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"Mennonites Don't Dance" --Stories by Darcie Friesen Hossack
November 8, 2010"Mennonites Don't Dance," a collection of stories by Darcie Friesen
Hossack, has been published by Thistledown Press in
Saskatoon. "Taking place primarily on the Canadian prairies, the
families in these storis are confronted by the conflict between
tradition and change--one story sees a daughter-in-law's urban ideals
push and pull against a mother's simple, rural ways, in another, a
daughter raised in the Mennonite tradition tries to break free from
her upbringing to escape to the city in search of a better
life. Children learn the rules of farm life, and parents learn that
their decisions, in spite of all good … -
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Miriam Toews wins The Writer's Trust Engel/Findley Prize
November 3, 2010Acclaimed novelist Miriam Toews has won a $25,000 award.
The 46-year-old writer, who grew up in Steinbach, Man., and lived in Winnipeg before moving to Toronto in 2009, was awarded the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Prize on Tuesday.
The award, handed out at the 10th annual Writers' Trust Awards in Toronto, is presented to writer in mid-career.
Toews has five books to her publishing credit, the first coming out in 1996 and the most recent in 2008.
Her 2004 novel, A Complicated Kindness, was her breakthrough work. It was on the Canadian bestseller lists for more than a year and won … -
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Sherie Renee Scott on Broadway
October 15, 2010Sherie Renee Scott, co-author of Everyday Rapture, which premiered on Broadway in Spring 2010, is now starring in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown as Pepa. The play opens in November 2010.
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Sandra Birdsell's novel Finalist for Governor General's Award
October 15, 2010Sandra Birdsell's recent novel, was named as a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards.
The Canada Council for the Arts provides almost $450,000 for the Governor General’s Literary Awards. Each winner will receive $25,000 and a specially-bound copy of the winning book.
Waiting for Joe, published by Random House of Canada, charts a contemporary odyssey of loss and dispossession. Caring for an elderly parent while they slowly lose their tangible assets, Joe and Laurie confront both economic and emotional bankruptcy. The discoveries they make as their lives disintegrate effect a poignant and intense depiction of class and consumerism. -
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Britt Kaufmann, Belonging, a poetry chapbook
September 27, 2010Britt Kaufmann’s (GC ’96) chapbook Belonging was named a semi-finalist in Finishing Line Press’s most recent New Women’s Voices Series contest and will be published this winter. The collection loosely chronicles her upbringing in Mennonite Goshen and her move to the mountains of Western North Carolina. Her poetry has been published in The Mennonite, Western North Carolina Woman, Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine, Main Street Rag, and LiteraryMama.com among others. She serves on the planning committee for the annual Carolina Mountains Literary Festival held in her hometown of Burnsville, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband Chad Smoker …
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Sandra Birdsell's latest novel, Waiting for Joe
September 26, 2010Random House Canada has just released Sandra Birdsell's latest novel, Waiting for Joe.
Its premise is a highly appropriate one for our stressed economic times:
After you've lost it all— job, house, savings, future—what have you got left? A piercing new novel of our times by one of Canada's finest fiction writers.
On a chilly early morning in late spring, Joe Beaudry and his wife, Laurie, wake up in circumstances that would challenge saints: they are on the lam in a stolen motorhome on the edge of a Walmart parking lot in Regina, Saskatchewan. They've gone bust, spectacularly: lost the … -
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Carla Funk's new poetry collection, Apologetic
September 26, 2010Turnstone Press has just released Carla Funk's Apologetic.
Capturing moments in time and nature, Carla Funk’s poems bring the world to a momentary standstill. Funk translates vivid descriptions and feeling into her poems, both testing and playing with traditional poetic experiences.
Apologetic’s poems experiment with expressing thoughts and emotions in formal poetic traditions, confining words to metrical lines or rhyme schemes. Many deal with the natural world, moments in time spent outdoors, in gardens, and capturing fleeting impressions in the human experience. Playing with form and content, Funk evokes the idea of a flesh-and-bones body (the poetic structure) carrying a …
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New Poetry Book from Di Brandt -- Walking to Mojacar
September 22, 2010Di Brandt's newest book of poetry, Walking to Mojacar, will be published in Canada by Turnstone Press this fall. In October Brandt will tour Winnipeg, Calgary and Toronto.
Reviewers' comments about Walking to Mojacar:
Di Brandt has surpassed herself in this extraordinary book, which hurls itself upon our desperate environmental, emotional, spiritual condition with fury and eloquence and headlong grace. The sequence “Hymns for Detroit,” which sets German hymns the poet heard in her Mennonite farming childhood against “trans(e)lations” for that most damaged city, could make the angels weep. Everywhere,Walking to Mojacar makes us know how far we have gone … -
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EMU Crossroads focuses on Literature
September 21, 2010The Summer 2010 issues of Eastern Mennonite University's Crossroads Magazine focuses on Mennonite Writers and publishers who are alumnae of that institution. To view the issue on line, go to
http://issuu.com/easternmennoniteuniversity/docs/crossroads-summer-2010
The issue includes poems by such writers at Debra Gingerich and Juanita Brunk, along with excerpts and articles by Kirsten Eve Beachy, Omar Eby, Merle Good, Valerie Weaver-Zercher and others.
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New novel by Omar Eby, Mill Creek, just published
September 21, 2010A new novel published by Omar Eby, Mill Creek, is set in Lancaster County in the 1950s.
"Mill Creek tells the story of the age-old struggle of an adolescent's attempts to understand himself and his world. Peter Martin, the brainy, shy, farm-boy narrator, pious beyond his years, fights a private war: whether to remain with his strict farm people or whether to embrace his best friend's anarchic approach to Mennonite life. . . An almost amorous friendship, the threat of the draft (Korean War), the lure of art, a pregnancy and a tragic drowning aid Peter to make compromising moves …