Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing

The first book-length treatment of the flowering of American Mennonite writing of the last two decades, this book combines careful scholarship with Jeff Gundy’s frank, sometimes sardonic, often funny, deeply engaged commentary on Mennonite writing and culture.

This book explores important Mennonite and related authors—Patrick Friesen, William Stafford, Julia Kasdorf, Jean Janzen, Keith Ratzlaff, and others—as well as crucial issues and themes, such as power and authority, myths of origin and possibility, heresy and community.

Walker combines revised versions of path-breaking critical essays such as "Humility in Mennonite Literature" and "American Mennonite Poetry and Poets" with Gundy’s visionary and lyrical explorations of Mennonite writing and identity, including several chapters written especially for this book.

"Do we all imagine that we have the clarity others lack, when in truth we are all just walkers in the same fog?" Gundy asks. "We might then determine to listen to others’ reports of the weather and the landscape very carefully, to learn of that which is obscured in the fog from where we walk, but clearer from another point of view."