For Mennonite-raised Nightbitch author Rachel Yoder, what excites her most about speaking at EMU is learning how Mennonites will react to her book. “Will they be offended? Will they relate? Will they see it as productive or worthless?” — all questions she’s pondered in an email to EMU News.

“Now that I’m more outside the Mennonite tradition than in, it feels important to me to remain in conversation with the community regardless, not only as a means to understand the tradition better, but as a means to understand my own story, why I make art, why I have to write things that are ‘dark’ or ‘evil’ or ‘unpleasant,’” said Yoder, who will present at EMU’s Writers Read Author Series on Friday, Feb. 28.

Yoder grew up in a Mennonite community in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Ohio before studying English literature as an undergraduate student at Georgetown University. She is a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona. Currently, she serves as assistant professor of screenwriting and cinema arts at the University of Iowa. 

Her debut novel Nightbitch, published in 2021, is a “strange and unforgettable story about a sleep-deprived stay-at-home mother who, after apparently growing extra nipples, sharper canine teeth and a tail, develops an ‘exhilarating and magical’ ability to literally become a powerful bitch. ()

“It became a cult hit, was named one of the best books of the year by Esquire, got shortlisted for a PEN/Hemingway award — and has now been made into a film starring Amy Adams and directed by Marielle Heller.”

EMU Professor Kevin Seidel said the Language and Literature Department tends to invite authors for its Writers Read series who have some connection to the Mennonite tradition or who can “help us see past the edges of that tradition.” Yoder, he said, meets both of those conditions.

Seidel credited fellow EMU English Professor Kirsten Beachy with introducing him to Nightbitch a couple years ago. 

“She handed me the book with a smile that, looking back, probably meant I dare you to read this,” he recalled. “The first paragraph was so brilliant, so affectionately self-deprecating, and so off-kilter funny that I had to read the rest.” 

The three-time New York Times-bestselling author joked about her start as a second-grade poet: “Lots of poems about dead cats. Gosh, it’s hard to live in the country by a road.”

She clued people in on a beloved writing location: “I do miss Panera. There’s lots to see. I used to sit by the beverage dispenser. Lots of conversations to listen to. You would not believe how many people fill up a cup of hibiscus tea and drop it on the ground.”

And she also told moderator and English professor Kirsten Beachy about some of her favorite memories while at EMU. For instance, the smell inside the Campus Center is one she’s never forgotten, she admitted.

“I always credit this place with completely changing my worldview,” Baer said. “I went to the Middle East, and just being able to see so much outside myself and how so many different people live… I’m grateful for that.”

A recording of the event can be viewed on the .

In the book, Isay and Millett present the stories of people and the work they love. A waitress, a public defender, a teacher, an engineer, a doctor and many more “demonstrate how work can be about much more than just making a living, that chasing dreams and finding inspiration in unexpected places can transform a vocation into a calling,” the publisher’s blurb states. “Their shared sense of passion, honor, and commitment brings deeper meaning and satisfaction to every aspect of their lives.”

EMU’s Common Read establishes common ground for discussion in classrooms and other venues. This year, nearly 300 students in classes ranging from first-year writing to a graduate career counseling course will receive copies of the book.

“The book provides an excellent opportunity for faculty and staff to share their own stories of calling and vocation, and to invite students to consider the directions their own stories are taking,” said core curriculum director Kirsten Beachy, a professor of visual and communication arts. “It has the benefit of bringing diverse, personal voices from a broad spectrum of occupations into the classroom.”

Campus events will focus on the theme of calling. An October Suter Science Seminar will highlight Dr. Jill Stoltzfus’s path from studying psychology at EMU to becoming research institute director at St. Luke’s University Health Network. On Nov. 7, faculty members will share from their own experiences in a convocation titled “.” The Academic and Creative Excellence Festival on April 18 will feature keynote speaker , professor of wildlife at Clemson University, who will talk about his work as a naturalist.

