As much alike as we are different—Carolyn R. Wilker

In our mailbox Tuesday was a Christmas card from an Amish school friend named Rachel. It’s hard to believe after so many years ago in our one room school house that we would one day be corresponding again, but thanks to another friend, Gayleen, we were reconnected years later.

I opened the card from Rachel first. It’s probably been close to a year since I'd last heard from her. Summer is a busy time on an Amish farm—on any farm really—and especially with doing things in a more labour intensive way without hydro. Her lifestyle is so different from mine, but the friendship remains. The card message said: “May our world be filled with Peace this holiday season” and then a personal note to me in her handwriting.

About fifteen years ago, Gayleen, whom I had known since childhood, planned a visit to see Rachel on her farm and wondered if I’d like to come along. After all, I knew most of the Amish children who went to our school. The visit to her clean and neat home and surroundings helped to rekindle that relationship. I was grateful to be included. 

What do you give as a hostess gift to an Amish friend who writes? Letter stationery, of course.  I wrote a note, thanking her for her hospitality and the opportunity of meeting three of her grandchildren.  She wrote back again in the fall when the farm work slowed, thus I had her address when Gayleen became very ill a few years ago.

I wrote to Rachel each week and kept her up-to-date on Gayleen’s condition. I knew Rachel would want to be informed and that she would be praying too.

When Gayleen died, I was in mourning. Here was a friend I had known all my life, as children, as adults and parents. We'd shared prayer concerns and our faith too and she had been at my book event in our home town.

Winter weather or not, I had to get word to Rachel. Would she make it to the funeral all those miles in horse and buggy, or might she hire a driver to take her? It would be her call. A letter would not make it there in time, and so I brainstormed with a friend and came up with a plan.

I called the farm supply store in the nearby town to see if they had any business dealings with Rachel and her husband. I said it was important to reach Rachel and why. Bless the woman’s heart, she went through her sales list and gave me the name and contact information of a neighbour who lived down the same road.

I’d followed up and introduced myself to Rene, who promised to pass along the message. I gave him the details of the funeral and visitation. He asked, “Did I know that her husband had been unwell.” Yes, I knew. A winter storm prevented him from getting there that day, he said; he barely made it home from town in such a storm. I thanked him and left the message in his and God’s hands to make it happen and I hoped that Rachel might still find a way to come.

Rachel’s letter arrived only days after our friend’s funeral saying she’d wanted to come, but winter storms and her husband’s frail health prevented her. She would have hired a driver except she had no back-up care for Ed. She thanked me for my letters, and in her letter commended Gayleen to God.

And so this short letter, inside the card, this week began,

Dear friend, Just a few lines of Christmas cheer and may you all have had a good year.

Rachel wrote that she’d been in touch with Lydia, another of the Amish girls who had been a special friend of mine during those school days, and told me that she had sent my book to Lydia. I was excited to hear that Sherrill had sent a copy to Rachel and that it was being passed along.

Perhaps Lydia and I can re-connect too, I thought. It would depend on how Lydia feels about my school house memories, with them included, and if she wishes to re-establish our connection after so many years.

The note continued with news of Rachel’s husband regaining some movement but still confined to a wheelchair, and she told me about Ed’s sister dying of cancer. Rachel closed her note with these words:

Life changes every year, we must live close to God who is unchanging. May you know him this Christmas season.

Love, Rachel.

 I found the perfect card and got it in the mail the next day, along with a hand-written note. She may live a different lifestyle, much more restricted than my own, but she believes in God too. We have things in common. Not surprising really since we’re all human and God’s children. I’m thankful for my Amish friends.

 Carolyn R. Wilker is an author, editor and storyteller from southwestern Ontario. Sign up for her newsletter, FineTuned, about writing. She's on Facebook too.

www.carolynwilker.ca

The Making of This Writer by Ruth Smith Meyer

     As long as I can remember, reading and writing have been a central part of who I am. The reading part came very early in life, hearing my mother read stories to us—Bible accounts and tales from the Busy Bee series. Although Dad never read other than the Bible to us, he often had a book in his hand and shared historic and current happenings which inspired me to have an inquiring mind.

