by Richard A. Kauffman
Judging by my reading habits, the memoir is my favorite form of literature. I’ve read scores over the last 15 years.
A Private History of Awe by Scott Russell Sanders is my favorite. I first encountered Sanders via his collections of essays. I was drawn to his sense of place and rootedness, his nature mysticism and Quaker sensibilities and his incredible powers of observation and description. His memoir is a love story of sorts, an account of …
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Mennonite Life Resurrected!
June 11, 2010June 14, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Mennonite Life returns from the dead in online form
NORTH NEWTON, KAN. – Once again, Mennonite Life has risen from the dead.
Since 1946, when Bethel College began publishing the journal, Mennonite Life has been devoted to exploring and developing Mennonite experience. Its intended audience is scholars and academics as well as a wider literate readership interested in Mennonite matters.
From 1946-99, Mennonite Life was published in paper form. Starting with the March 2000 issue, it became a free, online-only journal. Over the decades of its existence, Mennonite Life has undergone many transitions in …
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Recent Reviews of Mennonite Literature - Connie Braun
June 10, 2010Connie Braun, The Steppes are the Colour of Sepia: A Mennonite Memoir. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2008.
REVIEWER
Jeff Gundy, Bluffton University, Bluffton, Ohio
http://www.grebel.uwaterloo.ca/academic/cgreview/reviews/01-09_mennonite_memoir.shtml
REVIEWER
Shirley Showalter, Vice President for Programs, Fetzer Institute
The the review in context at Shirley Showalter's Blog, 100 Memoirs: http://www.100memoirs.com/2010/05/another-mennonite-memoir-the-steppes-are-the-colour-of-sepia/
and in
Read Connie Braun's essay, “Silence, Memory and Imagination as Story: Canadian Mennonite Life Writing," in the Archives of the CMW Journal on this site.
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Richard Kauffman on Memoirs and the Mystery of Life
June 2, 2010See the blogpost in its original setting at
http://theolog.org/2010/05/memoirs-and-mystery-of-life.html
May 12, 2010
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This Hidden Thing, novel by Dora Dueck, just published
May 30, 2010Dora Dueck’s second novel This Hidden Thing was recently published by CMU [Canadian Mennonite University] Press in Winnipeg. “The young woman standing outside the prosperous Winnipeg house that day in 1927 knew she must have work. Her family depended on it. But Maria Klassen had no idea that her new life as a domestic would mark her for the rest of her days. This Hidden Thing reminds us how dangerous and powerful secrets can be. This lyrical and moving novel offers one woman’s compelling, ordinary, and surprising life.” The novel is grounded in Dora Dueck’s earlier research, including many interviews, …
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Todd Davis & Mary Linton Poetry of Nature Workshop
May 24, 2010
Merry Lea to Offer Poetry of Nature Workshop
Saturday, June 12, 2010 9:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Writers who love the outdoors will gather at Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College, Saturday, June 12, 9:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. for a day of word play among some of Indiana's finest wetlands, woodlands and prairies. Poet Todd Davis will team up with ecologist Mary Linton to offer inspiration and guidance in the kinds of settings that inspired William Wordsworth, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and Jane Kenyon.
About the Presenters:
Dr. Todd Davis teaches … -
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Just Released: Woldemar Neufeld's Canada: A Mennonite Artist in the Canadian Landscape, 1925-1995
May 16, 2010Book Description from http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/press/Catalog/neufeld.shtml
Woldemar Neufeld (1909–2002) emigrated with his Mennonite parents from Ukraine to Canada in 1924. By the late 1920s, he had begun his lifelong project as documentarist, responding especially to the built environment, whether close to his home in southern Ontario or farther afield: northern Ontario, the prairies and the west coast, the Maritimes and Quebec. His work passed through a number of styles, from the coolly abstract to the vividly “realistic.” Although he never abandoned oils, he produced a substantial body of watercolours and block prints—the latter influenced by German Expressionist and Japanese printmaking approaches.
Woldemar …
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Laurier Anniversary Lecture to be given by Paul and Hildi Froese Tiessen
May 16, 2010
"Elmira, Ontario" by Woldemar Neufeld (1987)Annual Anniversary Lecture
LALL's 13th Annual Anniversary LectureKeynote Speakers: Dr. Paul Tiessen and and Dr. Hildi Froese Tiessen
"First Art, then Tennis": the Construction of Kitchener-Waterloo in the Visual Imagination
of Woldemar Neufeld, 1925 - 1995
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 | 7 p.m.
Senate and Board Chambers
Wilfrid Laurier University
75 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON | 519-884-0710 ext. 4628for more information, see http://www.wlu.ca/page.php?grp_id=160&p=2322
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Everyday Rapture on Broadway!
May 10, 2010Sherie Rene Scott's musical, "Everyday Rapture," has opened on Broadway at the American Airlines Theater to rave reviews! Read all about it here:
http://theater.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/theater/reviews/30everyday.html
Raised in Kansas by a Mennonite mother and what she describes as a "cavalry officer" father, Sherie Rene Scott plays a character based on her own life. Read more about it here:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/sherie_rene_scott/index.html?inline=nyt-per
For "hot" links to these sites, visit and "like" the Center for Mennonite Writing facebook page.
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Mennonite in a Little Black Dress -- #1 NYT Paperback Bestseller
May 10, 2010Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is at the top of the New York Times paperback bestseller list for Nonfiction this week--its third week on the list!
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/bestseller/
For "hot" links visit and "like" the facebook page for the "Center for Mennonite Writing"
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Ken Reed receives Grant from the Schowalter Foundation
May 10, 2010Schowalter Foundation, Newton, Kansas, has just announced a grant of $10,000 as seed money for the research and writing of a major new historical novel on the coming to America of the Swiss German Mennonites in 1710. Schowalter awarded the grant to the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society (LMHS), Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in cooperation with Ken Yoder Reed, author of two previous novels on Mennonite life and history.
The coming-to-America story of the Swiss German political refugees is a largely untold story. Mennonite and Amish refugees, caught up in the European geo-political wars and chaos of the eighteenth century, fled to William …