A Beloved Canadian Novelist Reckons with Her Mennonite Past

How Miriam Toews left the church and freed her voice. (Entire article here🙂

Before Miriam Toews can sit down to write, she needs to walk. Something about the body in motion limbers up the mind and suggests that it should get moving, too. When she is working on a book, she exists in a state of heightened suggestibility, as if everything she sees and hears were hers for the taking. In her twenties, when she went to journalism school to learn how to make radio documentaries, she loved spending hours with audiotape, a razor blade, and chalk, seamlessly stitching together the voices she had gathered, trying to keep her own voice out of the mix. But she found that she wished she could embellish, add thunder and lightning where there had been only a gentle rain, and that is why she writes fiction.

A few years ago, Toews was walking around Toronto, where she lives, turning the idea for a novel over in her mind. She had been thinking about it on and off since 2009, when she read about a series of crimes that had taken place in a remote Mennonite community in Bolivia known as Manitoba Colony. Mennonites belong to an Anabaptist movement that took shape in the Netherlands during the Protestant Reformation. Today, they number about two million worldwide. Though most now live modern lives, they, like the Amish, have traditionally kept themselves at a strict remove from the sinful world, and some still do. Members of Manitoba Colony aren’t on the electrical grid. They make their living from farming, but they put steel rather than rubber on the wheels of their tractors, since rubber tires, which move faster, are forbidden. Their first language is Plautdietsch, or Low German, an archaic unwritten dialect that dates back to sixteenth-century Polish Prussia, where many of their ancestors settled after persecution drove them from home. After Prussia, they went to Russia, then to Canada, and then to Mexico and points south, not intermarrying with the local population, leaving each place when its laws or customs impinged on their commitment to separation. Read more…