Mennonite Weekly Review

NORTH NEWTON, Kan. — Perhaps a key achievement of Rudy Wiebe’s new memoir is his evocation of the “polyglot world of languages” the award-winning Canadian novelist grew up in and the role these languages played in his formation as a writer.

Bethel College history professor Mark Jantzen, left, talks with novelist Rudy Wiebe. — Photo by Vada Snider/Bethel College

The child of Mennonite Breth­ren settlers in the boreal forest of northern Saskatchewan, Wiebe, 73, grew up speaking not only the English he learned in school but also the High and Low German tongues of his parents and spiritual forebears.

Because these languages were virtually unique to his people, and later became part of the spare and often bitter landscape where Wiebe lived until his 12th year, “I always knew exactly which one to use, switching back and forth as the listener required.”

“It was a wonderful polyglot world of languages,” Wiebe told an audience at Bethel College on Oct. 29. And though he writes exclusively in English, the Low German dialect spoken by his family remains fundamental to his outlook, a basic if outwardly silent part of his writer’s toolbox.

“I feel it as instinctively as the rub of hunger in my bones,” he said.

Wiebe, whose recent memoir, Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, was published in the United States by Good Books, delivered this year’s Menno Simons Lectures at Bethel. Wiebe also spoke and gave readings from his work at Tabor College in Hillsboro and at Hesston College.

Speaking at Bethel Oct. 29 on “Where the Truth Lies,” Wiebe explored the contradictory and sometimes complementary territories of fact, narrative and fiction.

“Fiction is the narrative you and I make about the facts of our life,” Wiebe said. “Such a statement, of course, is fraught with ambiguities… . Once we are inside them, words are essentially a closed system. The facts you or I live every day we recast into words. We are timebound creatures, and it is only by the use of words that we can contemplate the past … or the future.”

Wiebe also emphasized the role that landscape — whether the boreal forest of the Canadian Arctic or the prairies he still inhabits in and around his home base of Edmonton, Alta. — plays in his writing.

“What particularly speaks to me are the aspen trees,” Wiebe said.