Celebrate the launch of On Mennonite/s Writing, a collection of essays by literary scholar Dr. Hildi Froese Tiessen, edited by Rob Zacharias.
All are welcome to attend this book launch reception, held in the Grebel Chapel. Books will be available for sale during this launch.
"On Mennonite/s Writing"
In 1973 Hildi Froese Tiessen published one of the earliest essays about Rudy Wiebe's “Mennonite novels.” Over the next fifty years, Dr. Froese Tiessen would go on to author some eighty additional contributions to the field of Mennonite/s writing, including over sixty essays and book chapters, more than a dozen edited collections and special issues of journals, and a host of scholarly introductions, reviews, and encyclopedia articles. On Mennonite/s Writing is the first collection of Dr. Froese Tiessen’s work, gathering eighteen essays that reflect a half-century of critical engagement, including: field-defining encounters with the wider emergence of Mennonite literature across Canada and the United States; nuanced close readings of major literary figures such as Wiebe, Di Brandt, and Julia Spicher Kasdorf; a decade-long search for a “lost” novel; and late-career reflections on the changing nature of the field itself.
Edited and with an extended introduction from Dr. Robert Zacharias (York University), and including a wide-ranging and personal Afterword by Dr. Froese Tiessen herself, On Mennonite/s Writing is thedefinitive collection of work by a scholar widely recognized as the primary critical figure in contemporary Mennonite literary studies.
About the Author
Hildi Froese Tiessen lives in Kitchener, Ontario. Raised in Manitoba, she earned her BA at University of Winnipeg and MA and PhD at University of Alberta. She taught English and Peace & Conflict Studies (1987–2012) at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo, where she also served as academic dean. Before her retirement she was literary editor of Conrad Grebel Review and on the editorial board of Rhubarb magazine. She is the editor of Liars and Rascals (1989), an anthology of short fiction by Mennonite authors, and also 11 Encounters with Mennonite Fiction (2017). With Paul Tiessen, she is the editor of After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery’s Letters to Ephraim Weber (2006).
Editor Robert Zacharias teaches at Toronto’s York University. He is the author of Reading Mennonite Writing: A Study in Minor Transnationalism (2022) and Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature (2013); he is also the editor of After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America (2015).
