“The Mennonite Heritage Cruise ushered a new era of ethno-tourism for Mennonites. For sixteen years (1995-2010), these cruises created a ‘
floating community of Mennonite pilgrims,’ transforming a passenger ship along the Dnieper River into a collective space for fellowship and reflection on the Mennonite story in Ukraine. The lectures of Paul Toews, the resident historian, provided thousands of cruise participants with the historical knowledge they needed to understand the experiences of Mennonites that had unfolded on the landscapes they were about to visit. Blending history, sorrow, and reverence, Paul’s lectures explored the themes of prosperity, destruction, and resurrection within the Russian Mennonite story. Edited and illustrated by Aileen Friesen, these lectures, along with almost one hundred accompanying historical photographs, offer a revisiting of this past and a path forward for its future study.”

Price: $35.00

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“The experience of marginalized peoples has been a rich literary field in Canada, recording in fiction, nonfiction and poetry the stories of those who have not been able to speak for themselves. Works that reflect my own family’s lived experience as refugees crossing borders includes memoirists Janice Kulyk Keefer (Honey and Ashes), Modris Eckstein (Walking Since Daybreak) and Rudy Wiebe (Of This Earth) and most significantly, poets Anne Michaels and Czeslaw Milosz. As a child of ‘border crossings’ that have eventually led to homelands on the West Coast of Canada and as a student of literature, poet and memoirist, I have embraced what I consider my obligation as a ‘second generation witness’ in writing and publishing the memoir, The Steppes are the Colour of Sepia ​(Ronsdale, 2008) and the volume of poetry, Unspoken: An Inheritance of Words (Fern Hill, 2016).

Situated in the conflicting spaces between family and societal circles, particularly recording the historical and cultural past of traumatized Mennonite immigrant experience given refuge on the West Coast of Canada, I have engaged another form of ‘border crossing,’ privileging ‘words, unspoken’ as the linguistic utterances that arise from silence, memory and imagination in my own interpretive and creative capacities.

Rudy Wiebe: ‘You have done the history of your family proud…’ calls Unspoken ‘a beautiful book’.’

In a workshop, American memoirist Patricia Hampl suggested to Connie that ‘hers was a life’s work’ and to continue to create and record the universal themes of displacement and dispossession that are engendered in such particular family history.”

Price: $18.00

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