JMW: What’s most exciting about this book to you?
DSC: Frankly, the most exciting thing about this book is that I found a publisher for it! I was worried that its queer-in-the-sense-of-weird form would make it too unmarketable to find a home. Although I was not yet writing Ethics for Apocalyptic Times, I attended a panel called “The Space Between Creative Nonfiction and Literary Criticism: Theorizing, Writing, and Publishing Critical-Creative Hybrids” at the January 2020 Modern Language Association convention. I recall numerous attendees lamenting that they had been submitting hybrid manuscripts that sounded similar to what my book became about subjects that are way more well-known than Mennonite literature for years without success because university presses didn’t believe that such hybrid work was marketable. More openness to this kind of work has been developing in the intervening years among university presses and commercial publishers alike, but I still wondered whether my book would make sense to anyone else. I’m tremendously grateful to Penn State University Press for taking a chance on it. I believe deeply in its ideas, and I am glad they are out in the world for readers to encounter.
JMW: Do you see it as a new departure for you, a continuation of earlier work/themes, or some combination?
DSC: As I say in the book’s Acknowledgments, “in some ways it expresses ideas that I have been struggling to articulate since my very first attempts to write about Mennonite literature as a student at Goshen College two decades ago” (ix). In that sense, the book is a continuation of my earlier work, including many of the ideas in my first book, Queering Mennonite Literature. But Ethics for Apocalyptic Times’s intentionally hybrid form makes it the most memoirish, personal piece of scholarship I’ve written by far.
JMW:Do you see your work as “Mennonite,” and how or how not? (We know this is a ridiculously broad and fraught question, so feel free to respond in whatever way seems right to you.)
DSC: The general answer to this question is that I am a Mennonite writer, so my work is Mennonite writing as the field of Mennonite literary criticism defines the term. The specific answer regarding Ethics for Apocalyptic Times is that it is Mennonite in that it discusses the field of Mennonite literature and analyzes texts by a number of Mennonite writers. But its ideas are applicable to non-Mennonite literature, and it discusses some non-Mennonite authors and literary traditions. I wanted the title to be Getting the News: Theapoetic Ethics for Apocalyptic Times, which references the William Carlos Williams quotation I discuss in the Introduction (“It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet [people] die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there”). I did not want the word “Mennonite” in the title for fear that it would scare non-Mennonite readers away, but the Press insisted on it, so Ethics for Apocalyptic Times: Theapoetics, Autotheory, and Mennonite Literature is the compromise we came up with. I’m glad that some early reviews of the book, such as this one from Ancillary Review of Books https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2024/03/20/reading-and-writing-from-somewhere-review-of-daniel-shank-cruzs-ethics-for-apocalyptic-times/, have picked up on the book’s relevance for non-Mennonite readers. Non-Mennonite readers are certainly reading the Mennonite writers that I write about, so I hope these readers will find my book of interest as well.
JMW: What themes, issues, techniques, and/or other authors were most in your mind as this project came into being?
DSC: I read Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?” (collected in his book of the same name) when I was a senior in college, and the question it raises has affected all of my writing about literature since then. Ethics for Apocalyptic Times is my attempt to answer it—it took me twenty years to find a framework (theapoetics) to help me do so in a way that allowed me to connect all of my literary obsessions—Mennonite literature, queer literature, poetry, Samuel R. Delany, and so on.
The work of the writers I examine in Ethics for Apocalyptic Times have shaped my thinking in numerous ways, and the Samatar, Delany, poetry, and speculative fiction chapters are love letters to their respective subjects. In terms of theory, aside from queer theory in general, Robert Zacharias’s ideas reconceptualizing what it means to read Mennonite literature in Reading Mennonite Writing were especially helpful. Lauren Fournier’s and Natalie Loveless’s work on autotheory was also important.
JMW: What part(s) of your writing process might other writers find useful, either to imitate or to avoid?
DSC: My process for writing this book was much different than for my other large writing projects. The idea came to me while I was working on another book project, a memoir, so then I was thinking about and writing both books concurrently for a while, and their ideas kept cross-pollinating, and I ended up putting around 40 pages of material that was initially in the memoir into Ethics for Apocalyptic Times, so it was a chaotic process that made both manuscripts better, but that I don’t especially recommend. I will say, though, that after a lifetime of trying, since 2017 I’ve finally been able to sustain a consistent journaling practice. I recommend journaling to everyone. Keeping a journal has substantially helped all of my writing. Many of Ethics for Apocalyptic Times’s ideas were first written by hand there.
JMW: Is there a brief excerpt, or a poem if this is a book of poems, that we can reprint as part of this interview?