“I like that we’ll read stories from a variety of persons and professions,” Jennifer Ulrich, technical services librarian said of Callings. “I hope it helps students and all of us think about our work and calling. Is it the same thing?”

Callings is the fifth book from , which seeks “to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world,” its website states. It began in 2003 as a booth in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, and last year released the 500th episode of its podcast.

Previous Common Read selections at EMU have included Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Random House, 2015), Memory of Water  by Emmi Itäranta (Teos, 2012), Searching for Zion: the Quest for Home in the African Diaspora by Emily Raboteau (Grove Press, 2013), The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (W. W. Norton, 2010), and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown, 2007).

Though surely all professors at ��ݮ���� were excited by the inaugural Academic and Creative Excellence Festival on campus last week, new faculty member Sonia Balasch Rodriguez was beaming.

Balasch, who teaches linguistics and Spanish, arrived at EMU in the fall of 2017 with the goal of encouraging scholarly research among her students. On Thursday, three of her students presented linguistics research, including Abigail Shelly’s study of the historical and contemporary use of the word like.

Indeed, Shelly’s effort to participate was noteworthy: a member of the cross-cultural group currently traveling in India, she made unsuccessful multiple attempts to email a video of her presentation. So it was that classmate Lydia Haggard provided interpretation — in front of a photo of Shelly and Shelly’s poster.

“I am so pleased,” Balasch said. “This is just so exciting to see my own students’ research and their enthusiasm about their work.”

EMU’s inaugural Academic and Creative Excellence (ACE) Festival culminated the academic year with a day-long all-university celebration of scholarly research and creative arts from undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty and staff. The schedule included oral presentations, poster sessions, gallery receptions, and theater, arts and music showcases. [Click here to view the schedule.]

“This festival highlights the productivity of our students, faculty and staff around scholarship across all disciplines,” said Provost Fred Kniss. “Good scholarship correlates to good teaching and good student learning. I have been thrilled with the energy and the turnout and the quality of work around campus today.”

Professor Tara Kishbaugh, chair of the Intellectual Life Committee when festival planning began several years ago, noted a major challenge in adjusting the academic calendar. But the committee, currently chaired by Professor Kirsten Beachy, persevered. The celebration was a novel event to join others planned for the university’s Centennial year, and the concept united many different smaller celebrations of scholarship on campus, Kishbaugh added.

“Many of these events, such as the student art shows, senior shows, the STEM poster bowl and quiz session, have been going on for years,” she said. “This festival coalesces them all into a high-energy celebration of scholarly energy across the university. It’s important that today celebrates scholarship and creativity in all disciplines, reaching across all interests and out to all audiences.”

Attuned to the presence of many students not normally in the Suter Science Center, Kishbaugh especially noted the loud chatter as groups circulated through poster sessions in the center’s concourse or stopped to check out engineering projects. “It’s been really nice to see non-STEM students here wandering around and asking questions.”

That cohesive feel of intellectual engagement started with Wednesday evening’s keynote address by Fania Davis, Kishbaugh said.

Davis, a social justice advocate and Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow with the Council of Independent Colleges, connected her talk with EMU’s 2017-18 Common Read — Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me — and some of the racial justice-focused programming hosted by the university throughout the year. A long-time partner of EMU’s  (CJP) and founder of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, Davis is currently focusing her efforts on furthering truth and reconciliation processes for racial healing in the United States. As part of her Wilson Fellow activities, she also visited several classes throughout the week.

Here’s a brief overview of ACE Festival events:

• One-act performance by the advanced performance class;
• Student-facilitated playback theater session;
• Performance of The Spitfire Grill, EMU’s spring musical;
• Showings of digital media class projects;
• Poster sessions, including the annual STEM poster contest and STEM Quiz Bowl (see winners here);
• Photo print and portfolio class exhibit opening and student talks by 16 students;
• Senior art shows and film showing;
• Faculty authors reception;
• Selected capstone presentations by graduate nursing, education and conflict transformation students;
• Oral presentations on the themes of story and memory, contemporary culture and spirituality, race and gender in literature, wealth/poverty and development, and various topics in applied social science and environmental sustainability;
• Various musical performances.

