming community of Mennonites (Prussian, from the same area he’d left) who had emigrated decades earlier. My mother’s first cousin lived in Danzig, and her birthday party actually was cancelled because of the Battle of Westerplatte that opened World War II.” One incident in this opening chapter is adapted from a story told by the Canadian poet Patrick Friesen.

In the context of Kathy Meyer Reimer’s survey, it is intriguing to consider whether the work of Ingrid Hess and Barbara Nickel fits into the same paradigms of authorial intent and genres that Kathy finds in her four eras of publications. One might look for continuities, also, in the six poems published here by our “featured poet,” Sarah Klassen. Is it possible to see in her poems for sophisticated adult readers, intentions and subjects parallel to those of the writers for children discussed in this issue? In what ways do her poems demonstrate an ethical engagement with the world around her? There are no exemplary biographies in these particular poems--although one of her books of poetry focuses on the work and life of philosopher and mystic Simone Weil—but rather a deep engagement with nature, a clarity of observation, and especially in the last poem, a strong sense of social responsibility. And do we find in her poems a word and sound “magic” that might appeal, in an animated oral reading, to children too young to understand the poems’ full intentions?

Bookbinder Image

In This Issue

Click on the link above to find the image that introduces this issue. It is “The Bookbinder,” one of 97 engravings in The Book of Trades published in 1694 in Holland by Jan Luyken (1649-1712), the prolific Mennonite engraver, assisted by his son Casper (1672-1708). The book of engravings has become Luyken’s most famous work, and the Bookbinder image has become an icon for book-binders and book conservators worldwide.

No doubt an idealized depiction, the Bookbinder seems to have reason to be satisfied, even happy, in his work. The room is spacious. The upper windows let in a lot of light and the lower windows and doors are open, letting in fresh air. In the left foreground, the worker sews signatures on a sewing frame, glue pot on the floor. In the back, the man beats the signatures prior to sewing. The round-blade “plow” at bottom right is for trimming book edges. The shelves at the left are crammed with books. Perhaps the Bookbinder is himself an avid reader.

He is doing “word work,” the theme of this issue of the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing. Perhaps he can represent most of the readers of this journal—poets, fiction writers, memoirists, bloggers, journalists, readers—anyone who loves words and might yearn to earn a living in some way associated with words. All of us might hope somehow, someday to attain the goal of the speaker in Robert Frost’s poem, “Two Tramps in Mudtime,” who says: “My object in living is to unite / My avocation and my vocation.”

This issue presents three Journal readers who, in very different ways, earn their living by means of words and books. Jeff Peachey is The Bookbinder’s closest descendant, since he has mastered the craft of book conservation and earns his living by it in New York City. We can tell he loves to hold and preserve the physical vessels of writing—books and pamphlets—by his clear and precise attention to the physical and historical details that the books themselves embody. Even more of his craft and insight is available through his blog that is included in the links on the homepage of the CMW website.

Marta Brunner manipulates books in a similarly meticulous way, but more theoretically, as an academic bibliographer for the graduate library at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her academic background is in English, rhetoric and the history of consciousness, not in library science, which gives hope to all that our training does not limit us to one vocation.

At the opposite pole from Peachey, who preserves books and their history, is Jane Hiebert-White, who as Executive Publisher of the journal Health Affairs, tries to keep up with the decline of words in print and the rise of words in digital form. Despite Jane’s heavy workload in Washington, DC, during the recent flurry of discussions of health care reform, she was able to rise above the chaos and craft her fine essay—like many writers, just in the nick of time.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, a lexicographer, defined his own “word work” as that of “a harmless drudge.” To some degree, the intense, minute scrutiny that our three authors’ jobs require fits that disarming description. But ask all of our writers if they enjoy their work, and you will, I am sure, receive a positive response.

