Response to Rhubarb Issue (winter 09, #24)

            While this issue of the Rhubarb magazine is centered on the single theme of American writing on traveling and homecoming, the genre of work it presents is very eclectic.  Most of the issue is comprised of poems and short works of nonfiction but it also includes book reviews, an artist’s statement, an interview, and a translated Arabic poem.  Each of these mediums of writing offer a different view of the journeys Mennonites take and how those journeys affect them.

            When I first opened this magazine issue I thought that all of the pieces would be about remarkable trips to far off countries and, while many of them were, the works that I enjoyed the most are the ones that deal with a different kind of travel.  Linda Wendling does not physically go anywhere in her story “Cosmonaut Girl Lost in Space.”  Her story is more about traveling inside her mind and going back to a time in the past when her mother was still alive.  She also remembers a trip she once took to Java to the top of a volcano.  Her stories twist and meld together the lost feeling after her mother’s death and being lost on a volcano in Java, and straighten out when she finds her way back home.

            Kirsten Beachy’s “Last Mile” is also steered more toward the wanderings of the mind than of the actual physical journey.  The canoe trip sparks her minds wanderings but it are the narrator’s thoughts that travel further, leaving behind friends and the here and now and traveling to a hypothetical “what if?” of a looming possible hidden romance.

            When Jean Janzen returns to her home town for a reunion in “Sleeping in the Cellar,” her memories are so strong and so quietly slipped in to the present that as you read you forget that the narrator is a fifty year old mother and not a ten year old girl.  She gives a different view of basements as she talks of being one with the earth she is within as she sleeps below the ground.  She is reminded of how she came to be in this place, of her father emigrating from Europe and how she returns to the place of her ancestors, completing the circle.

In Melanie Zuercher’s “High on a Mountain,” Zuercher’s spring break trip to the Appalachian Mountains inspires her to take a trip back home to a mountain she is more familiar with.  For Zuercher, mountaintops are places of refuge, of peace and memories.  She does not need to travel great distances, she just goes up.  

My favorite piece in this issue discusses an entirely different kind of travel.  In “The Road to Amish Country,” Rachel Yoder travels with her dad to a different county but most importantly, it is a journey to a different culture.  I was intrigued by this new view of Mennonites and the Amish.  Yoder’s presents us with a unique view of the gap between Mennonites and Amish people as only someone in her position has the power to do.  She also provides a good insight into the culture and ideas of her former Amish father as he struggles with his past and his present and how to make them work together.  Being a Methodist, Yoder’s story is a valuable insight for me into the relationship between the Amish and Mennonites.

I was also intrigued and surprised by the issue as a whole.  Even before I turned the first page I was struck by the cover of the magazine.  The cover two very polar images: what looks like an Amish buggy and the outline of a seemingly naked girl dancing.  The second image is so far from what I have learned about Mennonite beliefs and traditions and some of the pieces in the issue carried with them this same surprise as they contain swear words, talk of sex, and thoughts of affairs.  This was not at all what I was expecting in a Mennonite magazine.  Maybe this new look of Mennonite art and literature that is starting to appear is indicative of changes that the Mennonite faith is going through or at the very least it is indicative of the difference between liberal and conservative Mennonites.