Staff writer Christopher Clymer Kurtz contributed to this article.

Gundy will present his poetry and other works at a Writers Read event in ��ݮ����’s Common Grounds at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 15.

“Although he has described himself and other artists as existing on the fringes of Mennonite community, Gundy “is widely embraced as a leading Mennonite poet, and he is well-recognized in the wider literary milieu,” says , assistant professor and director of the EMU core curriculum.

Gundy’s books are many, among them three that garnered acclaim: Abandoned Homeland (Bottom Dog Press, 2016) was shortlisted for the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, 2016; for Somewhere Near Defiance (Anhinga Press, 2014) he was named the ; and Spoken among the Trees (Akron University Press, 2007) earned the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Award. His poems have also appeared in , , and elsewhere.

A professor at Bluffton University, Gundy also plays guitar and writes songs and nonfiction essays – see in the Jan. 2018 issue of Brevity and his collection Songs from an Empty Cage.

At EMU, he said he will “look for a curve in the whole reading, a kind of rhythm perhaps” that will include tested favorites, a balance of lighter and more serious poems, and “a few new poems, just to see how they sound when read aloud to a real audience,” he said.

“Poetry is a tremendous personal and communal resource, a great storehouse of wisdom, beauty, consolation and joy,” Gundy said recently – and then quickly added, “This is not to make such grand claims for my poems.”

Others, however, make those claims for him. Fellow poet Philip Metres has said that “Gundy’s poetry reminds us, over and over, that paying attention to the delights and troubles of existence becomes a kind of psalm to this botched and beautiful creation.”

Gundy “turns a critical yet compassionate eye to the Mennonites and the broader culture,” Beachy said. “His poems tend to be lyrical and are frequently funny and/or political.”

In a 2010 Work and Hope post, Laura Lehman Amstutz wrote that Gundy’s “The Cookie Poem” from Rhapsody with Dark Matter (Bottom Dog Press, 2000) “is about remembering who we are. It points to Anabaptist history in imagery, and reminds me of a God who delights in us all, even in our failures, collective and individual…. The idea of God looking at me and saying, in Cookie Monster’s voice ‘ooohhhh cookie!’ makes me giggle.”

Gundy will sell and sign books at the Writers Read, and said he always hopes to meet new people, “especially students who very likely don’t know much about me or my work.”

Judging from past experience, said language and literature professor Vi Dutcher, those students will be glad to have met him. “Students enjoy being in his presence and discussing poetry with him,” she said.

Each year since 2013, faculty, staff, and students select a book that relates to contemporary situations and which will generate conversation around important themes. Most of the finalists for this year “connected to themes of race and justice, an indicator of what’s in the general zeitgeist in our country and on our minds at EMU,” said professor and Intellectual Life Committee member .

In the series of letters to his teenage son about his life experiences as an African American male, Coates challenges readers to examine assumptions about race, history, education, faith and social change.

Common Read activities at EMU throughout the year will include conversations about race, diversity and identity, including Anabaptist identity.

Five Thursday noon reading circles, beginning Sept. 14 in the East Dining Room and facilitated by Professor , will jump-start the discussion. Each hour-long conversation will focus on consecutive sections of the book. A second round of reading circles will run for five weeks starting Wednesday, Nov. 1 from 5-6 p.m. in Northlawn Great Lounge.

Social justice activist and civil rights attorney Fania Davis will contribute to those discussions in April when she spends a week on campus as a , sponsored by the .

Toni Morrison calls Between the World and Me “required reading,” and wrote, “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory.”

The book was chosen long before the that threatened the nation’s sense of inclusiveness and angered many in EMU’s social justice-oriented community. But Beachy thinks that there is plenty in the book to challenge even this sympathetic, academic culture, from conceptions of whiteness that Coates says is at the heart of racism, to his response to the reverence for non violence in civil rights action in a world “secured and ruled by savage means.”