One caveat: Nick Lindsay, the poet and mentor who was honored at the Mennonite/s Writing Conference in 2006 at Bluffton College, always urged his creative writing students NOT to try to earn their living by writing literature or teaching creative writing, lest the job ruin the art. Nick eventually left his teaching position at Goshen College and returned to Edisto Island, South Carolina, where he built winding stairs and fiberglass boats. Perhaps, in light of his warning, the three essayists in this issue have found the golden mean of “word work” between the extremes of “mere work” and “literature.”

This issue concludes with a series of linked poems by David C. Wright. He is the “Featured Poet” for this February 2010 issue, to be followed by Sara Klassen in May and Jeff Gundy in July. Wright’s five “Sarabandes” represent a new direction in his published poems. Instead of the sharp, chatty, witty and always insightful poems that we have enjoyed earlier, here he experiments with pure lyricism and emotion, responding to performances of cello music by Bach. The poems are examples of ekphrastics, or the interplay between one artistic media and another, in this case music and poetry.

The Bookbinder engraving that introduces this issue is also ekphrastic art, since it integrates image with poetry, creating a kind of Renaissance emblem. The Luyken text has been newly translated by Jan Gleysteen and Leonard Gross:

The Eye of the Eternal Being,

Can read the book of your heart.

If knowledge were hidden in secret corners,

Showing us the way to heaven,

It would be worth searching the world for it;

But now it has been clearly told to humankind,

In the Holy, God-given Book. Respond to it by holy living!

Ervin Beck, Editor

The title of this issue is a bit misleading, since some of the authors included have published fiction elsewhere, and the piece by Keith Miller is excerpted from his second published novel. But the title does capture the intent of this issue, which is also one of the goals of the CMW website as a whole: to offer unpublished authors a friendly venue for publication; to bring to the attention of CMW readers Mennonite writers early on in their publishing careers; and to make accessible the writings of Mennonites who might be unfamiliar to many readers of this journal. The seven very different fiction-writers in this issue fulfill these intentions in a fine way.

The issue also is intended to encourage the writing of fiction in the Mennonite community. Periodicals tend to favor poetry, which takes up less space. Readers can easily embrace a lyric poem, and move on if they don’t like it. Fiction requires more space from the publisher and more patience and commitment from the reader.

To pose a provocative, winless debate: it may also be easier for most people to write a good poem than to write engrossing fiction. If William Wordsworth is right, a poem springs from a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” which everybody experiences from time to time. Any person literarily inclined might be able to write at least one good poem in a lifetime, based on such experience.

A short story might also derive from personal experience—hence the close association between memoir and fiction—but perhaps it requires a fuller, more complex set of competencies and inspirations to create “believable” setting, characters, narrative, conflict, dialogue, resolution and idea (to invoke the classical ingredients of fiction).

As has often been noticed, Mennonite writers in Canada have tended to excel in fiction, as in the remarkable work of Rudy Wiebe, Sandra Birdsell, David Bergen and many others. Mennonite creative writers in the U.S. have produced much fine poetry, but much less fiction. That situation is remedied here a bit by a preponderance of U.S. authors: Keith Miller, Ryan Ahlgrim, Tim Stair, John Liechty and Linda Wendling

The seven pieces of fiction published in this issue prove once again that Mennonite literature is no predictable, monolithic body of work. The pieces are so varied that it was hard to arrange them in a fruitful sequence, and it is even harder to generalize about their connections.

The sequence begins with fiction by Keith Miller and Ryan Ahlgrim, both of whom move us beyond mundane reality into kinds and degrees of fantasy. Miller clearly writes in the tradition of Borges and other magical realist writers by creating a new world that bears little correspondence to daily life. Ahlgrim begins with mundane reality in Indianapolis, which gradually modulates into the realm of fable and poses a moral view of life, even if that “moral” is hard to pin down. Miller’s “Library of Alexandria” avoids any moral and lifts the reader into the purely imaginary, aesthetic realm. Miller’s piece welcomes the reader into the world of imagination in which the writers who follow him also dwell.

