Category Archives: Mennonite poets and writers

Special CMW issue on my sister Christine Wiebe

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I’m looking forward to a special issue of the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing, centered on my sister Christine Ruth Wiebe. The issue will be published October 18, 2010.

My sister Christine’s significant creative contributions as a poet will be explored through publication of a selection of her work, and essays by Ellen Kroeker and Jeff Gundy, our mother Katie Funk Wiebe, and myself.  To prepare to write my essay, I read through almost 30 years of her journals. I found dozens of poems and some drawings which had never before been published.  I learned that she studied dance at one point, considering becoming a liturgical dancer.  And I also learned that when she was in Chicago she was in a Centering Prayer group, which is a discipline I also practice.

The photo above came in an email yesterday from Ellen Kroeker,  writing from New Zealand: “The Southern Ocean winds (the roaring forties which sweep across at that latitude) have been battering New Zealand for five days now.  I  have ignored the essays that need grading for too long.  I light a candle, pull my freesias closer and make a pot of tea (under the tea cosy in the picture) and pull out the Christine teacup.  Ah, not even alone, while the cold wind is rattling windows and doors.  I feel more settled now, an old friendship warming a very chilly spring day. I wish my students had some of her song in their writing.  I sigh, open another folder on the computer, and resolve to put some of Christine’s grace into my attitude and comments. When we think of her, she is alive in us, right?” Thank you, Ellen.

O Trees

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O Trees

You have stood by me these two and a half years

and I still don’t know your names.

Nameless, you have steadfastly endured

beside me,  slender, tall, always reaching

you rise straight up from the earth

past the concrete, the glass, to the sky.

At night you brush the soft grey light

You even out the clouds.

While I sleep, you are the roost of angels

In the day you pull down the sun

You suck it out of the sky

You entice it to stay

You hold the light in your arms while I sleep.

My sister Christine Ruth Wiebe wrote this poem when she was living in Chicago, on Tuesday, February 12, 1991.

Ann Hostetler and my mother Katie Funk Wiebe are working on a special issue of the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing focusing on Christine and Sylvia Bubalo, two writer/artists whose inspiring spiritual and artistic journeys deserve a wider audience.  Both struggled with chronic illness as well. Christine’s flavor was systemic lupus erythematosus.

I have been going through Christine’s letters and writings to find poems which she never showed to anyone, and this is one of them.   She also made the drawing, which was separate from the poem, but I joined them together here.  For the most part I have preserved her punctuation, but I am thinking that had she lived to publish this poem,  she probably would have added a few periods here and there.

Take courage

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Many of the letters written by Anna Janzen Funk to her daughter Katie, my mother,  contained the phrase, “Take courage.”

I have thought of that short phrase often: Take courage. What does that mean? Faced with a blank page, I will take courage and fill it with words.

OK, let’s get serious. What if I make a mistake? I’ve gathered materials about grandma’s life for years; yet I often struggle with getting the facts right!   Can I trust this process of writing?

My red-haired great-grandmother, Anna Janzen Funk, was born March 15, 1895, in Friedensfeld, Sagradowka, southern Ukraine, one of 12 children of Franz J. Janzen (who also had red hair) and Katharina Boldt Janzen. Growing up in a well-developed Mennonite culture, Anna matured into a strong-willed, spiritual, intelligent person. She developed a hatred of crocheting, much preferring to read.  She did not have much time to read, however, as she began working seven days a week when she was 15. When she was 20, on a dark, rainy Sunday, she took the train about 90 miles to her second job. She was going to be a baker’s helper at Bethania Mental Hospital, near the Dnieper River. While she was at Bethania, in February 1917, the Russian government collapsed and the socialistic Bolshevist regime took power. Their army (the Reds) took over the area, taking livestock, food, and household goods, killing and razing estates. Anna’s family disappeared. The opposing White army battled the Reds back and forth across the Ukraine.

So, after that long setup, here’s the story about the importance of creativity, and how critical courage is in expressing creativity. One winter day, about 30 Red soldiers had stolen all the extra clothing from the male hospital patients. Now the revolutionaries were warmly dressed, slurping their soup in the dining room. As fast as she could slice bread, the soldiers grabbed it. Anna rushed into the spacious, bright kitchen with its tiled floor and huge stainless steel kettles to get a new batch of bread which the kitchen girls had just pulled out, and to ask them to punch down the rising dough and form it into more loaves to be baked. She heard a sharp knock on the back door of the kitchen. When she opened the door, she was startled to see a couple of dozen soldiers from the White army, who had been able to cross to Bethania on the frozen Dnieper River. “Let’s have lunch!” they demanded. What was she to do?  The Reds were having their soup in the dining room!  As she stood on the doorstep, the bright sun lighting up her coppery hair, she squinted at the hungry White soldiers, many of them her own age or younger, and rubbed a floury hand over her forehead. She could see that the Whites had added a lot of mud from the thawing banks to their uniforms and boots. Of course!  She grinned as she scolded them, “Please, boys, do you think I will let you in the house with those boots! Scrape the mud off completely! Knock again when those boots are clean, and I will give you a nice meal.”  Truly disarmed, they smiled back at the saucy young woman and began working on their boots. Anna brought the trays of bread into the Red group, encouraged them to fill their pockets for later, and opened the front door for them. As she saw the last Red soldier’s back going through the front door, she motioned silently to the kitchen girl to let the Whites in for their meal.

Now that I’ve written the words, I know quite well that this is not exactly the way it happened. I have left things out—big things, like the Makhnovist bandits. I have made things up, like the dialog. But—I have steadfastly shuffled phrases and sentences like jigsaw puzzle pieces to achieve that moment when I am not only seeing a picture that feels true, I myself am standing beside Anna on the back step at Bethania, close enough to see the flour dusting her forehead, to hear her steady breathing as we stand in the sunlight, facing those hungry, rough young men. I watch with my entire self, to witness her in the very moment of taking courage. She uses what she has—her bright hair, her confident smile, and her memories of her lost brothers—and speaks. The ugliness of war transforms into a homely backyard scenario: big sister telling the boys to clean their boots before coming inside. Anna’s courageous creativity has brought life to the day.

Opportunities for life-giving creativity occur daily. Filling a page with words is good practice.

Joanna Wiebe, May 1, 2007