Coates also rejects the “magic” of religious faith: “The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible — that is precisely why they are so precious,” he writes. However, in their introduction to the collection of original essays Between the World of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christianity (Wipf & Stock: forthcoming), professors and note a Tweet by Coates in which he said, “Best thing about #BetweenTheWorldAndMe is watching Christians engage the work. Serious learning experience for me.” Their book, they say, “can be read as a response” to Coates’ insights.

“The value of Between the World and Me for all of us in this campus community is that it invites us to see through the eyes of another person as he honestly relates to his son his own, specific experience of what it means to live in a black body in America,” said Beachy.

The award-winning speculative fiction, which students and faculty were encouraged to read throughout this academic year, imagines a future with diminishing freshwater and its effect on society and a family of “tea masters.”

“The book is an important read for anyone who is concerned about access to basic resources, like clean water,” says Professor Kirsten Beachy.

“Before I even started writing ‘Memory of Water,’ I was very interested in Japanese tea culture and its connection with Zen Buddhism,” said Itäranta in a March 2016 episode of Speculate!, a literary podcast. “I was also at the same time following news about climate change and its impact on freshwater resources.”

“Itäranta’s work stands out among novels written for young adult audiences,” says Beachy. “It takes place in a futuristic world, yet the way that it centers around the practice of the tea ceremony gives it cultural resonance, a sense of weight and history.”

Speculate! described the book, which Itäranta wrote simultaneously in Finnish and English, as “environmentally conscious speculative fiction, the kind of thing people call eco-punk or bio-punk.”

Itäranta was raised in Tampere, Finland, and now resides in Canterbury, U.K. She has traveled globally promoting Memory of Water and her second book, The Weaver (Harper Voyager), which was released in the U.S. last November. In April 2016, a polar bear cub born at the Brno Zoo in the Czech Republic was named Noria, after the main character in Memory of Water.

The next Common Read text will be Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) by Ta-Nehisi Coates, followed by the StoryCorps collection Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work (Penguin Press, 2016).

The reading will take place at 6:30 p.m. in Common Grounds, with light refreshments available.

Her first book, (Ruka Press) was published in 2011. The second, (University Press of New England), was published this year.

In Vulture, Fallon travels through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona and India to care for and observe this “often unloved though vitally important – and uniquely beautiful – bird.”

“Her writing combines a wonderful lyricism with good science journalism. She’s not afraid to get personal in her pursuit of her birds,” says Professor Kirsten Beachy.

Fallon is co-founder of the non-profit . Along with her veterinarian husband Jesse, two other board members, an intern and volunteers, the organization provides medical response for injured birds, hosts educational bird workshops for children and sponsors citizen scientific research projects. Her workshops feature six raptor “ambassadors” that cannot be released into the wild because of previous wounds.

The author first visited EMU in 2013, when she presented Cerulean Blues, “about the Cerulean Warbler, which is a jewel-like migratory songbird whose habitat is threatened by strip-mining in Appalachia,” says Beachy. “Just a precious little bird, one with which it is easy to sympathize.”

Beachy and Fallon studied together at West Virginia University (WVU) in the MFA in creative writing program.

Fallon has taught a “Writing Appalachian Ecology” class at WVU since 2012. The course takes students to the Fernow Experimental Forest near Parsons, where they learn to communicate scientific research to a broad audience and reflect on ecological change and their relationship with the environment.

She has also taught creative writing workshops at WVU and Virginia Tech since 2009.

***

In two years, sophomore Nicole Litwiller has used her artistic worldview, psychology background and creative problem-solving skills to carve out her own niche at ��ݮ����. When the major came here from Sarasota, Florida, she only knew a handful of people on campus.

“I remember the first week or so feeling really lost. Once I started getting involved, I kind of found my stride. And that’s how I knew this place was home,” says Litwiller.

Litwiller is extending that sense of belonging to other students through the “,”  a campus-wide competition designed to increase student involvement and foster team camaraderie.

