Mennonite Literature

(1979 - ): Mortifications

When the Sky Comes Looking For You

Sweetest Dance On Earth, The

Flyway

• Awards and Honours:
  • Winner: 2023 ReLit Award for Poetry
  • Shortlisted: Margaret McWilliams Award for Popular History
  • Shortlisted: McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award

• Praise:

  None have rendered the wrenching of war’s dislocations with such intensity and beauty as Sarah Ens. Flyway is sorrow artfully spun into a lyric that mends as it quests, gathers, scatters, and laments. Her family’s story of the all too common women’s flight for survival emerges with intimacy and urgency. This book is a triumph for any time, but savor it now, as power and grace in a troubled world.

  —Julia Spicher Kasdorf

  Flyway situates itself as a poem in a biodiverse temporality where all species of home is rooted. Its address, O / downtrodden / stray, directed to those scrambling for purchase on a soft ridge of song is a balm so many people on the planet could use right now as they journey to be welcomed. The question that persists, that thrums beneath this poem is as simple and endangered as tallgrass: How do you remember home?

  —Sue Goyette

  Flyway charts the devastation and dislocation of war, a haunting that becomes an inheritance. Tracing migrations both inexorable and precarious, with the tallgrass as her teacher, Sarah Ens creates a work of imagination wider than the horizon.

  —Laurie D. Graham

  Flyway is a tender and urgent re-negotiation of place, displacement, memory, and war. The poems are elemental, touched by bread and metal, grass and stone.

  —Benjamin Hertwig

Best of the Bonnet, The

• Praise:

  It’s fantastic, it’s hilarious … The Daily Bonnet is so funny!

  —Miriam Toews

Cattail Skyline

Tree of Life, The

Once Removed

• Awards and Honours:
  • Winner of the 2021 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book
  • Shortlisted for the Margaret McWilliams Award - Popular History
• Book Club Questions:
  1. Discuss the possible meaning(s) behind the title Once Removed.
  2. Describe Timothy as a character. What are his strengths/weaknesses in light of the various challenges he faces throughout the book? What motivates him? What is his relationship with authority?
  3. Describe what Edenfeld was like before BLT Wiens became mayor. What is it like now under BLT’s reign?
  4. What does “progress” look like in your community? Does it come at the expense of the community’s history or is there a balance between the new and old? Is a “balance” even necessary? Why or why not?
  5. Are there are specific buildings in your community that you’d like the see preserved in some way, and why?
  6. How important/necessary do you think “progress” and “growth” are for rural communities?
  7. Timothy’s ghostwriting projects are primarily those that record family histories. How important do you think it is to have this kind of information in writing? What other forms do family histories take? What form do they take in your own family?
  8. References to food and baking abound throughout the novel. What role does food play in the culture of Edenfeld?
  9. Randall has an obsession with Russian culture based on his understanding of the Mennonite diaspora of the 19^th and early 20^th century. Why do you think that is? What drives people to possess a fixation on our “roots”?
  10. What function do the rumours about Elsie Dyck play in the psyches of Edenfeld’s residents?
  11. Describe the novel’s attitude towards religion.
  12. How does the use of satire throughout the novel shape your impression of Edenfeld, its residents, and the cultural standards?
  13. On page 52-53, Timothy remarks: “Moving to the city is so twentieth century... Who would I be in the city? Just another hayseed from the country trying to seek fame and fortune on Henderson Highway.” Do you think it’s better to be a big fish in a little pond, or a little fish in a big pond?
  14. Timothy and Katie seem to enjoy a relatively harmonious marriage. What is it about their marriage that makes it “work”? What do you think are the keys to a successful marriage

• Praise:

  An affectionate pastiche of small-town Mennonite life, replete with duty, folly, irreverence, and joy.

  —David Bergen

  Hilarious as Schitt's Creek, sinister as Hitchcock, Once Removed gives us Timothy Heppner, the quintessential non-resistant Mennonite, in a comic tour de force that exposes the friction between progress and preservation, ethnic pride and ethnic embarrassment, commerce and heritage, truth and boosterism, and the coercion and acquiescence that is as real to the big city as to a small town.

