The Center for Mennonite Writing: Issue on Personal Writing

The English department of Goshen College has created a Center for Mennonite Writing online, including a new journal.  The latest issue deserves special mention because it is about personal writing, life writing, or as we know it here, memoir.

One of my stories, “Daddy’s Girl,” which tells the story of how and why I bit a tobacco worm in two at age 13, was published in this essay.  You can find it here.

For those of you who are interested in why memoir is so important, I recommend the essay of Connie T. Braun, a young scholar whose essay is called “Silence, Memory and Imagination as Story.”

Here’s a juicy morsel extracted from the essay to entice you to read the whole thing:  “History provides facts, but narrative provides the individual truths of history.  Story becomes the metaphor for a life in history.”

Congratulations, English department members both past and present, who have created an excellent new journal with great potential to become a gathering place for writers interested in any aspect of Mennonite life as a whole, Mennonite literature, and the experience and expression of individual Mennonites.