The next three pieces, by Dora Dueck, Tim Stair and Linda Wendling, exploit the idiosyncratic views of first-person narrators. Dueck’s short story seems so close to life that the Journal editor initially mistook it for memoir, although the complex narrative strategies in it signal that it is art more so than life. Stair’s narrator is so witty and saucy—and so different from its pastor author--that we relax, enjoy the humor and look forward to the unwinding of a picaresque tale. The most extreme, idiosyncratic, surprising – and biographically and emotionally complex -- narrator is Wendling’s God-haunted Hope, whose story becomes the most overtly religious one in the set.

The sequence concludes with two third-person narrations. Janice Dick offers the beginning of an unfinished historical novel, set in Siberia, that promises to add one more variant to the archetypal Russian Mennonite narrative of migration because of persecution. John Liechty creates a central figure who is an alien by choice, teaching English in an Arab country, almost despite himself. Dick’s chapter sets up a romantic, melodramatic story line, whereas Liechty’s selection comes from a picaresque novel that is funny, ironic and richly allusive to experiences found in Mennonite history and western literary classics.

A welcome response to any or all of these fictions would be comments addressed to authors on the CMW website blog. Any response is an encouragement. Feeling ignored is the worst fate a published writer can experience.

Ervin Beck, Editor

A Celebration of “New” Voices in Mennonite Poetry

In a recent talk broadcast on TED, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns against “the danger of a single story.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg

Although her focus is on African writers, and the ways in which western readers are apt to read a single work of fiction by an African writer as representative of all Africans, Adichie’s insights can productively be applied to a discussion of Mennonite literature. According to Adichie’s logic, cultures with great economic power have the privilege of telling many stories about themselves, but cultural minorities too often only have permission to tell “one” story to outsiders. If the story a minority writer tells deviates too much from the “script” of the single story, then the story is deemed “inauthentic” by critics outside the minority group, who have known the group primarily through this “single story.” Too often, their criticisms gain support from insiders who disagree with a representation of their culture that does not match their own experience. Yet, as Adichie convincingly argues, we are all people who have multiple, overlapping stories to tell.

Reading poetry, I’m convinced, is a way to expand one’s capacity for entertaining a variety of stories . . . as well as their containers made of language. Lyric or non-narrative poetry may not offer story as such, but it allows us to look at the world from different vantage points, illuminated through the lenses of other minds. While readers may lack time or patience to sample multiple works of fiction, they may be enticed to read a variety of poems. Poems, after all, are short. We’ll reserve the “New Fiction” for the January 2010 issue of the Journal, after we have offered readers a taste of poetry.

While I was editing A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2003), I was delighted to discover a whole range of diverse voices, each offering a unique perspective from the roots of a heritage whose churches have split over and over again because they insist on a single version of what is in fact a capacious and multi-faceted story. Mennonites have for so long been misunderstood by outsiders, a state of affairs complicated by the tremendous range and variety that exists among Mennonite groups. Individual Mennonites also tend to become extremely uncomfortable with representations of their cultural and religious group that do not reflect their “own” experience or understanding of Mennonites.

Mennonites (in all their variety) also have a tradition of fidelity to historical truth and loyalty to THE Story, both of their own religious history and of their understanding of the New Testament. Literature has typically been viewed by Mennonites with a bit of suspicion because it purports to tell many stories from subjective, and often critical, points of view. The ethnic writer often feels the double burden of both originality and responsibility for representing the group to others. Most “Mennonite” writers I know want nothing to do with the latter; it is an impossible, silencing task. Rather, these writers are people who have been shaped by a particular Mennonite experience who want to exercise their gifts and imaginations with artistic freedom.