Housing-based teams “check in” to campus events, which are assigned different point values. The team with the highest percentage of involvement at the end of the year will receive a trophy and special celebration during Springfest. This semester is the “pilot program” of what would ideally be an annual, year-long event explains Litwiller, whose Maplewood Dorm team is currently in the lead.

The Cup grew out of brainstorming sessions in the (SGA), where Litwiller is a senator.

“I love Harry Potter,” says Litwiller.

The Royals Cup is based on the “House Cup,” which is awarded to one of four “houses” (dormitories) in the magical Hogwarts School. “That inspired me to think about it in a way that the EMU campus could benefit from, whether you’re a ‘muggle’ (magic-less human) or a wizard,” she jokes.

Lead Residence Director Scott Eyre, Director of Student Programs Rachel Roth Sawatzky, Professor Kirsten Beachy and Rachel Holderman, SGA vice president of marketing, have been the other primary organizers behind the competition.

Litwiller is also part of the and . She’s also joined the planning committee for the Inauguration Gala, a formal event April 7 to celebrate the of Dr. Susan Schultz Huxman as EMU’s ninth president.

Litwiller’s artistic spirit informs her involvement in each of these.

“Art is just something that’s always been a part of me,” she says. “It is how I observe things, and how I look at the ‘little beauties’ … that helps me to look at things a little bit differently than someone with a more scientific or mathematical mind might think of things.”

Litwiller says that, besides art, participating in Odyssey of the Mind in high school – a youth competition which fosters creative problem-solving – has informed her approach to college. Her liberal arts concentration in psychology helps Litwiller consider individual and group wellbeing within the many organizations she navigates.

Music, good conversation, and reflection keep Litwiller energized for this work. “Get involved in the things that give you the most energy, but also make sure to take times for things that restore you,” she advises.

Nominate a student with an email to lauren.jefferson@emu.edu.

That last one merited all caps from her keyboard because she admits the page was “begun in blatant celebration of St. Martin’s Press for publishing my novel SMALL BLESSINGS on July 15th, 2014!” is her debut novel, published when she was in her mid-60s.

Woodroof will read from her work and talk about writing, her calling to write, her creative process and other topics when she comes to ��ݮ����’s Common Grounds coffee house at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 4. A time for Q&A will follow. The event is part of EMU’s , sponsored by the language and literature department.

, professor of English and chair of the language and literature department, said he has enjoyed reading Small Blessings. “What I love about the novel is the light that Woodroof shines on the goodness in two of her main characters, both of whom have the ability to call forth the goodness in others,” Medley said. “Her novel seems to me a rebuke to contemporary cynicism about human nature.”

Shenandoah Valley residents likely know Woodroof best for her work at , the Harrisonburg station from which she recently retired. She has also written for National Public Radio and the Virginia Foundation for Humanities Radio Features bureau, published essays in several major newspapers, and wrote an earlier non-fiction book based on her recovery from substance abuse, . Woodroof says on that she loves words because of “their power to tell other people’s stories.”

Woodroof was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, but eventually found her way to Virginia by way of New England and Texas. She attended the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she says she became “a grad school dropout.” Now she and her husband call the Shenandoah Valley home, where their “.”

Small Blessings is set in a Southern college town, but Woodroof told NPR’s Scott Simon in that it isn’t based on Charlottesville or any other specific town. Only the story’s bookstore, drawn from a college bookstore where she once worked, comes from an actual place.

The characters are what drew in , assistant professor of English at EMU.

“All of her characters are flawed and, somehow, lovable,” Beachy said. “I suppose it is because she, as the author, loves them. I was intrigued by how many parts of the plot and the lives of the characters were driven by addiction—most obviously to alcohol, but also to the ways they think about themselves. The book as a whole is a great illustration of the ways addiction arises out of loneliness, and how community can create an opposite, positive pull.”

An of Small Blessings said, “This book is a charmer: quirky, clear-hearted and effervescent.” By all indications, the same could be said of Woodroof herself. Find out for yourself at this first-of-the-semester installment of Writers Read. The event is free (donations accepted) and open to the public.

