Who are the Intruders?

One way to read Searching for Intruders is as a novel of stories.

How do all of the stories relate back to the title?

Is the search for the intruders ever complete or successful?

Who are the intruders?

In the first story, "Roaches," it seems pretty clear that the intruders are the cockroaches. And yet, as anyone who has ever rented a New York apartment knows, the roaches were there first. (But of course they don't pay rent.) What keeps intruding on the relationship between Wilson and Melody?

Keep reading the stories with these questions in mind. See if you can detect a subtle thematic organization here.

Searching for Intruders

Stephen Raleigh Byler's first book, Searching for Intruders, is a series of interlinked short stories about Wilson Hues, a young man haunted by his past and uncertain of how to impose himself of the world around him. After this book was published in 2002, Byler has spent a number of years working on his next novel.

Byler's work is pioneering in the literature of American Mennonites--both as a work of fiction, and as an exploration of contemporary masculinity.

Here are some articles about his work.

From The Columbia University News

Rachel Yoder's Hair Patty

Rachel Yoder, a young Mennonite writer who is finishing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Iowa, offers a brief essay on the mysteries of the body in Brevity.

Inspired by a weird object from her Mennonite childhood--the "hair patty"--or bun form that her aunts used when putting up their hair, Rachel has created a mini-essay that takes material culture to new places!

Consider finding an object from your own past that provokes a creative meditation, and using it as a prompt for your own creative essay--or the personal essay due when you get back from break.

Read Transubstantiate, Rachel's brief essay.

Read Rachel's discussion of how she wrote this brief essay on Brevity's blog.

Rhoda Janzen Poetry Online

It's fun to read Rhoda Janzen's poems in light of her memoir. A number of them were published in Mennonite Life, an online magazine published by Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas.

Many topics are common to both her poems and her memoir--such as underwear, laundry, Mennonite cuisine, martyrdom, the trauma of the Russian Mennonite experience . . .

"Essentials of the Mennonite Wardrobe and Other Poems"


"Poems"

Memoir as Discovery

Neil Genzlinger in The New York Times Book Review (Jan. 28, 2011): "If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. "

Here are a few quotes that hint at some of Rhoda Janzen's discoveries:

About faith:

“When you’re young, faith is often a matter of rules. What you should do and shouldn’t do, that kind of thing. But as you get older, you realize that faith is really a matter of relationship—with God, with the people around you, with the members of your community” (137).

"Some things are better than reason. Some things actually defy reason. And that's okay" (196).

"I suddenly felt destiny as a mighty and perplexing force, an inexorable vurrent that sweeps us off into new channels" (214).

About the body:

"Mom's stoicism regarding the body and all its functions was really almost Christian in its ideation of openness and transparency" (164)

About Nick:

"His wracked misery, his anger at God, his creative brooding, were in some ways attractive to me. These qualities orbited me, too, like shadowy moons around Jupiter" (215).

"Without my husband I had somehow drifted back to this point of origin, as if my turbulent marriage had been a long journey on dark waters that had propelled me away from everything known and safe" (224).

"[T]he music was gentle as a hand on the small of the back, nudging me forward--the sound of my heritage, my future" (224).

About love:

"Is it ever really a waste of time to love someone, truly and deeply, with everything you have?" (78)

"[T]he simple, practiced presence that love demands" (171).

"[I]t's when you don't love somebody that you do notice the little things. Then you mind them. You mind them terribly" (181).

"Sexiness comes down to three things: chemistry, sense of humor, and treatment of waitstaff at restaurants" (203).

Three "Mennonite" Poems

Who is the Mennonite Writer?

Three "Mennonite" poems from A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry suggest that the answer to this question is complicated.

"Mennonites" by Julia Spicher Kasdorf was written when the poet was a graduate student at New York University. In a talk to my students a few years back, Julia said that in New York she felt a "difference" in herself--not visible to the eye--but a sense of belonging to another world, another people. She wrote this poem in order to understand her identity. What were the attitudes, the values, the assumptions, the history she carried that set her apart?

The result is a poem that many Mennonites have identified with--aha! that is my experience--or that of my parents, or grandparents. To a non-Mennonite audience, Julia's specific images and historical references create a fascinating portrait of a little-understood religious minority. Julia's poem appeared in the early 1990s, when American readers were developing a new interest in culturally diverse literature--a trend that helped to encourage the rapid development of Mennonite literature at this time.

Julia's poem uses the "declarative" sentence and the pronoun "we" to create a kind of manifesto or creed. Its images are agricultural, homespun, historical. While Julia manages to get at the intertwined histories of two different strands of Mennonites in this poem--the Swiss Brethren and the Dutch-German-Russian Mennonites--some of her statements are ironic, or even a bit sarcastic. Mennonites both worry that they may not be as perfect as their heavenly Father, BUT they also clean up HIS disasters. Mennonites fear that they will be damned by sins "so deep in our organs" that they do not even know about them. Mennonite history is one of violence--martyrs, forced migration, pacifism that prompts persecution--and non-violent response. Julia throws out a question that is also a challenge to Mennonites and their theologians: "This is why we cannot leave the beliefs or what else would we be?"

Jeff Gundy's poem, "How to Write the New Mennonite Poem," was written a few years later as a kind of tongue-in-cheek response to Julia's poem and the sudden emergence of "Mennonite" writing. Gundy is clearly skeptical about "ethnic" writing for its own sake. His poem is written like a recipe--suggesting a formula of fraktur, quilts, dead grandmothers and lost farms that will evoke the proper ethnic atmosphere. The audience for this poem is primarily Mennonite--and the reader is even addressed as "you" and assumed to be an urban Mennonite with expensive habits and lots of guilt. Jeff's poem was first published in Mennonot, an alternative magazine of humor and the arts, subtitled "For Mennos on the Margins." Guilt seems to be the common thread in Julia's and Jeff's poems. When I read Jeff's poem a few years ago to a class of students at Lancaster Mennonite High School, hoping to make them laugh, one of the students responded: "Boy, I'm glad I'm not a Mennonite!"

Gundy's poem raises an important question--or several. What makes a Mennonite poem? When poems use ethnic symbols and images just to gain the attention of readers looking for an exotic experience, is the reader cheated? Will a self-conscious, angst-ridden experience--if it's genuine--make for a more genuine "Mennonite" poem? Is the real Mennonite one who is guilt-ridden for not living up the the examples of his ancestors, now polished to perfection in stories? Who is the Mennonite writer? And who is his/her audience?

David Wright, in "A New Mennonite Replies to Julia Kasdorf," joins the conversation with a fresh perspective. Locating himself in an urban Mennonite congregation where people drive volvos and bring lentils and free-range chicken to the potluck, he describes a Mennonite gathering where people come together to express their faith, rather than carry on a tradition. David came to the Mennonites as an adult from a background in various independent evangelical churches. He's a convert Mennonite, not a cradle Mennonite, and one of the elements his poem lacks is a sense of guilt. David responds to Julia's question about beliefs by suggesting that there are contemporary Mennonite beliefs and practices that have something to offer the world--it's not just about carrying on a faith out of historical obligation. However, David's audience is a fairly specific Mennonite poetry-reading one, as his title makes clear. The congregation he describes is similar to several urban ones I've been a part of. In fact, this is the poem that most of my students most closely identify with. The poem shows the importance of bringing the non-traditional voice into a living, growing faith.