What if we acknowledged our many stories? What if our self-understandings, as well as others’ understandings of Mennonite heritage, were as varied and contradictory and productive of surprising harmonies as an international library? Would such a circle of readers and listeners open up to include more members? Such was certainly the case at the most recent “Mennonite/s Writing: Manitoba and Beyond” conference, held at the University of Winnipeg in October 2009, co-chaired by literary critic Hildi Froese Tiessen of the University of Waterloo, Conrad Grebel University College, and historian Royden Loewen, Mennonite Studies Chair at the University of Winnipeg. The conference celebrated a place that has given rise to a rich array of Mennonite writers at a crucial moment in history when the sons and daughters of Mennonite immigrants encountered literature through secular education and dared to begin writing their own contributions, and when the Canadian world was receptive to new stories from its cultural minorities. You can read some first-hand reports on this conference at the end of this issue. But in a panel on the future of Mennonite writing, poet Patrick Friesen cautioned, “A danger in being Mennonite is to retell the same stories. It’s the danger of repeating something to the point of sentimentality or, possibly worse, to the point where the story starts to become a lie, the point where it is fossilized, becomes a museum piece that holds no life whatsoever."

Meanwhile, I am aware that there is also danger in the “single anthology,” as it may be used by readers or critics to solidify the “best of” a canon which is in the very early stages of shaping itself. Thus it is important to open the covers of our books to the reality that language is always creatively, restlessly changing its shapes and containers. None of the writers represented in this current “New Voices” issue were anthologized in A Cappella, nor have they yet appeared in print in the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing, another sign that poetry is flourishing among writers from Mennonite contexts in North America. One of the productive conversations between writers of Mennonite “stories” has been a cross-border one between Canadian and American poets. Happily, a new multi-genre anthology of British Columbia Mennonite Writers, Half in the Sun, edited by Elsie Neufeld and Leonard Neufeldt (Ronsdale Press 2006) appeared to offer readers access to an additional group of Mennonite writers, only a few of whom had also been anthologized in A Cappella, but some of whom are represented in this issue.

The ten poets featured here—men and women, from Canada and the United States, newly published or well-published—write of everything from divining rods to the feminine divine, from leftovers in an American kitchen to hunger in Ethiopia. Their language ranges from lyrical to narrative to imagistic to experimental. Their experiences encompass the struggles of building a new marriage, mourning the dead, exploring desire, encountering another culture, and listening to the miracle of their own heart beat. This issue also includes a set of translations from the French poet Rimbaud, testimony to the multiple stories that construct a writer’s self. Together, these poems invite us to taste language and thus to celebrate life.

Ann Hostetler, Guest Editor

Poetry Note: Look for more poetry in future issues of the Journal in the “Featured Poet” section, which will offer selections from the work of poets such as Jeff Gundy, Sarah Klassen and David Wright. And be sure to visit our archived issues for a sample of poetry published in the Journal of the Center of Mennonite Writing by Carl Haarer, Rhoda Janzen, Robert Martens, Shari Miller Wagner, and Yorifumi Yaguchi.

In 1660 in Dordrecht, Thieleman van Braght published the first edition of The Bloody Theater, better known as Martyrs’ Mirror in North American Mennonite culture. The second edition, published in Amsterdam in 1685, contained 103 etchings by the prolific Mennonite artist Jan Luyken. The book has remained in print for over 300 years and has been translated from the original Dutch into German, English and, in part, other languages. It is frequently claimed that “every” Amish home today contains a copy and that “every” Mennonite home used to do so—albeit, in both cases, usually unread.

Mennonites today have a love/hate relationship with the book. On the one hand, authors and artists appreciate it as the earliest and largest collection of artful narratives and images. And the average Mennonite stands in awe of the heroic stances taken by their Anabaptist ancestors in the face of the Inquisition’s mortal challenges to Anabaptist beliefs and commitments. Probably over 3500 Anabaptists were drowned, burned at the stake, drawn, quartered and otherwise tortured because of their Christian beliefs.

