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
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Joanna Wiebe's BIRTH MOTHER, a memoir, just published
January 21, 2012Joanna Wiebe's memoir, BIRTH MOTHER, has just been published as an ebook or kindle download on amazon.com.
BIRTH MOTHER is a memoir about Wiebe's experience of giving up her son for adoption in 1969. It's also a travel book, a coming of age story, and a Mennonite memoir with recipes.
From the amazon.com description:
Six years ago Joanna gave up her baby son for adoption. Now it's Christmas 1975, and she longs to celebrate with her rural Kansas Mennonite family, but the relationships are tense as they struggle to understand:
• why, after having a ...
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Julia Spicher Kasdorf poem set to music and performed in New York
January 18, 2012Five Boroughs Song Book Concert features Kasdorf poem "On Leaving Brooklyn," set to music by Yotam Haber. Reviewed in The New York Times on January 16, 2012.
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Shirley Showalter's e-book on writing memoir
January 17, 2012Shirley Showalter, creator of "1oo Memoirs," a blog with reviews and discussions of memoir, has created a new personal blog that includes a free download of her new e-book, How to Write a Memoir that Sings. To get inspired to write your own memoir, visit www.shirleyshowalter.com
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New Novel by David Elias just published!
January 16, 2012For the Sake of Rose, David Elias's latest novel, takes up where Sunday
Afternoon left off. This book is published as an ebook and is available as
a download from buzzwordbooks.comMartha Wiebe has gone on her annual trip to get away from life in the small rural community where she's lived all her life. This time, she finds herself in Dallas, Texas. It's November 22, 1963, about noon ...
This new e-novel by Canadian author David Elias opens this way:
For The Sake Of Rose
Author's note:
A close examination of the grainy film footage ... -
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Mennonite Arts Weekend in Cincinnati, Feb 3-5
January 15, 2012Save if you register by January 15!
Cain’s Legacy: Marked By Plain Sorrow
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.
Jacob and Agnes
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.
Memoir: A Troubled Genre
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.