CMW Journal

Julia Spicher Kasdorf (JSK):

Okay, let’s get this out of the way. Perhaps Ervin Beck started the rumor. Then Ann Hostetler straightened out the story by quoting your self-identification as “an offshoot of the Mennonites” in your headnote in A Cappela: Mennonite Voices in Poetry. (Your paternal grandmother and most of your father’s family were Mennonite, but your parents raised you in the Evangelical United Brethren Church. ) Nonetheless, the next generation of Mennonite literary critics on both sides of the border have called you Mennonite in print.  In your own terms, can you explain what about you identifies as Mennonite—ancestry, affinity, anything else?

Janet Kauffman (JK):

I was born a Kauffman and lived in a community of Kauffmans–– the surname itself announced a Mennonite connection in Lancaster County in the 1950s.  Outside Landisville, our Kauffman tobacco farm was in the midst of half a dozen Kauffman tobacco farms, mostly my dad’s uncles, almost all of them Mennonites.

Many extended families had become, even then, a mix of Mennonites and non-Mennonites –– a range of beliefs you could see at our family reunions by the range of clothing, from cape dresses and prayer caps, black coats, long-skirted fine prints, to jeans, t-shirts, orange shorts.  And whether swimming in the creek with neighbor kids or cutting tobacco or visiting family, I lived in a community formed and dominated by Mennonite culture and beliefs.  One small but potent glimpse as a child: Mennonite Bible School in the summers, down the road to the old Landisville Mennonite Church, up the steps and inside –– girls directed to the left, boys to the right. 

But my deepest and lifelong connection to Mennonites came through their set of beliefs and commitments to non-violence and social justice.  These were crucial ideas and voices to me then, along with high school friends who were members of the Church of Brethren and the Society of Friends. The ethic of peace and justice has been a powerful force in my life, linking civil rights, non-violence, women’s rights, and in the last 20 years,  environmental protection –– maybe past the point of Mennonite agreement –– beyond support for human rights, to animal rights, species and ecosystem rights, earth rights. 

JSK:

You grew up near Landisville, PA, on a tobacco farm, then studied French and English at Juniata College in the heart of northern Appalachia. What stays with you from the 1950s in Lancaster County? From those years in Huntingdon?

JK:

Apart from a commitment to peace and justice, what stays from Lancaster County is –– a love of tobacco!  The feel of it, the velvet and tarry leaves, the dramatic flowering, the work of it, handling each stalk at least 7 times from seeding to planting to suckering to topping to cutting, hanging, stripping the leaves, cranking them into bales in the tobacco press. It was hot, sticky, dreamy work.  I loved it all.  The dirt, the dust. Every season. What I mean is … it was the hands-on, sense experience of one plant in one place –– that made me attentive, I do believe this, to loving the things of the world, this living planet. 

And also, the flip side, farming tobacco has stuck with me for its mixed messages, its economic and moral conflicts.  The community consensus was: tobacco was the most profitable-per-acre product to grow, but tobacco was also–– a sin to be smoked.  So the moral conflicts within today’s agriculture (“we must feed the world,” we must confine animals, pollute air and water, etc.) are familiar to me, very clear.

And there is also a grief, a kind of mourning, that’s stayed with me –– a recurring nightmare, even now –– the loss I saw of that entire landscape. If you know the area around Lancaster, you know the massive development in the last 50 years, houses up and down every slope, suburbia sprawling. Every farm I knew from childhood is gone, except one, and how long can a remnant last?  Like so many others, my parents sold our farm when their health declined –– sold it to the Landisville Mennonite Church, in fact. I grew up in tobacco fields right there, where the new church now stands. 

As for Juniata College and Huntingdon, it won’t be a surprise, what’s stayed with me most all these years ––  the mountains, the civil rights activism. I used to say I went to Juniata for the scenery, but of course I meant for the natural world, mountains at the campus boundary, and especially for the easy walk off-campus to cliffs by the Juniata River.  The civil rights activism there was crucial, on campus and especially as it reached beyond the campus in March 1965, following the attacks on marchers in Selma.  The march organizers called for students and others from across to country to offer support and join the marchers from Selma as they entered Montgomery and marched to the Capitol for a closing rally. Three carloads of us, Juniata students and faculty, along with thousands of others from other states, drove to Alabama, for the final days of the march. 60 years later, short a distance as I walked, those are still for me some of the most important steps I’ve taken.

JSK:

I’m struck that you managed to get from rural Pennsylvania to the University of Chicago, where you wrote a PhD dissertation on Theodore Roethke—who taught poetry writing and coached tennis in the 1930s at Penn State until the place broke him, I have to say—who was also a Michigander and child of growers. I’m curious about how your time in Chicago influenced your poetry writing, and what it was like to be a woman in academia then.