Reserve tickets online at or by calling the language & literature department at 540-432-4168 by Friday, Jan. 25.

Cerulean Blues, Fallon’s first book, was recently named a finalist for the ’s Reed Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment. Her essay “Hill of the Sacred Eagles” was selected as a finalist in the 2011 essay contest.

Her work has appeared in a variety of other magazines and literary journals, including The Bark, Fourth Genre, Ecotone, River Teeth, Isotope, Fourth River, Appalachian Heritage, Now & Then, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Rivendell, and The New River Gorge Adventure Guide.

“Katie writes with a beautiful mix of passion and gentleness, whether she is minutely describing the habits of an endangered songbird or her reactions as a professor to the tragedy at Virginia Tech,” said , assistant professor of at EMU.

Fallon has taught creative writing at West Virginia University and Virginia Tech. She co-founded the , a nonprofit organization dedicated to conserving the region’s birds through research, education and rehabilitation.

More information

Several of the author’s books will be available for purchase. A book signing and short question-and-answer session with the author will follow her reading. Sign-language interpretation is available upon request.

• General admission, $15

• EMU students with a full meal plan, $5

• All other students, $7

Speaking at the final event, a service marking Palm Sunday, Wiebe touched on the way writers work in silence, enveloped in the mystery of writing. Yet when writers and readers meet, their “mutual silences open to listening.”

There was little silence at this conference, dubbed “Mennonite/s Writing VI.” Packed into the two days, one evening and one morning were: an oratorio featuring the poetry of one of the conference participants, Jean Janzen of California; two dramatic  performances and an equal number of music events; at least 30 readings from original poems, works of fiction and memoirs; and plenty of talks on such weighty topics as the intersection of theology and poetry (“theopoetics”), on teaching writing and literature, and on what it means to be a Mennonite or to write in a Mennonite manner. Critics of literature formed one panel discussion and publishers of literature formed another.

Some participants left the campus to take a guided tour of the MennoMedia offices a block away or a different tour to Singers Glen, eight miles to the west of EMU, where the oldest continually used hymnal in the United States was first published by a local Mennonite man, Joseph Funk.

Kirsten Beachy, an EMU assistant professor who was co-chair of the conference, smilingly summed up the conference with these words: “We feasted together on words and on food.”

Throughout the conference, participants often credited Wiebe and Julia Spicher Kasdorf, a poet and conference co-chair, with inspiring other Mennonite writers by producing seminal works that challenged the insularity of the traditional Mennonite church-community in North America—he in 1962 with his first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many, and she in 1992 with her first book of poetry, Sleeping Preacher.

Well-known poet and essayist Gregory Orr, a University of Virginia professor who is not a Mennonite, attracted one of the largest crowds assembled in one location to hear his talk on “ethics, aesthetics and the lyric.” He advocated that writers be true to themselves and “break with the overculture,” a message that resonated with his Mennonite audience in two ways—some have worked hard to find their voice within the “overculture” of their original community, while many view themselves as belonging to a minority culture that often goes against the grain of the mainstream culture.

On Friday evening, Vern Thiessen, one of the most-produced playwrights in Canada, performed two roles—that of himself and of his father—in “Back to Berlin,” his play exploring how his father (and by extension other Mennonites in Germany) acquiesced to or collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

Writers who received formal tributes at the Saturday evening banquet were Ervin Beck, Goshen College professor emeritus; Omar Eby, EMU professor emeritus; Al Reimer, professor emeritus at the University of Winnipeg; Elaine Sommers Rich, author of the 1964 children’s book Hannah Elizabeth; and Katie Funk Wiebe, a prolific essayist who taught at Tabor College before her retirement.

