Novelist probes Mennonite heritage
by Ali Siemens (Contributor)
Email: cascade.arts@ufv.ca
Rudy Wiebe made his second appearance at the University of the Fraser Valley on Wednesday November 24th at the campus bookstore. Students, faculty and members of the community gathered to listen to readings from Wiebe’s latest book, Collected Stories from 1955-2010. Wiebe has been presented two Governor General Awards for The Temptations of Big Bear and A Discovery of Strangers. In 2007, Wiebe was also awarded the Charles Taylor Prize for Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest. Wiebe’s books work toward telling stories of first encounters, the stories of immigration of his own people, the Mennonites, as well as Aboriginal studies.
Wiebe started his presentation with the first rule of using language, which he perceives to be “naming things”. Moving into his first reading, “Sailing to Danzig,” Wiebe also shared that this is one of the first stories he wrote in a creative writing course at the University of Alberta. His story was about his name, and where it came from. Wiebe found out at seventeen years old that he had never known his real name, Adam, because of immigration papers and the changes that are usually made when arriving in a new country. His stories are packed with history, humour, and Hutterite German jokes. Wiebe aims to base all of his stories on true memories, and when it came to gathering the research for his books, his advice is to start by, “asking questions about yourself.”
Wiebe’s second reading was “The Angel of the Tar Sands.” This short story was written twenty years ago about two men and a woman who come across an angel emerging from the tar sands, a story Weibe referred to as “apocalyptic.” When it was originally written, Wiebe told his audience, there were only two oil rigs in Alberta, and today there are many more. He notes the importance of this story and the irony of how a story that was applicable twenty years ago is still important today: “the oil, where it ran yesterday and where it runs today, still has great effects on our modern world.”
Important advice was also given to students who are interested in furthering their own writing career. Wiebe admitted that when he first proposed his Master’s thesis idea, he wanted to specialize in Shakespeare. His professor knew about Wiebe’s Mennonite heritage and told him, “yes, Mr. Wiebe, yes, a great many people can write perfectly acceptable, or dreadful, theses on Shakespeare, but perhaps only you can write a fine novel about Mennonites.” Wiebe wrote a novel for his thesis, it took him only a few months and was the shortest amount of time it ever took him to complete one.
As UFV seeks to further its knowledge in the field of Mennonite Studies, writers like Rudy Wiebe make it possible to bring the community together by engaging students in the cultural history of many families in Abbotsford and the lower mainland. Abbotsford may have more cultural significance then we make it out to. Posing a question at the end of his reading, Wiebe asks, “If this is your land, where are your stories?”
