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.






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

