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Autobiography: generalRolling Down Black Stockings
A Passage Out of the Old Order Mennonite Religion
by Esther Ayers (author)
A rare memoir of growing up Old Order MennoniteRolling Down Black Stockings is a personal recollection of Esther Royer Ayers’s youth spent in a highly restrictive and confined religious community. Her story is as much a search for identity and a longing for a mother’s love as it is a tale about a totalitarian culture that led to her departure from the Old Order Mennonite religion.This poignant story is told in three books: book 1 describes her youth in a farm community on the outskirts of Columbiana, Ohio; book 2 follows the struggles of Ayers as she tries to fit in with another culture after leaving the church when her family moves to Akron, Ohio; and book 3 discusses the history and cultural dynamics of the religion.Ayers recounts how the Old Order Mennonite Church came into existence. Her personal account begins when she was eight years old, watching as her mother took care of her sick father. With intelligence and insight, Ayers describes how her family coped with the burden of not having enough income, which meant that the children were expected to work instead of getting an education. When secular educational leaders closed the one-room schoolhouses that served her Mennonite community, Ayers relates her difficulties trying to fit in at the public school and how she and her siblings were required to fail classes so that they would be expelled. It concludes with reflections on what all this meant to her.A rare and moving memoir, Rolling Down Black Stockings is also a valuable piece of social history that will appeal to historians as well as those interested in separatist communities and women’s studies.
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Peculiar Lessons
How Nature and the Material World Shaped a Prairie Childhood
by Lois Braun
Part memoir, part social history, this collection of ten essays explores the various physical and natural elements that form the backdrop to Braun’s memories of growing up mid-20th century on a farm in southern Manitoba. From blackboard chalk to curling rocks, from mirages to straight-line winds, she reflects on her interactions with the elements as a child and how her responses influenced her evolution into adulthood. Braun includes intriguing tidbits about the science and history behind each element as it pertains to life in her unique location on our planet. The book highlights the value and beauty of the simple components of our surroundings that we take for granted growing up, exposes their true complexity, and reveals how the fascination with a “simple” thing can become a lifelong pursuit that sustains one’s artistic and spiritual needs.
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Literary essaysOhio Outback
Learning to Love the Great Black Swamp
by Claude Clayton Smith (author)
A collection that reveals the surprising variety of life in northwest Ohio Ohio Outback is a unique compilation of writings by Claude Clayton Smith about his experiences of living in Ohio for the past twenty-two years. Smith offers a vibrant, humorous portrait of life that focuses on individuals and events in out-of-the-way places throughout northwest Ohio. The pieces in this book reflect a growing curiosity and fondness for Ohio, with topics ranging from the manufacturing process of NFL footballs and the anatomy of ditches to an Ohio section of a ten-thousandmile drive by interstate highway across the forty-eight states and Smith’s reflections as a licensed professional boxing judge. Ohio Outback also contains “Yard Wars of the Ohio Outback,” a lighthearted piece that forms the book’s narrative core with tales of bird, pool, and driveway battles.“Claude Clayton Smith, an Easterner who found himself transplanted to the ‘outback’ of northwest Ohio, has written a poignant and funny account of his longstanding attempt to feel at home there. The happy result of his struggle to come to terms with the region’s landscape, customs, and history is a thoughtful meditation on the charms and challenges of an obscure part of the world that some of us, no matter where we ended up, still call home.” —Jeffrey Hammond, author of Ohio States: A Twentieth-Century Midwestern and Small Comforts: Essays at Middle Age“Claude Clayton Smith writes of his adventures in the countryside of northwest Ohio with a bemused humor that fans of James Thurber (one of his heroes) and Dave Barry will appreciate. Natives may think that only an immigrant like Smith would find cottonwood fluff, horseflies, driveway gravel, woodlots, cicadas, feisty red squirrels, and birds that attack picture windows so exotic. But his perplexed celebration of his struggles to coexist with these—and much more—reminds us all just how much strangeness lurks within the everyday.” —Jeff Gundy, author of Trees and Scattering Point: The World in a Mennonite Eye
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Peace and Persistence
Tracing the Brethren in Christ Peace Witness through Two Generations
by M. J. Heisey (author)
A study of one Anabaptist group struggling to practice their peace commitmentsIn the first half of the 20th century, American society mobilized for the three great wars: World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. During this tumultuous period the Brethren in Christ joined other pacifists in opposing participation in the mobilizations. Like the Amish, Mennonites, and Church of the Brethren—other groups descended from sixteenth-century European Anabaptists—the Brethren in Christ held nonresistant pacifism as a fundamental aspect of their identity. They carried out their peace witness, however, not as an isolated community but as one integrated economically, technologically, and culturally into American society.Peace and Persistence presents a wealth of material about this small, little-know religious group.
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Literary FictionMay 2023Hold Your Tongue
by Matthew Tétreault
Upon learning his great-uncle Alfred has suffered a stroke, Richard sets out for Ste. Anne, in southeastern Manitoba, to find his father and tell him the news. Waylaid by memories of his stalled romance, tales of run-ins with local Mennonites, his job working a honey wagon, and struck by visions of Métis history and secrets of his family’s past, Richard confronts his desires to leave town, even as he learns to embrace his heritage. Evoking an oral storytelling epic that weaves together one family’s complex history, Hold Your Tongue asks what it means to be Métis and francophone. Recalling the work of Katherena Vermette and Joshua Whitehead, Matthew Tétreault’s debut novel shines with a poignant, but playful character-driven meditation on the struggles of holding onto “la langue,” and marks the emergence of an important new voice.
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March 2016Immigrant in Peril
Carl Tangeman's Heroic Journey Across America, 1847-1848
by Cheryl D. Clay
