30+ Years of Mennonite/s Writing

Vol. 15, No. 1

A selection of recent work celebrating the Mennonite/s Writing 2022 conference. Included are links to plenary talks.

In this issue:

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Introduction to Mennonites Writing 2022 issue

by Jeff Gundy

30+ years of Mennonite/s Writing: Looking back, looking forward.
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Excommunication Sequence

by Abigail Carl-Klassen

Poems by Abigail Carl-Klassen
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from East of Liberal

by Raylene Hinz-Penner

I have read that the Apaches believe land makes people live right. Can that be true? The Apaches also honor place as the origin of story. I know that to be true. It is said they begin and end every story, “It happened at. . . .”

For us, it happened three miles east of Liberal in the corner of Seward County, Kansas bordering Beaver County, the Oklahoma Panhandle once known as “No Man’s Land.” My parents, a young and eager post-World War II couple, were looking for a place to farm and considered themselves unaccountably lucky in 1950 to have found a half-section of sand left mostly untended since its topsoil had blown away during the 1930s catastrophe known as The Dust Bowl.

The children of generations of Mennonite farmers, my parents set about bringing the land back into productivity. Realizing almost immediately that the dry land would not sustain them, they accumulated a herd of Holstein milk cows and managed the dairy together for a quarter century. Purportedly, Menno Simons, the founder of our faith, was the child of a dairy farmer. So was Georgia O’Keeffe. So am I.
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Hildi Froese Tiessen

by Robert Zacharias

Presented at Mennonite/s Writing IX, October 2022
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Merle and Phyllis Good

by Ervin Beck

Presented at the Mennonite/s Writing IX, October 2022 Conference
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On Creating Poland Parables

by Connie T. Braun

On Creating Poland Parables
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Raylene Hinz-Penner

by Jennifer Sears

Presented at the Mennonite/s Writing: IX, October 2022 Conference
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Victor Enns

by Hildi Froese Tiessen

Presented at the Mennonite/s Writing: IX, October 2022 Conference
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Woman Built of Stones

by Kirsten Beachy

A meditation
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Plenary Conference Events

by Multiple Authors

See below for embedded YouTube videos of conference plenaries.
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Review of Anabaptist Remix

by Daniel Born

Anabaptist ReMix: Varieties of Cultural Engagement in North America, ed. Lauren Friesen and

Lauren Friesen and Dennis R. Koehn, editors. 477 pp. Peter Lang, 2022. $109.95 cloth.
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Magdalene Redekop

by Ann Hostetler

Presented at the Mennonite/s Writing: IX, October 2022 Conference
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Two Poems from Fences

by Cheryl Denise

Where I’m From

I’m from clotheslines off back porches,

from pickle brine and cook cheese

from a mother who made us kids sniff horseradish

at the first sign of a cold.

I’m from shape notes, knitting needles and pickling corn,

ink stains and silver typeset

Dad’s Heidelberg press forever snorting

like a stallion in the old chicken coop.

From neighbor kids flooding the backyard for hockey

imagining ourselves as Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Orr.

From a giant white Bible on a coffee table

with a picture of Solomon about to split a baby in two.

I’m from home-sewn bathing suits, accordion lessons,

breaking curfew and smoking Players,

Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and Farrah Fawcett hair.

From a mother who had two dates in one night,

a father who snuck out of the parsonage

to see South Pacific at that verboten

movie house.

From a grandfather who refused to go to war,

sent west to fight forest fires instead

while his wife gave birth on a poultry farm.

I’m from recycled ancestors—

the ones I can’t name

and don’t understand, but who somehow

survive in my bones, grounding me here,

to this place where I’m from.

Brother Lawrence and the Sheep

Eight a.m. I stumble to the barn

in my old high school stoner jacket

with the missing black buttons.

The weeds no one ever seems to pull

or hoe or mind sway in the grass,

wild as my boss in a temper tantrum.

In the warming sunlight, fat borer bees

begin to chew holes in the rafters,

like the board members who took away

Good Friday as a holiday. I swat

them with that tennis racquet

that lies on the hay bale, feel the satisfying thud,

watch the stunned bodies in the dirt winding down.

I sweep manure from mangers,

clatter the feed can and the flock flows into the barn.

They rise, plant their front feet in the troughs,

throw their heads heavenward,

a bleating hungry choir.

I tap my metal scoop, raise it like a baton

and sing my old Sunday School song about patience.

As choir director, I should commit to the words.

It’s been years since I sat inside the barn

waiting for a lamb to sniff my legs,

cock his head, one ear drooping with the weight

of a yellow ear tag —

waiting for the ewes to take me in,

to plop down almost near and chew their cuds.

It’s just chores now.

I imagine Brother Lawrence hanging his head

as he creaks through the weathered walls,

Practice the presence of God, he chants,

If I could doing dishes, you can tending sheep.

But I’m no monk, I retort.

Unlike you I have a real job, and my boss,

he doesn’t give a shit about poetry,

or barns, let alone my soul, and I’m late.

I hurry back to the house, Larry one step

behind, reciting a homily on holy habits.

I plug my ears, change jeans, gulp coffee.

Larry shakes his head as I zoom down the lane,

God is everywhere, he heralds over the fence,

It’d make the day easier if you’d start

by saying hello.

Where I’m From, and Brother Lawrence and the Sheep, are from Cheryl Denise’s new poetry collection, Fences, 2022, Cascadia Publishing House, DreamSeeker poetry series, Telford, PA.
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Review of MennoFolk3:

by Levi Miller

Review of Ervin Beck's third "MennoFolk" book, MennoFolk3: Punns, Riddles, Tales, Legends