Writers wanted

Back in May, I heard Trevor Herriot read from his latest book, Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds, and he also talked about writing. There’s more writers today, he said, less readers: “maybe we’re all becoming writers.” This didn’t seem to discourage him, though. In fact, he had just given us a number of good reasons to be writing non-fiction. Books can be a stand-in for elders, he said, revealing truth inside our lives and others. And we write because it helps us grow up, he said, and mature, and understand more deeply — it’s “a gestational process.” In doing so we try to “delve deeper.” It “guards against cynicism.”

Each of these ideas would be worth exploring further, but I’m not thinking so much from the writer’s perspective today, as from the editor’s. It’s true, there’s writers everywhere … 256,875 bloggers using this platform alone, I was just told when I opened WordPress. And yet, thinking over the past year at the MB Herald, I’d also have to say that the need for writers isn’t letting up, and maybe it’s even increasing. We didn’t have trouble filling our pages, so that may sound like a contradiction, but at any point in the year I’d look at the issues coming down the calendar and could feel a bit of a panic unless we had a solid piece in hand as an anchor or something assigned to someone we were sure would come through for us. But it wasn’t always easy to find those pieces, or secure a writer.  

Not just any kind of writer. We usually got enough of what I call the “happy thoughts” — an anecdote with a bit of a life lesson attached, a devotional, a piece “giving testimony” to some personal or congregational transformation  or touch of God. I hope I’m not sounding derisive, because I’m not, but these pieces are filler, they’re like sugar, you can’t make a meal of them. 

What we need more of are those writers who are grounded in their faith (and because we’re a Mennonite Brethren church paper, connected to this community, or the wider Anabaptist family) who also know something about some aspect of living, a.k.a professionals in the broadest, “competence” sense of the word — be it in parenting, or pastoring, or teaching, or peacemaking, or working with seniors, or seeing movies, or reading books, or doing theology — and who are willing to work hard (for very little money, let’s say 5 to 10 cents a word) to articulate that in a clear and interesting way. It could be a knowledge-based article or theological investigation with experiences to illustrate. It could be experience-based but with a sensitivity that places it in a larger framework. Such writers have to have some nerve, to let their study/reflections be multiplied 16,000 times and sent around the country. So it’s still about growing up and understanding, but also about a willingness to assist in the growth and understanding of others, and with a broad but essentially lay audience in mind.

(It seems to me — and this is an aside, and only an impression I hasten to add — that our MB conference leaders in the past did more writing. I’ve heard people like board chairs, executives, directors, program leaders say they’re not writers — so they don’t. What happens then, I think, is that their analyzes, ideas, experiences in leading our church, which still need to be expressed, get turned over to others to communicate and they end up sounding like public relations-buzz. It may also be, of course, that we’ve didn’t work hard enough to develop the writing confidence of our leaders. And there are exceptions of course — MB executive director David Wiebe often writes an “Outfront” column,” and there are professors at our schools willing to turn their considerable academic skills into lay-accessible prose for the wider service of the church. I’m thinking, for example, of Tim Geddert’s helpful piece on atonement in the June MBH, here.) 

 Bottom line, magazines aren’t dead, and the one I know best — the MB Herald  – always needs writers.

Trevor Herriot also commented that nonfiction writers write about the things they worry about. So if we run out of writers, maybe it’s because nobody’s that worried.

Congregational Fantasies: Ruth Maendel

We attended the opening of an exhibition of art by Ruth Maendel at the Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery in Winnipeg last evening. Ruth is a young, local artist; she’s currently working for the government and doing her art on the side.

Ruth does all manner of interesting work. Wonderful photographs of tiny and unexpected things, for example — things like tiny mushrooms on a wood chip, bubbly scum in a bucket, ladles hanging in a camp kitchen, a slice of grapefruit with its luscious veins (title: “Behold! The Majestic Morning Assembly”), close-ups of gas flames in an oven (title: “Northern Lights in an Oven”), or flames curling around a kettle on the stove. When she notices and focusses on them, then brings them to our attention, we realize just how unique and wonderful they are.

