In this true and haunting story beginning in Switzlerland in the 1600s and in its second half becoming a personal memoir of her childhood, Mumaw tells of how her two family lines came to meet and merge.

The Merging: A Story of Two Families and Their Child

Biographies & Memoirs

Mumaw, Evelyn King

Historical

DreamSeeker Books

In this engagingly offbeat and often humorous memoir, Hertzler tells of his editing years, his larger life story, and how his theological and philosophical positions have come to place him just "a little left of center."

A Little Left of Center: An Editor Reflects on His Mennonite Experience

Hertzler, Daniel

Arts & Literature

Frost's "momentary stay against confusion" is Barbara Esch Shisler's mode of trying to make sense of life through poems that worry the riddles of getting old, family dynamics, dreams, prayer, the evening news, bees-not to mention love, death, and God "'Love every tedious beat/ of your dear and fleeting life,' writes Barbara Esch Shisler in her poem, 'To a Mountain.' And she takes her own advice, plainly naming a world of pleasures and pains. In her gaze, African violets are 'luscious birds in furry nests,' and meals at the Nursing Home, 'vague purees.' The strange teachings of Jesus turn and flash in her imagination. These poems offer good company for anyone brave enough to face the freedom and losses that come with age." -Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author, Poetry in America "In these brave, bright, searching poems, Shisler explores the fears and delights of that time of life when 'Old and new make love all day, / their souls curved close / against chill and darkening.' Within the necessary, painful recognitions of mortality and loss, Shisler finds her way to both an unsentimental faith and a lovely, celebrative lyricism." -Jeff Gundy, Author, Somewhere Near Defiance and Songs from an Empty Cage "Barbara's poetry takes me places I wouldn't go on my own, often with the surprising result of going more deeply into my own reflections about life, aging, death, faith and family." -Richard A. Kauffman, senior editor and book review editor, The Christian Century Momentary Stay is volume 11 in the DreamSeeker Poetry Series, and follows The Apple Speaks, volume 10 The Author: Barbara Esch Shisler is a retired Mennonite pastor and spiritual director, active in her Perkasie Mennonite congregation. Her life as wife, mother, and grandmother is filled with friends, gardening, dogs, movies, books and much more. Reading and writing poetry have been a lifelong joy and learning.

Momentary Stay: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Shisler, Barbara Esch

Poetry

How does driving a tractor at age five, irrigating corn, and reading a cartoon book about anatomy in a three-shelf-library one-room country school prepare one to become a physician? In the poems of Cornfields, Cottonwoods, Seagulls, and Sermons, poet-physician Joseph Gascho reflects on such questions. "In the tradition of Seamus Heaney, these poems trace the arc of a life at once humble and grand--a boy coming of age against the backdrop of a land whose rhythms of work and worship remain touchstones of the man he becomes. Joseph Gascho renders the numinous earthiness of the Nebraska plains and the people who live there in frank, clear-eyed images that make the reader feel she knows the place." --Kimberly R. Myers, Associate Professor of Humanities, English, and Medicine, Penn State College of Medicine
"Regardless of the author's age, a first book often reveals the source of the poet's voice, and Joseph Gascho's memoir in free verse is no exception. These poems trace a profound journey, reckoning both losses and gains that came of his family's move off a Nebraska farm for the boy's education. Savor a vanished world returned in these rich narratives of rural America, and meditate on the meanings of place--geographical, social, familial, and economic--migration, and cultural change. --Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Author, Shale Play (2018)
"Sweeping from Nebraska to the East, childhood to maturity, farmsteads to hospital rooms, these poems render the moments, people, and places of Joseph Gascho's life with understated intensity. His lucid, vivid poems hum with curiosity and compassion." --Jeff Gundy, Author, Abandoned Homeland and Somewhere Near Defiance
The Author: Joseph Gascho, Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, is a cardiologist at the Penn State Hershey College of Medicine. He grew up on a farm in Nebraska and moved with his father and mother to Virginia when he was 13. He presently practices medicine, reads echocardiograms, and teaches medical students. Many of his poems arise from his interactions with his patients and his viewing of medical images.

Cornfields, Cottonwoods, Seagulls, and Sermons: Growing Up in Nebraska (Dreamseeker Poetry)

