CMW Community

The CMW Community offers a space for readers, writers, students, and scholars to interact around the subject of Mennonite writing. It houses the CMW Journal Discussion as well as the CMW News.

Recent News Stories

Recent Journal Discussion

  • Cain’s Legacy: Marked By Plain Sorrow

    On January 28, 2012 Adam Hostetter wrote:

    Thank you Eileen. This is a very powerful story. I have come recognize that one of the themes I explore constantly in my writing is “who are my people?” I am a gay mennonite and very pleased to walk between many worlds. I find that “Between-people are both outsiders and insiders. They don’t belong anywhere.” is true, and difficult, and beautiful.

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  • Jacob and Agnes

    On January 19, 2012 Loretta Willems wrote:

    My dad talked freely about his wild youth, but that was to people who knew that he later returned to the church. In 1954 he opened the Phoenix Lighthouse Rescue Mission in Phoenix, AZ, which became his life work. He would want readers to know that. It didn’t even cross my mind to include this information until after this piece was published.

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  • Memoir: A Troubled Genre

    On January 19, 2012 Heather Munn wrote:

    This is very interesting. I’ve always felt memoir to be kind of problematic, as well as a little too trendy, which is part of why I’ve always resisted the notion of writing in the genre.

    I’d expand on your point number 1, about the first-person point of view, and add this: it’s terribly easy for a gifted writer writing in first-person to make the reader like him/her. We are instinctively sympathetic listeners to an “I”, especially if there are reasons for sympathy, and these are easy to provide; everyone suffers. (It’s a technique I’ve used in fiction; my protagonist was in some ways unlikable at the beginning, but I showed what genuinely made him suffer early on to catch the reader’s sympathy.) It’s also fairly easy for the writer to go further, and pull us into being the enemy of her enemies.

    I’ve had the experience of reading a memoir and absolutely loving it, sympathizing with the author one hundred percent, and years later finding out that her husband claimed certain things in it (directed against others) were untrue or twisted to the point of caricature. Only then did I look at the memoir again and realize how the author had portrayed herself as a victim bravely soldiering on, how she never spoke of any wrong she herself had done, and I realized her husband was probably telling the truth. You’ve said the writer can become her own worst enemy, involuntarily accusing herself; I think that’s a comment from the point of view of a mature reader, fairly aware of human nature. An immature reader, on the other hand, is at risk of buying the story hook, line and sinker.

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