      For a Mennonite minister, he had quite an extensive library and encouraged us all to read. We soon learned that he couldn’t be persuaded to buy us toys, but if we asked for a book, he would find a way to get it for us. The teachers in the one-room school I attended added to the fascination for the written word. One chose interesting books from which to read a chapter every day after lunch. The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, The Secret Garden and Little Men, for example, were read with such enlivening expression it wasn’t hard to imagine the settings, and live along with the characters. My best friend and I shared books for the local library and read well over a hundred in any given year.

     Another teacher in my upper grades was such a vivid story-teller that many lessons were absorbed when we thought she was just talking and had forgotten to teach us our assignments for the day. She even attended readings by Stephen Leacock which left us awe-stricken after reading some of his writings. Imagine meeting a real live author in person! 

 My first attempt at poetry came from her suggestion to write a poem about Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. In my teenage years, my writing was mostly in the form of letters to 35 pen pals to whom I sent monthly missives. I enjoyed making my letters so interesting that these friends could enter my world through what I wrote to them. My dad was the editor of a monthly newsletter that went out to probably about 500 addresses. I helped with editing, typing them on to stencils, and drawing illustrations with a stylus before running them off on a Gestetner. Occasionally he’d let me write an editorial and a few of my poems were published. I’ll never forget the thrill it gave me to see my first one in black and white. In my early twenties, a bi-national magazine called Christian Living published one of my poems on their back cover. It’s funny to me now, but I was absolutely shocked to receive a cheque for that contribution. I didn’t know much about the publishing world. I would have gladly paid them for the honour and satisfaction of having my poem included! 

      Over the years I had many letters to the editor in newspapers, small articles in others and I wrote columns for different organizations and clubs for weekly newspapers. At the Seniors Day Center where I worked, I wrote a bi-monthly column Keenager’s Korner which was published in four different weeklies so had quite a large circulation. I also interviewed each of the seniors and wrote a short life-story and along with a picture inserted it in a binder called This is Your Life. Often those dear people remarked how interesting their life sounded when I got finished writing about it. I know it pleased them and I like to think it was an encouragement to them. I didn’t think of myself as a writer—I was just doing what I enjoyed. Still, I had dreams of someday becoming a writer and author.

     My husband promised when he retired, he’d do the bulk of the house work so I could pursue my writing. Meantime, I took college writing and English courses. When he died of colon cancer at 63, I thought I may never achieve my goal. Had it not been for Brenda Lundy inviting me to God Uses Ink, I may have dreamed forever.

      I waited a year and then attended what had become WRITE! Canada. I didn’t know a soul, for Brenda had succumbed to cancer by then. I was welcomed and nurtured and took in so much information my head was full and my heart was light by the time I came home.

      For months, I had dreaded wakening to another day without my beloved, but the morning after that conference, I awoke with the realization that I could scarcely wait to get up and begin writing. I literally sat up in bed and said aloud, “Hello, the rest of my life! I want this day to begin.” It was nice to have new purpose in life. My first writing after that was a week’s assignment for REJOICE! a daily devotional. When that was well-received, I had several ideas of what to pursue. I had in mind a book I could write, but all the advice I got at the conference was toward writing articles first. However the book idea wouldn’t go away, so I thought I’d just begin to get it on paper while working at other articles. But when I got started I typed from 9 a.m. to 9 or 10 p.m. day after day as fast as my fingers could type. Even at night I often awoke with an idea of what should come next. Of course it took a lot of editing and reworking after the initial writing but there was a lot of pleasure in that first draft. Not Easily Broken wasn’t published for a few years, but the sequel, Not Far from the Tree came a year later after that.

