30+ Years of Mennonite/s Writing
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 Gundy30+ years of Mennonite/s Writing: Looking back, looking forward.
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Excommunication Sequence
by Abigail Carl-KlassenPoems by Abigail Carl-Klassen
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from East of Liberal
by Raylene Hinz-PennerI 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 ZachariasPresented at Mennonite/s Writing IX, October 2022
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Merle and Phyllis Good
by Ervin BeckPresented at the Mennonite/s Writing IX, October 2022 Conference
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On Creating Poland Parables
by Connie T. BraunOn Creating Poland Parables
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Raylene Hinz-Penner
by Jennifer SearsPresented at the Mennonite/s Writing: IX, October 2022 Conference
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Victor Enns
by Hildi Froese TiessenPresented at the Mennonite/s Writing: IX, October 2022 Conference
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Woman Built of Stones
by Kirsten BeachyA meditation
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Plenary Conference Events
by Multiple AuthorsSee below for embedded YouTube videos of conference plenaries.
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Review of Anabaptist Remix
by Daniel BornAnabaptist 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 HostetlerPresented at the Mennonite/s Writing: IX, October 2022 Conference
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Two Poems from Fences
by Cheryl DeniseWhere 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 MillerReview of Ervin Beck's third "MennoFolk" book, MennoFolk3: Punns, Riddles, Tales, Legends