  -Armin Wiebe, Grandmother Laughing

World is Mostly Sky, The

• Awards and Honours:
  • Winner of the 2021 Word Guild Award- General Market Non-Fiction - Specialty Book
  • Shortlisted for the 2021 Word Guild Award - Best Book Cover Award
  • Shortlisted for the 2021 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award
  • Shortlisted for the 2022 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry/Prix Lansdowne de poésie
• Book Club Questions:
  1. The epigraph before the table of contents reads “a boat is not / the whole world / (the world / is mostly / sky).” Discuss the possible meaning(s) behind this statement.
  2. Of the three sections in the book, which resonated most with you? Why?
  3. In what ways did this collection challenge or confirm your understanding of “millennial culture”?
  4. Within the context of the book, what does it mean to be a woman in 2020?
  5. Which poems explore feelings of being dissociated or disconnected from the body and which poems take a more embodied stance? How (and where) is the body presented as a place of refuge, joy, and strength but also as a place of vulnerability and pain?
  6. How does this collection address the current environmental crisis? Find examples in the book. What is the speaker’s reaction towards this reality?
  7.  What other forms of “loss” does the book explore, and how does the speaker handle them? Which one(s) resonated with you the most?
  8. The World Is Mostly Sky illustrates the empowerment that comes from being part of a strong community of women (i.e., sisters, parents, cousins, classmates, and friends). What relationships in your life give you this same sense of fulfillment and empowerment in the face of turmoil and crisis?
  9. The notion of “place” is very important in this collection; find examples that illustrate how “place” defines the speaker’s sense of self during her formative years. What are the places that defined you as a young person? Do these places still hold the same importance for you? How have they changed?
  10. What poem(s) stuck with you the most? Why?

• Praise:

  In The World Is Mostly Sky, Sarah Ens bewitches us with broken robin eggs and belly button rings, silos and steeples, stones and stars. This stunning debut bursts with transfixing hosannas for an eerie coming of age—and with “purple-tongued” benedictions that sing the “in/breaking divine.” Ens’ poems have a contagious and fierce intensity, akin to an intimate conversation between the closest of friends. Her poems haunt. They ricochet. They pierce and shine.— Sandra Ridley, Silvija

  Ens’ vibrating debut gnaws inside the dark vat of a prairie girl’s becoming. These poems are thorough, intimate, fiercely sensual processes, “tiny gnathic movements / digesting disaster.” In The World Is Mostly Sky, Ens takes the world by mouth, turning submerged matters into spit-back, unroofed, fully-lit desires. Throw away the old Hitchcock femme fatale script. Ens’ debut is “one true scream.” —Jennifer Still, Comma

  These sharp, smart poems are embodied in the truest sense: of and faithful to the body. Whether she’s writing of girlhood or womanhood, of the prairies or the city, Ens’ vivid, forceful language fully engages and challenges her readers.— Rhea Tregebov, Rue des Rosiers

All That Belongs

• Awards and Honours:

  Shortlisted: Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award

• Book Club Questions:
  1. All That Belongs is about family relationships – mother-daughter, niece-uncle, brother-sister, brother-brother, husband-wife, friend-friend and more. Discuss these relationships. Which did you enjoy most? Which find difficult? Did the complexities of family and marriage resonate with you?
  2. Shame has worked its way into Catherine’s psyche, sometimes in ways that seem small and unreasonable? Why, do you think, was she especially vulnerable to shame’s power? Are you sympathetic to this aspect of her character? How has she formed herself against the shame?
  3. Another theme in All That Belongs is time. Of Darrell, Catherine says, “I had to pass through every year I’d lived beyond his death before I encountered him again. The injustice of this…was overwhelming.” (181) How does the episode with Jim’s souvenir clock illustrate Catherine’s frustration with the relentlessness of time, but also – perhaps  – convey some amusement about it?
  4. We see Uncle Must mostly through Catherine’s eyes. Are you sympathetic with her  conflicted youthful feelings and frustration with him? (“I steeled myself against him.” 191) What does the unusual family moniker (Uncle Must) for Gerhard/George say about him? How does the event revealed in the packet letters and documents affect your understanding of him?
  5. Think of the various letters in the novel: Uncle Must’s notes to Catherine, his letters to the German Mennonite newspaper and college and his brother; Darrell’s letters to Catherine and his parents; Catherine’s Moleskine notes to Darrell and her uncle. How do the sometimes contradictory voices of these letters affect your views of their writers? Do you agree that there’s always something “hidden in the folds”? (248)
  6. Catherine’s attempts to face and accept “all that belongs” to her are, at times, bold, and at other times, tentative. Where do you see the boldness? The hesitation? Is her quest more about acceptance than final answers to unresolved mysteries? When she learns the shocking “truth” of her uncle’s archive, does her insistence that it doesn’t matter surprise you as it surprises her? (“I could scarcely believe my own freedom in this turn of events; me, who’d always been so ashamed… I would have to practice saying my own genealogical truth…. Weave acceptance in, maybe even pride… Or encouragement…” 277) How has the process of remembrance prepared and helped her to this conclusion?
  7. How does Lucy’s character contribute to the themes of shame, acceptance, growth, and love in the book?
  8. Catherine considers herself a competent, and independent woman, yet she resents retiring “alone”. Does her yearning for Jim represent a reluctance to engage with remembrance? Is this year actually a gift that forces her to remember and do some long-neglected grieving? Discuss.
  9. Discuss how Mother Edna’s state of disability and increasing confusion both complicates and clarifies aspects of Catherine’s preoccupation with the dead? Are the generational gaps between mother and daughter adequately bridged?             
  10. “The good thing about both yearning and remembering was that not much of it happened on the surface. Control could be maintained. I had—still have—a tremendous capacity for calmness on the surface. As well as a tremendous capacity for effervescence when required.” Discuss in reference to narrator Catherine’s character.
  11. Of Darrell’s going off to walk with Uncle Must, Catherine says: “A choice he’d made to single out the world of men from the wider humanity we shared, some difference I was beginning to perceive that put me at a disadvantage.” (189) Discuss this in terms of both Catherine’s feminism and the losses she has experienced on account of her brother.
  12. “My uncle’s strange paralysis about women was hardly original to him; it was the inheritance of an error long and pernicious.” (91) How does the patriarchal tradition affect Catherine, her mother Edna, Sharon Miller?
  13. Although shame affects both cases, how does remembering Darrell differ for Catherine from remembering Uncle Must? In what ways are the two preoccupations linked? Has Catherine finally grieved her brother properly?
  14. Music is at the core of Jim’s being, and was also important for Darrell and Catherine in their teen years. Snatches of song appear at various points in the book. Do you have a favourite musical reference in the novel? Do we ever exhaust ways to sing about love? (see 284 and 322)
  15. What are your impressions of and reactions to Sharon Miller?
  16. Catherine recalls learning that “Every document represents a construction of some kind and creates an impression.” Do you agree? What impression do the documents (photos and packet papers) of the novel leave with you?
  17. How do Catherine’s roadtrip reflections on her infertility fit the themes of the book (shame, love, aging, memory, acceptance)? At the end of mulling she says, “[Uncle Must] bore his traumatized mother inside him. And now, in some crazy, unintended way, I cradled him and his mother Elizabeth and my brother Darrell, too.” Do you agree with her interpretation of this year of remembering as an act of maternal nurturing?
  18. Do you think three poems about Darrell comprise enough of an “archive” for him? Sufficiently contain, that is, who he was? What about the slender packet regarding Uncle Must? Do they contain the man, or are archives by their nature mere “husks”?
  19. “Was it my hope to understand, then love? This seemed an error to me now. Understanding came to the aid of love, but shouldn’t be a precondition, should it? Love had to stand on its own.” Discuss.
  20. In All That Belongs, Catherine is looking back at a year of “preoccupation with the dead,” a year which involves looking back even further back into the past. How do you imagine her and Jim’s life now – beyond that year of remembrance?

• Praise:

  Catherine, the narrator in All That Belongs, is an archivist who, curiously, has waited until retirement to explore her own genealogy in search of answers to questions that have haunted her since childhood. Dora Dueck weaves an eccentric tapestry of present and past from the uncomfortably scratchy fabric of family secrets and lies. Her characters are complex: loving, vulnerable, ashamed, frightened, always drawn with compassion, but even in sorrow and grief never descending to the sentimental. In each of our lives there are those who remain puzzles. Dora Dueck offers insight that goes far beyond archives.

  -Betty Jane Hegerat author of The Boy

  After a stranger playfully suggests that she might have “a little embarrassment” in her family tree, retiring archivist Catherine Riediger embarks on an initially reluctant journey into her family’s history. The result is a gentle but compelling meditation on love, aging, the nature of memory and the need to acknowledge and forgive the pain of the past.