     Tyson’s Sad Bad Day was another project that grew out of a poem that came to me in the middle of the night, following the death of my daughter’s best friend and the need of her young niece and nephew to have an understanding of death as part of life. When I couldn’t find an illustrator, my horizons were stretched again as I drew the pictures to illustrate that children’s book. I’ve also had the joy of being part of three different anthologies—Second Cup of Hot Apple Cider, Grandmothers’ Necklace and Fifty Shades of Grace, and have had several personal experience articles in a variety of magazines.

     Another marriage, learning to know and love another whole family, another long journey with cancer and continuing medical appointments, have slowed the process on my next big project—my life story, Out of the Ordinary. But it is well on its way. I began the task mainly for my family, but as I share chapters with my writer’s group, I am affirmed time and again that it is worth sharing with a larger audience. I hope some of you will think so too. Coming from a conservative Mennonite heritage perhaps is a different existence than most to begin with, but there have been many parts of and incidents in my life that fit the title. Much as we all are similar, each one of us is unique and out of the ordinary—but this will be my story.

Starting Late--Carolyn R. Wilker

 Diane Amento Owens of Wise Women Write “considers herself a late bloomer and is proof that it’s never too late to begin writing.”  I’m so in there with her. I, too, started later in life, although there were signs along the way that it could come to pass. And yet if someone had told me in elementary school that I’d one day be writing for publication, I would not have believed it.

Writing wasn’t presented as an option at that time as were careers in teaching, nursing or secretarial work. And motherhood. From an early age I wanted to be a teacher, and a love of reading and good books has been with me, even if the number of books in our home was quite small at that time—unlike my current collection.

During my high school years, two things happened that led to me writing, apart from school assignments. Two families moved away—a friend’s family, and a family with whom we spent a lot of time. They were all friends and I missed them; I began writing letters, some of them quite long.

In high school there was much more reading material available—English novels and plays, including Shakespearean performances we got to see live. There were stories and poems that my fellow students submitted to the yearbook. Josie, a Grade 11 classmate, illustrated her story, and she allowed me to take it home one weekend so I could read the whole thing, not just snatches of it that I read over the noon hour in the cafeteria. How did she come up with such interesting ideas?

            During high school, I also began to write to a pen pal in Taiwan. Sheu Yi Yung, a graduate student in Pharmacology, sent beautiful postcards of his country and wrote about their customs and asked about ours. Already the teacher, albeit informally, I taught him English grammar, and he taught me some Chinese. Eventually I stopped writing as I had done with my Amish friend, but other connections and letters took that place.

After college, I fell in love with libraries and shared that love of books with children I taught in day care centres and nursery schools. I took my daughters to our local library or bookmobile from the time they were toddlers until well after they were able to read on their own; we read volumes. Yet it was years later, when our children were older and I was facing some health challenges, that I began to write more than letters.

At first the writing served as journalling, but with time, much reading and research, I felt compelled to write an article for our national denominational publication. That was my first publication credit and where I first learned that writing could be a risk and that others might disagree with my position. I was not dissuaded. I had a voice and I could share what I knew to be true and understood.

 A friend told me about God Uses Ink and so I attended my first writers’ conference in 2001. I knew no one else there and it was a strange and interesting step. When The Word Guild formed in 2002, I joined. The conference opened a door, and with the organization, further possibilities and meeting more new people. I experimented with my writing, trying many forms—book reviews, op-ed, children's stories, devotionals and articles—and stumbled upon poetry which I still love to write.

Numerous articles, poems, devotionals and a book later, I still enjoy writing letters, though some are harder to write—such as letters in January of this year to an Amish schoolmate that our friend was seriously ill. 

 I may be a late bloomer to writing, still in all those years I’ve collected much to write about. And now I teach writing and edit others’ work as well.

For me, writing has been a form of self-expresssion and exploration, of how I see the world and all that is in it, a world where God works in ways I do not often understand. Including times I wonder where he is.