She also does free standing, installation-type work, much of it clearly labour intensive. One of the central pieces here was “Wave” (a portion of it shown below). She wanted to recreate the look of water she said, and was also thinking of God’s Spirit, how it’s described as water, and of people like cups, sometimes receiving, sometimes pouring into other lives, but being together. — I asked, and she said it was fine for me to include some pictures here, but I’m a point-and-click kind of photographer, so these should be considered poor representations of the actual work — the piece has an undulating effect and more vivid colour than my photo is capturing. But it does communicate something of the exhibition’s title — “Congregational Fantasies.” For the artist’s photo of the piece, see here.

“I’m drawn to things in groups,” she said.

She’s also clearly fond of layers and doors and tunnels. One of my favourites pieces was “Tunnel book,” constructed of an old German Bible. Hard to see on the photo below, but it’s got tiny doors at the very back. As if to suggest that beyond the front door and the steps (made of pages of words) up and in, deeper and deeper, there’s even more, mystery and depth and surprise.

Ruth Maendel’s art is fun to view but also profound in its effect. You realize, as you mull over it later, that you’ve seen the ordinary made as great and amazing as it really is. And you realize, again, that you’ve got to start really looking at what’s right in front of you.

At the same time you’ve seen great and amazing truths (Spirit, community) made “ordinary” — accessible, that is — in stories of ceramic bowls and layers of paper.

Bolivian Mennonite rape victims

One of the articles I’d hoped to pull together before leaving the MB Herald was that of the horrifying and bizarre situation in some of the Mennonite colonies of Bolivia. The news flashed around the world this summer (one example here, from The Guardian), about the eight men jailed arrested after being charged with drugging (via spray) entire households at night, then breaking in to rape the women while they slept.

We carried a short MCC release about it in the MB Herald, here. And that was all we did with it.

I’d been pushed into opening a file on it, at least, by some rounds of email correspondence with a man who worked with Low German/conservative Mennonite concerns in various ways for many years, who was greatly burdened following the news (which has continued to build, with some 12 or 13 men now in jail, reports of bribes and death threats, and many rumors as well), and who is finding the silence of the Mennonite press “deafening.”

“I expected an outpouring of concern from Mennonites everywhere,” he wrote, “but it didn’t happen.” He has been trying to rally interest, and hoping Mennonite Central Committee (which already has connections with Bolivian Mennonites) might be pressed to do more as our point agency there.

I won’t have time to do the piece and am turning the file of materials over to assistant editor K., who is willing to sort through what we’ve gathered and also make calls to some people who visited Bolivia recently. Today I finished going through 9 pages of excerpts from the Kurze Nachrichten, a German paper published in Mexico, which my “prod” above says is one of the better sources of information, and translating the salient points for K.

I feel I need more information, understanding, perspective. How far away these women seem, how foreign somehow, even though we share the name Mennonite. I agree that we need to be speaking up. But what do we say? And to whom do we say it?

Another issue put to bed

It’s interesting how the vocabulary of living with children is borrowed for writing and publishing. A book or essay is said to be birthed. A magazine issue is said to be put to bed.

Which is what we did today — we tucked in our 36 pages for December — meaning it’s all set (electronically) and off to the printers, and except for the press proofs which we’ll give a final look-through tomorrow, it’s what it’s going to be.

One of the things I’ve liked best about this job is the rhythm of it, the ebb and flow of brainstorming ideas, finding and assigning authors, gathering stuff, making decisions about what’s in or out, the editing itself, layout, and proofreading that brings us round to this moment every month, another one done. I like the days of the cycle when the designer begins to set down the material we’ve worked on. But the last days of it are full and sometimes intense. There’s still decisions to make as we see the copy landing on the page,and we’ve got a deadline. I proofread with a ruler under every line and my lips move — I simply can’t trust my eye to read the word accurately unless I see it isolated on the line and say it.