Yet the “martyr complex” that even today’s Mennonites are said to bear becomes a burden, or even a curse, as they try to negotiate the demands of their church community and what is required for them to function in mainstream postmodern, global culture. Must Mennonites be bound to their early history of humiliation and defeat? Can they affirm, or even understand, the fine points of Christian doctrine for which the early Anabaptists risked their reputations and their lives?

In 2009 a group of Anabaptist scholars met to brainstorm ways in which the role of Martyrs Mirror can be updated and renewed to undergird the current global Mennonite church. A conference, Martyrs Mirror: Reflections across Time, will be held at Elizabethtown College June 8-10, 2010. We may look forward to other new, and new kinds of, studies and programs.

Meanwhile, this issue of the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing illustrates the continued inspiration and relevance that Martyrs Mirror has offered to Mennonite readers, poets and critics. Kirsten Beachy is one Mennonite of a younger generation who has read Martyrs Mirror. She has not only read it but integrated its images, stories and lessons into her and her husband’s genealogies and her liberal arts education. She reflects the ambiguities and ironies that many Mennonites find in thinking about the book, and writes movingly and thoughtfully about its lasting impact on her. Rhoda Janzen honors her own reading in Martyrs Mirror by transforming its plain style and narrative into a complex poetic art, linking early Anabaptist suffering with wide-ranging literary and historical allusions--like the martyr in “Last Words,” who “instead of plain words . . . speaks in bright jewels, rubies and emeralds and aquamarines.” While Janzen offers us an ars moriendi, Julia Spicher Kasdorf finds an ars poetica for Mennonite writers in her analysis of Sidney King’s prize-winning film, The Pearl Diver. She finds that the film raises the question of the relationship between suffering and the artist-writer’s responsibility to individuals and the community in representing suffering for a public audience. It uses the Dirk Willems story from Martyrs Mirror to explore the central ambiguity of “whether sacrifice and separation can ultimately undo the Christian imperative to love and choose life.” Jessica Baldanzi reviews Janzen’s forthcoming memoir, which depicts with “wit and spirit” Janzen’s recovery from a traumatic divorce and her adult return, for an extended visit, to the close-knit, conformist Mennonite home and community in which she grew up.

These fine writings indicate that the influence of Martyrs Mirror has not necessarily waned among Mennonites, but has been transformed in a new context by a new generation of readers with new sensibilities. Oddly, English-speaking Mennonites have ignored the main Dutch title of the book—The Bloody Theater—and named it Martyrs Mirror instead. Both titles are metaphors that, if taken seriously, might inspire new insights and new writing. But The Bloody Theater, which implies fiction as well as performance, might also lead to new thoughts about a Mennonite literary theory.

Folklorists regard as folk culture, or folklife, all knowledge and skills that we acquire through "oral tradition and customary example." The key words are tradition and customary. They call attention to the depth of historical circulation or use that has perpetuated any one aspect of folklife. That is, what is folk is never created from nothing, but has been around for some time, transmitted from one person to another or, more usually, from one generation to another. Folk items or practices resemble those that we have observed before, although often with interesting variations since they are informally transmitted and re-created and are therefore not fixed in form.

In recent years, personal writing has risen in regard in literary circles, as one subgenre of creative nonfiction. Two influences in this elevation have been the field of cultural studies, which has leveled the hierarchy of traditional literary genres, and postmodernism, which values the personal and relative over the objective and universal.

This issue of the journal focuses on the work of a single author, Yorifumi Yaguchi, of Japan, and specifically on the relationship of his life and poems to the problems of war and peace. The materials presented here have been gathered through the efforts of Wilbur Birky, his American friend and interpreter.

Since oral literature was first rendered in writing, c. 800 B.C., the written text, read in silence, has dominated western thinking about literature. But texts rendered nowadays in radio, film and television-to name only a few "new" media-should remind us that the history of literature began in what some people call orature ; that the national literatures of many cultures of the world remain in orature; and that even the appeal of our written literature includes the implied sounds of the words, as in the fiction of Joyce, all dramatic texts and the assonance and consonance of all poetry.