 Is writing something that I happened on or a gift meant for me to use and share my thoughts with others? While I may not always write about God and his wonders and the way he works in others and in me, he's definitely there in my worldview—the world I see with my own eyes.

 As for being a late bloomer to writing, you're not alone as I am not alone. There's room for more. If you've pondered writing, come and explore. Come join us!

www.carolynwilker.ca

Don't break that chain - Nesdoly

I am the writer of our family’s annual Christmas letter. I have, in my "Christmas" file, a copy of each one I’ve written! One of these years (maybe this one) I’ll make a photocopy of each and compile scrapbooks for my now-adult kids. But before I indulge in that luxury, I’ve set myself the task of writing this year’s letter.

For me the hardest part of composing this yearly newsletter is getting started. To help me with that I usually reread past versions to see how I’ve done it before. And so on Friday, I hauled out the Christmas file and flipped through this family history-in-letters.

The first thing that hit me was how technology has changed things. The earliest letters were handwritten on lined notepaper. A couple of years after that I designed letters that folded into cards with calligraphy or pen-and-ink drawings on the front. I painstakingly printed the artwork and the letter itself on parchment paper those years to keep the ink from fuzzing, as it did if I used bond. Then I photocopied them.

In 1990 I must have hauled out my old manual Olympus to do the Christmas letter - because it definitely has the typewriter look (white-out and all). Then in 1991 I used a borrowed word processor. Finally in 1992 I got a computer which I’ve used till the present, printing the letters on a variety of Christmas stationary.

In addition to mirroring advances in technology, a bit of the history of the times comes through these letters too. For example the 1990 letter begins:

In only a few more weeks 1990 will be history. It has truly been an amazing year in our world, with the unexpected toppling of much of the Eastern Bloc, the sudden flare-up in the Middle East and looming uncertainties throughout our country as befuddled politicians tackle one brush fire after another...

(My goodness, that last bit could be a description of Canadian politics any year!)

In 1997 a mail strike was pending and that year’s letter started out:

To write or not to write that is the question,
Whether the mail will move we do not know
But when it comes to friends, e’en the suggestion
That we’d forget them’s answered with a ‘No!'

And a year later, as email became the favorite mode of communication for me, I jingled:

Email would be faster
a visit even better,
but as tradition would dictate,
from us a Christmas letter....

The most favorite part of rereading these letters, though, is reliving times with the kids. Here are a few favorite bits.

From the 1990 letter when B. had just turned five:

...This is a conversation we overheard between him and a little boy in the next seat on the ferry this summer. They were watching some object in the sky.

Little Boy: ...maybe it will go as high as Santa Claus.

B.: Santa Claus is a sham

Little Boy: (silence)

B: Do you know what a "sham" is? It’s a fake.

We nervously glanced at the little boy’s parents and were
relieved when the two boys started talking about something else.

(Though Santa was never part of our Christmas tradition, we did not coach our kids to dash other kids' illusions about Father Christmas - honestly.)

And from that same letter:

S’s comeback to B’s endless knock-knock jokes:

B.: Knock-knock

S.: This is a recording. There is nobody home.

Finally, from the 1993 letter, when S. was 10 and not the keenest pianist:

...I brought some dispute between the children re: piano practice times to Ernie, our resident mediator and after he suggested a solution to the problem, he declared, "I’m as good as Solomon," at which point I heard S. mutter, "Yeah, cut the piano in half!"

Alas, reading all these old letters brings me no closer to starting this year’s. But I’ll think of a way to begin it in due course. Because I wouldn’t want to break this letter chain– which already spans 20 years!

*****************


I first posted this on my blog in late November 2005. That year I did get around to putting together a collection of letters for the kids. I made color copies of each, slipped them into plastic protective sheets, printed a photo collage cover, put the works into D-ring binders and called the project "Our Story in Letters."