We’ve made no pretense of being up-to-the moment in the small Mennonite world we inhabit — it’s impossible as a monthly — but at least until press time we try our best. We carried two news pieces in this issue referring to talks our MB seminary in Fresno, Cal. has been having with Fuller Theological Seminary, about being a distance education site. It provoked discussion at the conference’s recent annual general meeting. The executive board gave it “considerable deliberation” at their meetings following, according to their release. Then yesterday, in a news release from the seminary about the installation of their president, assistant editor K. spotted, in what was little more than a throwaway line, that the talks are off. Rats! I mean about the currency of the news pieces. We inserted a short note after one of them saying that Fuller had withdrawn, and that will have to do until we can get the longer (I was going to say “fuller”) story.

Typical putting to bed. I remember the evening-long procedures of baths and pyjamas, the string of last minute trips to the bathroom, the thirst requiring another drink, the begging for just one more chapter of the book, the sudden fears or recollections of what was supposed to be brought to school the next day. Busy, and often intense. Then, asleep — my goodness, in terms of children they were about as good as it gets.

Just like the issue we put to bed. It’s always my favourite. Not that it’s ever quite what we’d imagined, but it’s good enough. As I did at the bedsides of our sweet sleepers, I speak a prayer of release and blessing when I sign off on it. Tomorrow K. and I will meet to talk about the next — which I’m always sure will be the best one yet.

[some of my earlier favourites when put to bed]

        

What surprises me

Since my work as interim editor is drawing to a close next week, I thought I might offer a few further blog-ruminations about it as I wind down. 

It’s been a surprise, sometimes, what people react to. (I mean the reactions, of course, that reach our office.) There was one article, for example, we carried this year that felt good but also a little risky to me — in its potential to be misunderstood — but nary a discouraging word. In fact, the author told me that it had provoked some excellent further conversation that was all very interesting and positive. 

But our last issue — November’s — which focussed especially on the practice of peacemaking this time (as the well-”practiced” boots of a World War II conscientious objector suggest on the cover, above), and whose articles and stories seemed straightforwardly good in their implications, not provocative… I guess there must be something about peace that loosens them fightin’ words even among nonresistant Anabaptists. We’ve had some affirming responses, yes, but a couple of letters I hadn’t expected too — with reactions such as “profoundly saddened” and finding the issue “extremely one-sided,” and then further to this bit or that, “frustrating — and faintly insulting” and “particularly troubling.” These were private letters, so won’t be published, and the details don’t matter; plus I’ve had a good exchange with both letter writers already. We love to get letters, both personal and for our Letters to the Editor column, but like I said, reactions can be a surprise.

One realizes again that the article one thinks one’s written, or the magazine one thinks one has put out, is never quite the same as the article or the magazine read by this reader, or that one. — This reality certainly keeps things interesting though.

Writing editorials

It’s Saturday and I’ve finally got a reasonable draft of my last editorial hanging on the line.  

For anyone who doesn’t know, I’ve been working this past year as interim editor of the MB Herald, a 36-page monthly magazine, print run 16,000, which goes into the homes of  members of Canadian Mennonite Brethren churches. For some years I worked as associate editor, and then I “retired,” to do my own writing projects, but in January 2009 I returned to fill in while editor Laura Kalmar was on maternity leave. I’m wrapping up my term with the December issue, which is underway; Laura returns for the January issue.

I’ve enjoyed being back for the year, except, I’d have to say, for the editorials. Many kinds of writing, there’s a structure or strategy about them, and once you figure it out, it’s not so hard. But I’ve never quite figured out the formula that would get me easily through an editorial. In our particular magazine it sits near the front, so it often acts as an introduction to the issue’s theme, but it’s also expected (I assume) that one might have an opinion/position of some sort on some aspect of the topic, and now and then about other things as well. The bits of advice I’ve picked up from other editors is that it should express a view but also be open-ended. Or something like that. 

Good editorial writing may be a gift, or a temperament. Fellow editor Doug Koop (ChristianWeek) doesn’t seem to find it hard and does a great job, and I always admired the rolling through still firm style of former MBH editor Harold Jantz.

In the editorial on the line, I’m weighing in on the recent MB study conference held in Saskatoon. I opined (a word I’m using in honour of another editor friend who was fond of it) that it was a good event but we need to address how our having too little time talking together in a large group setting relates to the value we say we put on “community hermeneutic.”  

