A Collection of Mennonite Literature - "On Mennonite/s Writing" by Hildi Froese Tiessen

An established and long-tenured member of the Grebel community, Dr. Hildi Froese Tiessen, now Professor Emerita, began teaching courses part-time at Grebel in 1984 and was appointed Assistant Professor of English and Peace and Conflict Studies in 1987. She was Academic Dean for 12 years and served as Interim President in 1995. A champion of Mennonite literature, Froese Tiessen has nurtured a field of study and community of Mennonite writers and scholars both inside and outside the classroom.  

Over the past fifty years, she has authored over eighty contributions to the field of Mennonite writing, including over sixty essays and book chapters, more than a dozen edited collections of special issues of journals, and a host of scholarly introductions, reviews, and encyclopedia articles. Froese Tiessen's book, On Mennonite/s Writing, is her first collection of work, consisting of eighteen essays that detail her encounters of Mennonite literature across Canada and the United States, nuanced close readings of major literary figures, and late career reflections on the changing nature of the field itself.  

Read the recent feature in Canadian Mennonite for more about Froese Tiessen's contributions to the field of Mennonite literature and On Mennonite/s Writing.

Media release from CMU Press: 

An April 4 event at Conrad Grebel University College will celebrate the publication of Hildi Froese Tiessen’s new book On Mennonite/s Writing: Selected Essays, edited and with an extended introduction by Robert Zacharias. This new book from Winnipeg’s CMU Press is the definitive collection of work by a scholar widely recognized as the primary critical figure in contemporary Mennonite literary studies.

In 1973, Hildi Froese Tiessen published the first academic essay about Rudy Wiebe’s fiction. Since then, in scholarly essays and talks, she has examined with insight the literary careers of major literary figures such as Di Brandt, Patrick Friesen, Sandra Birdsell, and David Waltner-Toews, as well as key origin figures like Arnold Dyck and Al Reimer. “The publication of this volume reveals anew the great generosity, critical acumen, and encyclopedic knowledge that Tiessen has offered to the Mennonite writing community,” says American poet Jeff Gundy.  

Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, notes that “Hildi Froese Tiessen shaped and named a field,” as she was the one who coined the phrase “Mennonite/s Writing,” with its emphasis on the creative and critical work of the community, in 1990. It was promptly adopted as the umbrella term for this literary field. Kasdorf continues: “This remarkable collection maps the rise of 50 years of Mennonite/s writing in North America, while tracking the path one woman blazed to make a career of reading and writing critically, teaching, and the domestic labors of academic administration, conference organizing, editing, and publishing.”   

“It is my hope that the collection will come to serve as the kind of touchstone resource for future scholars that I had been looking for when I first became interested in Mennonite literary studies,” writes Robert Zacharias in his Introduction. “With 18 chapters that reflect a full 50 years of criticism, On Mennonite/s Writing is a record of a truly remarkable scholarly career. Whether readers are coming to this work for the first time or returning to it once again as a resource to be built upon or wrestled with, they will find Hildi a most thoughtful guide.”  

The Afterword to On Mennonite/s Writing is a wide-ranging new essay by Dr. Froese Tiessen herself. “Such is Hildi’s extraordinary and genuine modesty that she appears not to see what she has left out of her moving Afterword,” says Magdalene Redekop, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Toronto. “It was not just that she was a person who was in the right place at the right time. It was that Hildi Froese Tiessen was THE right person in the right place at the right time. That generous and humble person who wrote the Afterword, that is the Hildi we all know and love, we Mennonites who write.”    

Raised in Winnipeg, Hildi Froese Tiessen earned her BA at University of Winnipeg and an 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. 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). She lives in Kitchener, Ontario.  

The book’s 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).