Gascho, Joseph

"Because this story is so well-written, we the readers follow the narrator's progress with the eagerness of a child at play." --Shirley Hershey Showalter, Author, Blush: A Mennonite Girl Meets a Glittering World, in the Foreword
When a young Mennonite girl is uprooted from her cloistered community, she pines to go back to Yoder School where learning was full of wonder and where she decided to be a teacher. Here is a story of leaving a childhood of innocence to go out into the world and to learn in new ways from different people in places that don't feel like home.
This coming-of-age memoir shows how a young Mennonite, uprooted from her community in the mountains of western Maryland, forges her identity. Pulled from the cloistered three-room Yoder School, full of Mennonite and Amish kids, she pursues her goal to become a teacher in a variety of classrooms, all unfamiliar to her, and then graduates from Antioch University, the hippie college of Yellow Springs, Ohio.
In each classroom, she searches for Yoder School, where learning was full of wonder and people seemed safe. What she finds is people whose stories differ from hers. Will she hear and try to understand and learn from these stories?
"Yoder School is an extraordinarily insightful memoir of an inter-culturally-seasoned Anabaptist educator journeying from an Amish Mennonite mountain school in Maryland through urban mazes of Michigan and beyond. Her razor-keen excellence in educational pedagogy, fusing love for students with inspiring them to learn, forms a page-turning narrative." --Richard Showalter, Columnist, Mennonite World Review; and Overseer, CMC (formerly Conservative Mennonite Conference)
The Author: Enchanted by first grade at Yoder School, Phyllis Miller Swartz decided to become a teacher. But after her family moved, she wondered how to learn to be a good teacher when she often didn't have one. Still she pursued her goal. After graduating from Antioch College, she taught school for over 30 years, from HeadStart to middle school, high school, college, and more, trying to bring the wonder of Yoder School to her students. Swartz leads Columbus Museum of Art tours, teaches part-time at Rosedale Bible College, conducts seminars, and blogs on teaching at "Apple to Apple."

Yoder School (Dreamseeker Memoir)

Religion & Spirituality

Swartz, Phyllis Miller

Christian Books & Bibles

As she contends with forces that threaten to uproot what she loves, the farm wife emerges as a prophetic voice from America's heartland, embracing a concept of community that includes the dead and the living, neighbors and strangers, cultivated fields and ditches thick with milkweed.
"The farm wife names children after beloved cows, plays rook, and wants to be buried in a root cellar. In poem after poem we see what might appear to be a sheltered, insular life in its true and astonishing expansiveness. These are poems of both intensity and calm beauty, transformative in their vision of the holiness in the everyday." --Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, Author, What Cannot Be Fixed and Poetry Editor, The Christian Century
Quote: One of the closing farm wife poems, "The farm wife reviews the Tornado Theater at Menno-Hof Museum," reports that "In the rubble of Eli Yoder's house / all they found intact was a glass jug / with a carving stuck inside: 'Fear God' / on one side-- 'God Is Love' on the other. / Eli took that as a sign of the Almighty's power, / but I believe whirling wind spins the bottle / and God is in the dark with us, / not writing down what happens next."
The Author: Shari Wagner wasIndiana Poet Laureate 2016-2017 and is author of two books of poems: The Harmonist at Nightfall: Poems of Indiana and Evening Chore.Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including North American Review, Shenandoah, The Christian Century, The Writer's Almanac, and American Life in Poetry. She has taught creative writing in elementary schools, high schools, colleges, community centers, libraries, and nursing homes. She teaches for the Indiana Writers Center; Indiana University-Purdue University's Religion, Spirituality and the Arts Seminar; and Bethany Theological Seminary's graduate program in theopoetics and writing.

The Farm Wife's Almanac (Dreamseeker Poetry)

Wagner, Shari

"Continuing the saga initiated with her prior collection Life After Death, Jane Rohrer offers poetry recording her journey from a cloistered upbringing among conservative Mennonites and Church of the Brethren adherents to going "on the road, collecting places," as her title poem "Acquiring Land" describes it"--

Acquiring Land: Late Poems (Dreamseeker Poetry)

Rohrer, Jane

"This collection of poems grapples with the collision between spirit and nature, violence and peace, memory and memory loss, and the legacy of mothers and grandmothers"--

Between the Heron and the Moss (Dreamseeker Books)

Wells, Sarah M.

"This collection invites readers into the bodys rhythms of creation, love, and loss-affirming that even as we see only in part, "the moon is always whole" within and beyond chronic illness, ancestral trauma, silencing, betrayal"--

The Moon Is Always Whole: Poems (Dreamseeker Books)

Swann, Julia Baker

Hinz-Penner details a history fraught with tensions between land ownership and former inhabitants, commodification of the land and love of the land, land use and management, the simple life and love of nature.\nAs Elaine Enns, Co-Author, Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization, puts it, "Hinz-Penner offers an engaging personal and political narrative that explores the contradictions, myths, and resilience of what we call her landlines, bloodlines, and songlines. Her memoir includes helpful distillations of significant historical periods and patterns of Mennonite migrations and Indigenous and settler histories. I hope it will inspire other settlers to venture their own decolonial re-memberings."\nHinz-Penner delves into the history of the peoples who were on the land before her-the Plains Village farmers in the year 1000 C.E., Coronado's crossing of her corner of Kansas, the one hundred years of Comanche Empire including the land east of Liberal. She also explores the geography of the land, its soil, rivers, plateaus, and settlement story. The experiential details of 1950s farm life, the genealogy that placed her there, migrations journals of ancestors, her Oklahoma Panhandle country church settlement history give texture to the story as do gender understandings about work and play in a two-daughter family.\nMeditational in structure, the narrative includes musings, poetry, family stories, Mennonite history, spiritual yearnings, Indigenous contributions, and reflections about the author's multi-generational farming history, its privileges, contributions, transgressions on the land. Tensions between colonization hauntings and the idyllic nature of her childhood on the farm are ameliorated when author and sister return to tend the farm during Covid isolation.

East of Liberal: Notes on the Land (Dreamseeker Memoir)

Hinz-Penner, Raylene

Regional U.S.

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