JK:

I went to the University of Chicago for my Ph.D. in the same way anybody unfamiliar with the academic world in those days got there –– someone you know says, you ought to apply to U of C.  It might have been the poetry prof at Juniata. In my first poetry class there he assigned us poems by Theodore Roethke, who had just died (1963). Contemporary poetry –– all poetry –– was completely new to me, and Roethke’s greenhouse poems made an immediate impression, with his close look at plants, leaves, details of all sorts that brought even dirt so close you could see its particles and debris. At Chicago, working on Roethke’s poetry for my dissertation, the words of his poems became more physically apparent to me, in playful sound effects, in sensual and spiritual tonalities. Working with his language, I’m sure, helped me see ways my own words could be present on a page, gave me the nerve to work on a book of poems. 

It’s strange to think of Roethke as contemporary, just as it’s strange to think about being a woman in academia then.  At Chicago, I can’t recall one discussion about women’s rights.  This was 1967-69, and still, for me, civil rights and the Viet Nam war were the critical issues. Not women’s rights. We were on the very edge of it though, women were already more visible, much more present in universities than in previous decades, and by the mid-70s, in my first teaching job, I was teaching a Women’s Studies course as well as poetry. 

JSK:

The Weather Book was an AWP Award Series Selection and published by Texas Tech in 1981, and another collection of poems, Where the World Is, came out in 1988. But in 1983, you suddenly burst onto the New York literary scene with a collection of short stories from Knopf, Places in the World a Woman Could Walk; followed by Collaborators, a novel, also from Knopf in 1986; and Obscene Gestures for Women, more stories from Knopf in 1989. How did that happen and what did it mean for you?

JK:

Happenstance happens. My early poems were talking sorts of poems, mostly women talking. I was interested in women’s voices, as if they were right in the room, or thinking out loud to themselves. Trying deliberately (if anything was deliberate, and I may just be seeing this in retrospect) to make words visible, heard –– physical –– rather than “poetic.”  Which made the poems more narrative than lyric.  In any case, an editor at Knopf, Gordon Lish, someone I’d never heard of, but who turned out to be widely-known when I looked him up, saw one of these poems and sent me a note asking if I’d written any short stories, to send them along.  I hadn’t, but when I did, I sent them to him.  

I’d also found Grace Paley’s stories at about the same time, and her writing was empowering –– women, city women, sat around and talked, or visited somebody and talked. Her stories changed my thinking about fiction, my ideas about characters and action. It seemed like a truth revealed! –– walking is action. Talk is action. Talk can go any direction, can stop, veer, circle round, and sometime or other, reach a period for a full stop.  

Having grown up farming tobacco, and farming hay at that time in Michigan, I was determined to have women characters outside, working, walking, talking. And that’s pretty much all they do in my first book of short stories, Places in the World a Woman Could Walk.

JSK:

From 1976-1988, you taught at Jackson Community College, and from 1988 until 2008, you taught in the English department at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. That seems fairly early for a woman to be hired to a tenure line position, and I understand that you were instrumental in establishing the graduate creative writing program there, especially its reputation for experimental approaches. What caused you to question the linearity of narratives, even the physical object of the codex, and turn to mixed media work?

JK:

I was interested in mixed media in the visual arts from the first time I saw it, early in college –– unframed, free-standing, lopsided, weird materials.  I loved it.  As time went on, I understood more about that pleasure, the activity of walking around it, the importance and integrity of multiple points of view. I liked the absence of coherence and easy explanation, the absence of the usual focus on human beings. 

So for me, mixed media and mixed sorts of writing that call attention to their physical existence (rather than their meaning) –– whether on paper or in mud –– can make startling sense.  At Jackson Community College, I started asking creative writing students for a mid-term project that would be “a book not readable in the usual ways,” a “deformed book” project.  We’d hold an exhibit of these projects, and it was always a surprise to see the variety, the creative range in structure, with the overlappings and tangling of materials, of words or letters, images, fabrics. Metal welded, wires bent. Amazing to hear the range and freedom of discussions. At EMU (Eastern Michigan University), I added an entire creative writing workshop in mixed media, another in alternative narrative structures.  And other creative writing faculty at EMU were developing their own genre-bending courses incorporating art, ‘zine publication (handmade before digital options then, and now also with digital ease), video, audio, you name it. It was an exciting time and with interest high among both faculty and students, we developed an MA in creative writing that included experimental and cross-discipline approaches, separately or within the fiction, non-fiction, and poetry courses. 

The Violence of Plowshares 

JSK:

Linked above is a photograph and your artist’s statement from the installation, The Violence of Plowshares, which you brought to Bluffton, Ohio, to exhibit at the 2006 Mennonite/s Writing conference. I think we’re just catching up to the urgencies this piece expresses—installed there in a lobby outside an auditorium where panels and readings of the usual sort were happening. Can you talk about your turn back to the land and your fight in its defense?