The trouble with editorial writing is I have to figure out what I think, and it has to be “true,” not just there for effect. It has to be what I’m willing to commit to saying. What I think about a matter is the hard part and I can only write my way to it — but it involves too many starts and stops and procrastinations and re-writes and then revisions. This quote from one of writer Flannery O’Conner’s letters says it best: “Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.”

Eventually I’ve been happy enough with most of them. But now the last one’s on the line, almost ready, and I’m glad. 

(Re. hanging on the line: this is one of those little writing tips I’ve learned along the way. Once you have a draft of something you have to find a way to see it freshly when you come back to it. It helps to spread it out on the floor or table, or hang it up, and maybe read it backwards — last page first, I mean, and so on. It also helps to switch the column widths from draft to draft, or change the font.)

33 years ago today

I don’t generally write much about my children, nor about the mothering role — especially now that the three of them are grown and I’m off-duty. I figure it’s not their fault their mother is a writer, which often means using what happens personally for the work of words, but I try to leave them out of it. They can tell their own stories.

But “mother” is a role/name/fact that’s a huge part of my life, and today I’m celebrating the day it began. It all started 33 years ago today when the little fellow, pictured left at 3 months, was born. (He gave permission to post the photo.) I don’t think you can ever imagine at the time what it will be like to be bound up with another person for the long haul the way a mother is, but you discover it — through joy and difficulties — as you go, and I can say this for sure, the child who started it and his two siblings who followed (whose baby photos I will post on their own birthdays, if they let me) have definitely, definitely been worth it all. (Especially now that I’m off-duty.)

(Happy birthday, S! And also, D., who launched another woman on the mom adventure this day too.)

Ich bin ein Berliner?

I don’t know when I’ve seen a single category of my internet homepage, Arts & Letters Daily, here, as full as now with its collection of articles reflecting on the fall of the Berlin Wall, 20 years ago on Monday. 1989, it announces, was the biggest year in world history since 1945. 

Twenty years is not so long. Even the relatively young among us will surely remember it. Two of our kids brought home the famous Checkpoint Charlie poster — of the young soldier jumping to freedom — from their student exchange trips to Germany. We drymounted them and the image of freedom’s leap hung in their rooms until they left, a memory, perhaps, of their first short travels away. One of the posters got taken along, the other lies in the childless room, turned store room of sorts, the poster slightly warped but now also a memory of our children’s presence in our house, and the way they decorated their space. 

 I remember the fall of the Wall, of course, but looking back in my journals of Nov. 1989, I don’t find a word written about it. My only excuse is that I was in some excitement and tremor of my own, as my first book had just been released.Still, you’d think I could have mentioned the Wall. It’s the nature of personal journalling, I suppose. I do know we were all rather taken with Mikhail Gorbachev. 

Of a day nearly a year later, Oct. 3, 1990, however, I have notes. I was sitting in the public library, Henderson Branch, overwhelmed by the official re-unification of the two Germanys that day, and jotting lines trying to make sense of why it mattered to me, why I was so happy. 

 I wasn’t alive in 1945 when the Enemy was humbled to just proportions… when corpses formed Babels of perversity… when photographs were made of naked men / hands clutched to cover circumcised shame in the moment just before they died… In books and television and history lessons of all kinds, I had had images and words to educate my shock, determined I would look but never comprehend it …

Remembering the awfulness, the evil of it, how, as quotes from Nazism, A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919-45, Vol. 1, remember it, how Germans called the Fuehrer “Lord,” their “creator and preserver, the protector.” They actually said, “every flower… blooms in gratitude to him…” Quotes about Kristallnacht, and laws about everything that was newly forbidden: Jewish, that is. Surely they were pagans…

Far from that time and place, I grew up with Gentle Jesus and the children, his kind and undivided face… And in my youth, reading A.M. Klein, echoing his wrath, his double deuteronomies…

Here’s the thing. My very first language was German.  [But I assure you it means nothing.] By school time, though, it was only English that we spoke. My mother had no qualms to sing, “There’s Always Be An England.” I kept a scrapbook of the royal family. I’d grown up thoroughly Canadian, absorbed the British-centric country of my childhood.

Hadn’t I? 