The EMU conference received support from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as from Conrad Grebel University College in Ontario and private donors. It was the sixth gathering in North America since 1990 of writers who have a Mennonite background, who delve into Mennonite themes in their works, or who simply have an interest in this field. Photos are online at emu.edu/photos/mennonites-writing-vi-conference/

��ݮ���� (EMU) will host a March 29-April 1. The sixth in a series of Mennonite Writing conferences in the United States and Canada, the conference comes to the East Coast of the United States for the first time this spring.

“If you love to read or write, whether you’re Mennonite, MennoNot, or Menno-curious, this conference is for you,” said conference co-chair , assistant professor of at EMU.

“Mennonite/s Writing VI: Solos and Harmonies” will feature a performance by Canadian Mennonite playwright Vern Thiessen and a reading and lecture by Charlottesville, Va., poet Greg Orr. A growing list of Mennonite scholars and writers, including Katherine Arnoldi, Stephen Raleigh Byler, Todd Davis, Dora Dueck, Jeff Gundy, Ann Hostetler, Jean Janzen, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Keith Ratzlaff, Sofia Samatar, Hildi Froese Tiessen, and Rudy Wiebe will share their work.

Several events are open to the public, including a kick-off poetry reading followed by an orchestra concert on Thursday evening; a Friday night performance by Vern Thiessen of Back to Berlin, a funny and lyrical look at a father and son on a trip to Berlin to discover secrets lying in the city—and in the father’s past; a lecture on “Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Lyric” by Charlottesville poet Gregory Orr Saturday morning, followed by a reading of his poetry. The conference will close with a Sunday morning meditation by Rudy Wiebe.

The festival program for conference registrants includes over seventy different presentations: readings, scholarly paper presentations, writing workshops, performances, book-signings, excursions and feasting. “Our cup is full and running over when it comes to the program,” said Beachy. “You can’t possibly see everything offered during the weekend, but you’ll have a lot of great options. It’s a good reflection of the abundant and diverse voices coming out of Mennonite faith and culture.”

The conference committee, co-chaired by Spicher Kasdorf, includes Mennonite writers and scholars from Bluffton, Goshen and EMU. Conrad Grebel University College (Waterloo, Ont.), co-sponsors the conference, and committee member of Conrad Grebel convened the first Mennonite writing conference there in 1990.

The conference is sponsored in part by the , the and the Marpeck Foundation.

For more information contact Kirsten Eve Beachy at kirsten.beachy@emu.edu. The full conference schedule and online registration can be found at .

Special rates are available for students and seniors.

Katie Jantzen, co-leader of , said the overall goal of the mini-grants was to encourage the campus community to think more proactively about steps they can take to initiate efforts.

“We see these projects as a way of helping to support sustainability initiatives on campus that may not otherwise happen due to lack of funds,” said Jantzen. “Selection was based on the impact the project would have on the EMU community, student initiative, feasibility of implementation, and a diversity of ideas.”

Changes around campus

Projects to receive funding include a $400 grant for an LED theater light fixture for the Technical Theater class; $250 for compost bins in 15 lounge and kitchen areas across campus, submitted by , web content manager and strategist; $125 to purchase local food to reinforce learning in a food writing workshop, submitted by , assistant professor in and the departments; $125 for compost bins in residence halls, submitted by sophomore Christine Baer; and a $100 grant for raspberry hedges as edible landscaping near Northlawn residence hall, introduced by the .

“We hope that our funding can be the initial impetus to get many of the projects off and running as they expand in scope and influence,” said Jantzen.

Winning projects were selected by a committee composed of , sustainability coordinator, , Earthkeepers faculty advisor, Jantzen and co-leader Josh Kanagy and members of Earthkeepers.

Earthkeepers, and the quality enhancement plan sponsored the mini-grants.

About Earthkeepers

The mission of Earthkeepers is to encourage, simplify and implement environmentally friendly practices around the campus community by following Christ’s example of holistic redemption by pursuing sustainable attitudes and practices, according to their website. In addition, Earthkeepers have helped fund composting and recycling programs, edible landscaping and The Bicycle Cooperative.

More information on Creation Care Council and sustainability practices at EMU can be found at .