So take up that pen or head over to that keyboard to write your annual Christmas letter. After all, you're writing much more than a letter - you're writing history.


Website: www.violetnesdoly.com

Personal blog promptings 

Kids' daily devotions Bible Drive-Thru

Daily Devotions for adults: Other Food: daily devo's

A poem portfolio 

The lost art of letter writing

Recently I read a wonderful memoir by an elderly friend of my mother's: Russia and Beyond: One Family's Journey 1908-1935 by Margaret Zarudny Freeman. It tells an amazing story of her family's survival during the Russian revolution. She was the oldest of six children and wrote with amazing detail how they coped in western Siberia, helped by a couple of loyal servants after their father fled the country to work first in China, then in Japan. While he was away their mother was arrested by the Bolsheviks and later shot.

Here's a description of the book from Amazon:

Russia and Beyond is a young woman's account of herself and her family in
the chaotic years surrounding the Russian Revolution and Civil War of 1917-20,
followed by a long self-exile in Russo-Chinese Manchuria, and the beginnings of
a new life in America in the 1930s. A child's-eye view of violent military
events, and of unflinchingly practical responses to personal emergency and loss
- with five siblings in tow after the death of their politically victimized
mother - matures to an understanding of homeland loyalty, displacement, and
expatriation, in a more international arena. The author, now aged 97, has left
us an inspiring, sometimes chilling, but forever positive narrative of this
harsh intellectual coming of age, and of the mutual love and perseverance that
sustained her, and her young fellow survivors. A comment from Nadine Gordimer
(Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1991): "Dear Margaret, I've read your book with
growing interest and fascination, page after page. It's a remarkable evocation,
a double one: a revelation of the profound meaning of emigration not written
before, and a picture of family relationships enduring the disruptions of
historico-political disasters in what must be no less than a unique survival by
trust and love." Johannesburg, South Africa 10 August 2005

Mrs. Freeman does not spare herself in her portrayal of childhood selfishness, sibling rivalry, and conflict with adults. Her portrait of her father and mother and the servants is the stuff of great literature. One thing that struck me in reading the book was how many letters this family wrote each other. The father wrote as often as he could, even when strife, famine and dislocation made the mails unreliable. He encouraged his children to write him often, and saved the letters. First of all, it amazed me how much family togetherness was stressed no matter what distances separated people. Today, we may live in the same house, but so often everyone's in their own room with their own computer or TV set, often not even having meals together.

Secondly, those letters, saved through periods of unemployment, uncertainty, travel and danger, provided a treasure trove for Mrs. Freeman when she wrote this wonderful memoir.

What's happened to letter writing today? We send emails now, but mostly emails are short, a paragraph or two. And how can we depend on saving them? I have lost my saved email when hard drives have crashed. I have other saved email on hard disks that are soon going to be obsolete on new computers. Many of us have the little portable hard drives that look like squat pens, but who knows how long that electronic format will last.

We are in a period of such rapid technological change that even trying to write a memoir or a novel that specifically mentions a certain kind of technology can either date you pretty fast, or confuse readers. How many teenagers today would know what a floppy disk is? Or an eight-track tape?

I find it hard and cumbersome to write letters. I send the occasional hand written card, but even that is difficult. I am addicted to convenience and have trouble slowing down to write a long, thoughtful, observant letter. What I used to devote to letter writing, I now devote to blogging.

Maybe I have a wider audience in the blogs, but who knows whether 25 years from now, any of what I've written here will be accessible.

We're paying a price for convenience and today I confess my addiction to it. And, this Lenten season, my feeling of contrition makes me aware this addiction is not a good thing. The book also made me realize is that too often I don't take the time to get to know the people I meet. For example, I had met Mrs. Freeman several times over the years and had no idea of her remarkable story.

As we live in our virtual worlds, are we taking time to connect with the real people in our midst?
How alive will our writing be if our main contact is through computers, monitors and appliances? Do you miss the days of letter writing?