Excerpt from Ethics for Apocalyptic Times: Theapoetics, Autotheory, and Mennonite Literature by Daniel Shank Cruz, pp. 1-3, copyright © 2024 by Pennsylvania State University Press. Used with permission.
On Saturday, 14 March 2020, I turned forty. My partner had a full day of festivities planned for us: brunch at Ocean Blue, my favorite restaurant; a relaxing afternoon on the couch perusing the books I received as gifts; and then dinner with our three closest friends back at Ocean Blue, with a session of Dungeons & Dragons and homemade whoopie pies for dessert. But there was an edge of uneasiness accompanying the day. I was on sabbatical and had been having a calm semester, but our friends, all fellow professors, were dreading the upcoming spring break week because our institution had just announced that it was moving all courses online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. They would have to spend the week scrambling to adapt their courses to the new environment. On Sunday, I spent the day recovering from the previous evening’s debaucheries. On Monday, I realized that the pandemic would affect everyone’s lives when then governor Andrew Cuomo closed all schools and various kinds of businesses, including restaurant dining rooms, statewide. On Friday, Cuomo ordered the closure of all nonessential businesses. In hindsight, as I write this in April 2021 (and still, as I do a round of revision in January 2022, and still, as I do another round of revision in July 2022, when numbers are again spiking and monkeypox has entered the mix, and still, as I do my final edits in December 2022 during another spike before turning the manuscript in to my publisher), my birthday feels like the last “normal” day.
A few months earlier, as I was finishing the semester and wondering what I would work on during my sabbatical, I received two invitations four days apart to contribute essays to theological projects, one on Anabaptist vitality in the twenty-first century and one on Mennonite political theology. The timing of these requests may have been coincidence, or may have been a sign of something deeper, perhaps an act by what Sourayan Mookerjea identifies as “the animist agentic magic lying in the deepest recesses of antecapitalist life that the colonial project sought to drive from the face of the earth.”[1] Either way, they felt like a definite call from the theological Mennonite community, which I have had a vexed relationship with for twenty years. I said yes to both because I was happy that the editors felt I would have valuable ideas to contribute, but I also felt perplexed because I do not consider myself a theologian. I decided to write both essays about how you can read Mennonite literature theologically because it has often acted as theology for me since I left the church in 2002. As I began writing the essays, it became clear that a significant strain of Mennonite literature has always been concerned with ethics, and therefore can be read as a kind of secular theology.
At the same time, I was working on a paper proposal for the 2020 Mennonite/s [sic] Writing conference (subsequently postponed to 2021, and then 2022) about how Mennonite literature should respond to the nefarious tag team of the 2017–21 White House occupant’s administration in the United States and the global climate catastrophe that is already manifesting itself in terrifying ways. I have had an interest in apocalyptic literature since 9/11, and was using my proposal to intertwine this interest with my work on Mennonite literature for the first time. I was going to focus my paper on the future, but when the pandemic hit, more immediate, direct thinking about apocalypse became necessary.
Of course, a sense of impending doom is not new for some of us. Apocalyptic times have been present for people of color in the Americas since 1492. In other words, the idea that apocalyptic times have just begun is a product of white privilege. Much Mennonite literature remains flawed in its lack of engagement with this fact due to its lack of engagement with the lives of people of color in general, though the works of Sofia Samatar, Casey Plett, Abigail Carl-Klassen, Becca J. R. Lachman, and Ken Yoder Reed that I examine later are notable exceptions, as are Rudy Wiebe’s novels The Temptations of Big Bear and The Scorched-Wood People. I am a Puerto Rican with Taíno and African ancestry, so this ongoing apocalypse has shaped my paternal family’s history. My maternal Mennonite ancestors took part in settler colonialism when they settled what is now Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the early 1700s. However, after my birthday the interrelated symptoms of the 2017–21 White House occupant’s administration and the pandemic felt especially close and oppressive. The current apocalypse affects everyone. As I joined the wave of people turning to literature for comfort, panic-buying stacks of books to ensure that I would not run out of reading material, I began thinking about an old, old topic in literary discourse, that of literature’s role in society. The pressure cooker of the pandemic led me to the intersection between looking at Mennonite literature theologically and looking to literature as a balm in terrible times. I realized that rereading the Mennonite literature I was writing about for the three essays offered my generally secular self spiritual comfort. This realization surprised me, and I decided to explore it further.
Ethics for Apocalyptic Times: Theapoetics, Autotheory, and Mennonite Literature is the result.
[1] Sourayan Mookerjea, “Intermedia Research-Creation and Hydrapolitics: Counter-Environments of the Commons,” in Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation, ed. Natalie Loveless (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2020), 137.