So why, in light of my hatred of, in light of my resistance to this Germany and what they’d done and the division they’d surely deserved, why the tears of happiness, watching  jagged lumpen shapes of West and East, separated twins of history, re-form… the atlases of unredeemed history redundant at midnight…

Was it a kind of forgiveness then? Two now one, when a thousand pieces scattered would not have been too many?

I insist it was an accident, that I heard my first truth in their language… Gott ist die Liebe [God is love], and over and over the crucifixion story, in German, until my mouth was splintered…  gagging on Seven Last Words

    until the Eighth:

   Congratulations!

It still seems complicated. Country and language and what they mean. And also champagne… sparkling everywhere / inside me / over vestiges of walls / across the burial pits of slaughtered Jews.

Photos of the dead

Speaking of funeral customs — just this one more post on the subject, I promise, before I move on to something else!

I grew up taking for granted the family photograph around the body of the deceased. I saw such photos, and was in at least one of them (see below).

Since then, I’ve discovered through random conversations that this custom is by no means universal and actually rather shocking to some. And I’m not the only one. Googling, I see that Colleen Friesen in a recent column on her blog (Traveling Light) under “Mennonite Musings” remembers “the first time I found out that most people didn’t have photo albums full of dead people.” She was in Grade 8 and she and a friend were looking through albums, and her friend noticed and said it was “weird.”

I don’t necessarily find it weird — I’m used to it after all. But can anyone enlighten me on this? Is this something only Mennonites did? And if so, why they and not others?

[Above, my siblings and me at our maternal grandfather's funeral in 1971. Below, a family photograph taken with the body of my paternal great-grandfather, Peter D. Doerksen of Kleefeld, Ukraine, who died Dec. 5, 1912 at age 59. My grandfather, Johann, age 25, is standing third from the right.]

Does the body need to be there?

The recent death in our family has me thinking, again, about funerals. Not so much the “plain” version as still practiced in smaller and more cohesive settings like the Mennonite settlements of Paraguay, as the ways in which we’re doing it here, in North America. 

Poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch, quoted in the previous post, notes “the disappearance of corpses in the funeral ceremony” and he’s not pleased. “These celebrations are notable for the fact that everybody’s welcome but the dead guy,” he says. “This, to me, is offensive and I think perilous for our species.”

Thomas G. Long, in a recent Christian Century article, “The good funeral,” here, complains about it too, this “entirely new pattern of memorializing the dead,” marked by: memorial services instead of funerals (remains not present), customized rather than clergy-centred rituals, focus on the deceased person’s life, emphasis on joy/celebration rather than sadness, private disposition of the body.

I don’t mean to go all Jessica Mitford-ish here but isn’t it a little disingenuous on the undertaker’s part? Didn’t the bodies disappear already, a long time ago, taken away from us into the North American funeral parlour, to be embalmed and suitably suited-up for their carefully controlled reappearance? 

Long’s article, which I found helpful for its tracing of customs in history, acknowledges as much. The problems to which today’s trends react also concern shifts that happened in the latter part of the 19th century. He says it wasn’t so much “the guild of embalming technicians” taking the funeral away, however, as “church and culture…more than ready to hand it over.” 

But I find myself “yes-but-ing” Long as well.

Cemeteries are separated from us now, he writes, not near the church to help us remember that “the living and the dead are part of one ‘holy communion’.” Yes, but those cemeteries next door could also be brutal displays of who was “in” and who was “out,” judgments we surely had no business making.

Yes, the public gathering is different when the order is reversed — a private burial followed by a memorial, or a service with the body there. But does that preclude accompanying the loved one on “the journey of Christian dead toward the life everlasting”? Can it not be done through the rituals of “the viewing” and the burial that we do?  

It seems to me that’s what’s important in the funeral as far as being Christian is concerned, is the content, the assertions of what we believe, whatever the order, body there or not. Saying, counter-culturally, that we believe there’s life after life on earth. I weighed in on aspects of this in an MB Herald editorial once, here, and want to think that with deliberation, we can do our funerals well, in spite of our inevitable shifts along with the wider culture. Or am I being too accommodating, too optimistic?