  —K.D. Miller, author of Late Breaking

  All That Belongs is a lyrical, keenly-observed study of the strange and difficult beauties of family life. Dueck's writing captures the crackle and hiss of submerged memories and mysterious loyalties. This is a moving story, flavoured with delicacy and integrity.

  -Sue Sorensen, author of A Large Harmonium

Salvation of Yasch Siemens, The

• Book Club Questions:
  1. If you are unfamiliar with Mennonite culture, how does The Salvation of Yasch Seimens portray the ideologies and values of this group? If you are familiar with Mennonite culture, how does the book uphold or challenge your understanding of this group?
  2. Yasch’s dialect combines English, Plautdietsch or Flat German, and the rhythm of German sentence structures. How does this use of language and syntax impact your reading and understanding of the novel?
  3. In Douglas Reimer has described The Salvation of Yasch Siemens as an archetypal “quest for the father” novel. Do you agree with this assessment? Why or why not?
  4. How does the novel address sexuality and queerness? Is Yasch comfortable with his own sexuality? Explain.
  5. What is Yasch’s relationship to the church? Does he come across as a particularly pious character? Explain.
  6. What does it meant to find “salvation”? Where, exactly, does Yasch find his “salvation” in this novel? Is it through his testimony? Through his relationship with Oata? Or something else? Explain.
  7. Is The Salvation of Yasch Seimens a feminist book? Why or why not? What other prevalent themes do you see at work in the novel?
  8. Does Yasch change in any fundamental way from the beginning of the novel to the end? How so? Are there any pivotal character-altering moments in his life?
  9. The chapter titled “Mouse Lake” is new to this 2^nd edition of The Salvation of Yasch Siemens. What does this chapter add to the narrative as a whole?
  10. This novel is told as a collection of episodic stories. What are some of the gaps you would like to see filled? Now that you have a sense of Armin Wiebe’s humour, how do you think these scenes might unfold?

Glitter and fall

Grandmother, Laughing

• Book Club Questions:
  1. How does this novel work as a love story?
  2. What images stayed in your mind after reading the novel? How did these images affect your reading experience?
  3. How did the title serve your experience of reading the novel?
  4. Discuss the central choices Susch, Obrum, and Blatz make. Discuss the consequences of these choices.
  5. How do secrets affect the actions and happiness of the characters?
  6. Although the story is set in the past, in what way could the characters’ situation have relevance in today’s world?
  7. What relationship did you see between the tall grass prairie setting and the characters’ emotional states?
  8. Discuss Susch’s reliability as a narrator.
  9. Although they only appear on the page through the memories of Blatz and Obrum, discuss how Sonia and Maria influence the decisions Obrum, Susch, and Blatz make?
  10. How does the shadow at the window drive the story?
  11. Why does baseball matter so much to Isaac?
  12. Discuss the challenges of happily sustaining a love triangle? How many triangles are there in the novel?
  13. How is this novel about grace?
  14. How is this novel about breathing?
  15. How is this a novel about parents’ ideals and eccentricities and their effect on their children?
  16. Preacher Funk warns his congregation about “talking through the flower.” In what way is the novel about unclear communication and its consequences?
  17. Susch and Obrum have a son named Isaac. Discuss the significance of that.
  18. How does art inform the characters’ spirituality?
  19. Discuss the various grief experiences the characters have, and how trauma is processed and embodied by the characters.
  20. Discuss the significance of the lawn swing, the wedding dress, and the piano to the different characters.
  21. In some ways, Susch’s story is bookended with Susch’s grandmother and her great-granddaughter. Discuss the role of familial memory and intergenerational “ghosts” in the novel.
  22. How is Susch’s home with Blatz and Obrum peaceful? How is it violent?

Gloryland

Too Far Gone

• Awards and Honours:
  • Short-listed for the 2016 Prix Aurora Award
  • Shortlisted for the Mary Scorer award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher
  • Shortlisted for the Michael Van Rooy Award for Genre Fiction
• Reviews:

  • Too Far Gone is a gritty, whirlwind romp, designed to lead fantasy fans on a personalized tour as Norse mythology plows headlong into downtown Edmonton.