Click link below to see photo

Janet Kauffman at her Michigan Farmhouse

JK:

About 25 years ago, farming in southern Michigan and across the border in Ohio took a giant leap into industrialization. Rather than losing farmland to suburban sprawl, the farming landscape here, mostly dairies, expanded to CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations). The landscape, the streams, the air, the treatment of animals –– it all changed.  

And for me, already concerned about the environmental impact of a chemicalized agriculture, with crop-spraying and loss of insects, there was now the fully industrialized model, with even more risks to the natural world, air and water.  Starting in 1997, half a dozen dairies built multiple warehouse-size barns, thousands of cows inside year-round, manure handling a huge issue -- how to collect it, where to store it, how to get it onto fields, how to keep it out of streams.  

The CAFO operators began and continue to this day, clearing woods, wooded edges and hedgerows for more acreage. More profit. Bulldozers, backhoes, and earth-movers re-shape fields, smoothing slopes, tiling wetlands, burying streams in large drains.

In 2000, after a liquid manure discharge into Lake Hudson, a state recreation area, I joined a group which had just formed, Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central Michigan, and for 14 years worked on water monitoring and other watershed  protection projects. There were some stream sites where levels of E. coli bacteria tested at numbers TNTC, as the lab labeled it –– Too Numerous To Count. 

This Violence of Plowshares piece was pretty blatant on the moral lapses and failures of agriculture, connecting remnants of tobacco farming in the past (the 2 tobacco leaf-sizing boxes), with stamped text on the current manure pollution and hedgerow demolition, the “reap what you sow” warning, and words drawn from school songs, Bible verses, stark repetitions, in the boxes within boxes. 

JSK:

Like many of us, you created new work during the pandemic. Please describe what inspired your FOUR  new books, and tell us how we can order them. And let us know how you are spending your time now.

JK:

The best part of the pandemic for me –– lots of walking. Walking and birding and looking, listening. The worst part was the ongoing CAFO expansion, ecosystem loss, with climate change looming.  At a loss for words, that’s how I felt.  Which led to making a few pandemic books through those years, the first with no words, the rest with minimal wording.

I used an online book-making site to format the books, with just a few templates to choose from, two kinds of paper, so there’s a standard design to the books that wasn’t my choice, but given the circumstances, I decided it was like those prison books that long-incarcerated souls put together, using whatever’s available in the cell, pasting new work in an old book, whether a useless phone book or a Bible.

“debris fields, after the flood,” All Things Being Equal (2020)

With all the walking outside, I started taking photos with my phone and it became a habit, especially for sections in the longest book, All Things Being Equal. I have an old phone, not the best camera, which took the pressure off. I was just walking and looking at the ground, zooming in to dirt, or looking at flood debris deposited at the high water mark, nothing particularly photogenic. But the fact was, in almost every photo, something or some small bit, was visually compelling. A fragment of anything became completely interesting. Meaningful. 

Another book, Haloes and Other Ways Light Takes the Body, includes pre-digital photos, set out in sunlight, creating overexposed blasts of light that obscure the people and whatever they’re doing. For me, that obliteration in light shifts them, and us, into a fuller immersion in the natural world.

“fringe shifts, haloes, interference phenomena,” from Haloes, and Other Ways Light Takes the Body (2021)

The pandemic projects confirmed and elaborated, in ways I hadn’t expected, a simple understanding:  we are wholly part of the natural world. Not apart from it.

We’re in the midst —elementally in touch. Every day our bodies are touched by air and by light, we feel it on our skin if we pause, that touch. There is nothing between the arm, the air; the hoof and the mud; between the water, the swimmer.  So it’s not an exaggeration for me to say that the human body walking, for instance, is boundary-less at the last molecule of skin, merged ecologically with air, light, soils, the body of Earth.

These days I’m working with language again. Bits and pieces. Unearthed is a collection-in-progress of very short writings, fragments, skeletal scraps, like something found on an archeological dig, some parts intact, but others unclear or unidentifiable.

Some fundamental ideas took hold in those pandemic walks, and haven’t let go –– the idea of random debris as equal to coherent structure, the equality of brokenness with wholeness, the idea of human beings as elemental, as all things on earth are elemental. 

Somehow, those thoughts console me, and offer hope.  And suggest to me an ethic of both diminishment and expansion that as a human being I can live with. 

Janet Kauffman’s pandemic booklets available at:

https://www.lulu.com/shop  in Search box:  Janet Kauffman

More information about ACRES Land Trust, to which Janet Kauffman transferred the fields she restored to their original wetland state.