Brilliant literary criticism

Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing Jeff Gundy. Cascadia Publishing House and Herald Press, 2005. 296 pages.

References to “Mennonite writing” in Canada usually announce the arrival of another novel by Rudy Wiebe or Sandra Birdsell or Miriam Toews. In this book, while the writings of Rudy Wiebe and Di Brandt get frequent mention, Jeff Gundy spends more time on the poetry of Julia Kasdorf, William Stafford, Patrick Friesen, himself, and the one American possibly most familiar to Herald readers: Jean Janzen of Fresno, Cal. The other American Mennonite writers treated seriously are John Ruth, Dallas Wiebe, and Scott Holland.

Jeff Gundy graduated from Goshen College and earned a master’s degree in creative writing and a doctorate in American literature at Indiana University. He began teaching literature at Hesston College in Kansas and, since 1984, has been at Bluffton University in Ohio. Both are Mennonite schools.

Gundy has published much himself – both chapbooks and books of poetry and non-fiction – and many writers have benefitted from his literary workshops. In this work he is brilliant as a literary critic.

For this we must be thankful, for Gundy does indeed walk the reader through what he describes as the literary “fog of Mennonite writing.” And not only writing, but culture also, for the writers he explores most thoroughly in these pages are those who are prying and pushing on the edges between church and world, where the lines, once more clearly drawn, have become blurred.

I believe many readers will appreciate this extensive examination, both scholarly and humorous, of the recent “flowering of American Mennonite writing.”

Peter Penner is emeritus professor of history, Mount Allison University, Sackville, N.B., and lives in Calgary.