    —Chris Rutkowski, Winnipeg Free Press

  • Myth and real life collide to remake ideas of what is normal, comfortable, and taken-for-granted.

    —Derek Newman-Stille, Speculating Canada

  • The final showdown is Epic with a capital E.

    —Helen Michaud, AE

  • Ted is [...] conflicted, he’s complicated, and comes across excellently on the page.

    —Paul Weimer, SF Signal

• Praise:

  Ted Callan is that great creation—the hero who struggles as much against himself as his enemies. Yes, he can be a jerk. To his family. To his friends. But with the end of the world coming? Ted’s the guy I’d want in my corner. Real, gritty, and bursting with action as well as fantastic characters, Too Far Gone is a triumph.

  —Julie E. Czerneda, author of The Clan Chronicles series

  Don't miss this series! Chadwick Ginther is a compelling voice in urban fantasy.

  —New York Times bestselling author, Ann Aguirre

Armin's Shorts

• Book Club Questions:

  From the Gutenthal Galaxy

  1. From reading the stories in ‘From the Gutenthal Galaxy’ how would you describe the community of Gutenthal?
  2. What themes or motifs do these Gutenthal stories have in common?
  3. Two of the stories feature Oata as a character. What do you make of her?
  4. Water is a feature in three of the Gutenthal stories. What significance does this have?
  5. What is your impression of Gutenthal men as presented in these stories?
  6. While four of the stories in the first section are written in a first person voice, the stories in this section are written in third person. What difference does that make?

  Beginnings

  7. In her cover blurb, Susie Moloney says, “I don’t think ‘Barn Dance’ will ever leave me.” What characteristics of the story might have led her to say that?
  8. Do the styles these Gutenthal stories are written in enhance or hinder your reading experience?
  9. Why might this section be labeled ‘Beginnings’?

  Subarctic Stories

  10. In the stories ‘The Little Kollouch’ and ‘A Woman Who Married Yamozha’, are the first person narrators convincing as women? Why or why not?
  11. What do the three stories in this grouping suggest about the importance of stories and their role when cultures meet?
  12. How do these stories make you feel about your own stories?

  The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz

  13. In the story ‘And Besides God Made Poison Ivy’, what questions are hinted at but not answered?
  14. What do you notice about the narrative voice of the first five stories in this section?
  15. How would you identify the era or time period of the stories in this section?
  16. What are the dilemmas Suschkje faces in ‘Engel Bengel’ and ‘Mary’s Creek’, and how does she handle them? Are her actions credible?
  17. In ‘Moonlight Rehearsal’ the narrative voice changes from the previous five stories. How does that affect your reading experience?
  18. How would you characterize Suschkje? Kjrayel Kehler? Beethoven Blatz?
  19. What do you see in the relationship between Suschkje and Kjrayel?
  20. How about the relationship between Suschkje and Blatz?

  Olfert

  21. How would you describe Olfert’s world and his place in it?
  22. What links these five stories?
  23. What strikes you about Olfert’s relationship with women?

  Return

  24. What are these last two pieces about?
  25. Are these final pieces stories or poems? What makes you think this?

  General questions about the book

  26. Would you recommend this book to other readers? Why or why not?
  27. What role does music play in these stories?
  28. Comment about Armin Wiebe’s use of language. Does the inclusion of “non-English” words enhance or hinder your reading experience?
  29. What wines and finger food would complement a discussion of Armin’s Shorts?

Eigenheim

Cutthroats & Other Poems

What Lies Behind

Tombstone Blues

• Awards and Honours:

  Short-listed for the 2014 Aurora Awards

  Short-listed for the 2014 Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award

• Reviews:

  Ginther layers his rejuvenated Nine Worlds with a crackling good narrative and action set pieces that practically cry out for a Guillermo del Toro adaptation (I''m seeing Josh Brolin as a good choice for Ted).

  —Corey Redekop

  The book's action set-pieces could anchor a Peter Jackson movie, but it's the personal side that adds depth.

  —Helen Michaud, AE - The Canadian Science Fiction Review

  Ginther's mythos, bringing Norse gods and magical creatures within Manitoba's borders, is complexly woven...

  —Chris Rutkowski, Winnipeg Free Press

  Ginther has a Bardic authorial voice that aids in weaving a tale of stunning imagery and fast-paced action.

  —Kerry Unruh, Rhubarb Magazine