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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    Future Issues and Calls for Submissions

    July 16, 2010

    Would you like to see your work in our Journal? Here is a preview of upcoming issues with submission deadlines. We will occasionally insert special features into forthcoming issues, such as a featured poet or a book review or a report on a special event. As always, we appreciate your emails updating us on publications and other literary events. Electronic submission only to cmw@goshen.edu, include a brief bio that mentions your interest in or connection to Mennonites, and attach the submission as a word document. This is a tentative list, subject to change and adjustment.

    September 2010 -- In ...

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    Summer Reading Issue!

    July 16, 2010

    Ever wondered what was really in those Amish romance and mysteries? Or why they've become such a cultural phenomenon? Recent press in the publishing industry reports that "bonnet fiction" is outselling "chick lit," and that serial genre fiction on Amish and Mennonite themes is a growth market on an otherwise dismal publishing scene for fiction.

    In the current issue of the Journal of CMW, edited by Ervin Beck, read excerpts of new work by mystery writer Judy Clemens and science fiction writer Karl Schoeder, as well as lively analyses of mystery and romance fiction by Beth Graybill, Kyle Schlabach ...

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    Former Goshen College President J. Lawrence Burkholder dies

    June 24, 2010

    In 1971 Burkholder left the Ivy League to lead the small college in Northern Indiana he knew intimately. He returned to Goshen College to serve as its 11th president with the conviction that "Mennonites had something to contribute to the world, and I wanted to be part of it," he said.

    Burkholder, who served as president until 1984, began his presidency with a simple religious service and the planting of 138 trees around campus. "I wanted to bring beauty to a campus that seemed somewhat barren," he said. "And I hoped to soften and humanize the image of the ...

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    Inspiration for Mennonite Writers

    June 24, 2010

    Old news for Mennonite writers from John Updike in 1951: "We do not need men like Proust and Joyce; men like this are a luxury, an aded fillip that an abundant culture can produce only after the more basic literary need has been filled. This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; men who are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcend the limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what is peculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who ...

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    Di Brandt wins Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism in Canada

    June 21, 2010

    Wider Boundaries of Daring:
    The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry
    Di Brandt, editor, and Barbara Godard, editor

    Published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press

    has won the

    2009 ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary
    Criticism in Canada

    see: http://www.brandonu.ca/app/news/home/home-20100610-001.html?uri=%2Fnews%2Findex.html


Recent Journal Discussion

  • Chasing the Bonnet

    On July 28, 2010 Melanie Springer Mock wrote:
    Thank you so much for this analysis of the Amish romance and its popularity. Very thoughtful and well-researched. I've been fascinated with the readership of these books since stumbling across the Time article. My mother-in-law gave me a Beverly Lewis book several years ago, but I never read it until Time convinced me this was a phenomena worth exploring further. I struggle with the notion that these books are wholesome, though. I read approx. half a dozen Amish romances in the past year, and found their general message to their women audiences highly problematic: that is, that women have no real agency, and that their only hope in a meaningful life is to find a man (and a hunky Germanic one at that). Yes, of course, this is the ideal of the romance novel, but I'm troubled that so many evangelical Christians buy into this idealization of romance and of male/female relationships, and call this idealization "wholesome." I think this mythology creates plenty of problems for my female college students, who buy into the notions they read about in Christian romances. And--as I suggest in an presentation I wrote about Amish romances--I think the novels' fundamental message is no different than TV shows like The Bachelor, which provide an ideal setting, ideal male characters, and passive females whose only goal is to win the heart of a man. (And don't get me started on what I think about the misrepresentations of adoption. :) ) Anyway, I guess I'm not the ideal reader for the Amish romance, but I'm troubled by its success in the Christian market. Thank you for analyzing the nuances of this success! Melanie Springer Mock
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  • Poetry Feature: Six Poems

    On July 19, 2010 Jeff Gundy wrote:
    Yes, the sad-eyed lady surely should have gone in somewhere, Gordon, and the hard rain is from a different album, as I'm sure you also noticed. I can only hope my poetic license will cover such transgressions. I listened to Blonde on Blonde a lot in the old days but never owned a copy. For some reason, I felt a sudden yearning for it during the run-up to the Menno Writer's Conference in 2006, and bought it and Highway 61 Revisited on CD. They got me through . . . along with help and encouragement from many other sources!
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  • Poetry Feature: Six Poems

    On July 16, 2010 Gordon Houser wrote:
    I enjoyed Jeff's "Autobiography" and the references to Blonde on Blonde, perhaps my favorite Dylan album. But where was the sad-eyed lady?
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