Product Description
by Connie T. Braun (Author), Jean Janzen (Foreword by)
With this collection of meditative, personal, memoir, and lyrical essays and narrative poetry, Connie T. Braun explores the multi-valences of silence within themes of loss, displacement, identity, heritage, and faith. Reflecting on her childhood in Canada, and her ancestral Mennonite homeplace, these pieces form a memoir about her maternal grandparents' and her mother's life in Poland, their experiences of war and displacement, and their eventual immigration and acculturation. In these pages, and in consecutive travels to Poland, the author invites the reader to accompany her as she traverses the territory of old and new worlds, war and peace, the landscape of dispossession, and the mass forced migrations of World War II within the ground of holocaust. Braun conveys through story that not only words, but silences, speak meaning. Private memory within the historical record reveals people caught up in catastrophe striving to survive with their humanity intact. These are stories crafted from silence and language, memory and obscurity, faith and doubt, chaos and hope, the past, and future possibility. Telling and listening to stories performs the acts of mourning and witness, and attests to the regenerative and transcendent qualities of narrative.
Author Biography
Connie T. Braun is an instructor of creative writing and the author of The Steppes are the Colour of Sepia (2008) and two collections of poetry. Her academic and personal essays, poetry, and reviews appear in various anthologies, journals, and publications. For over twenty years she has served on boards for the arts and writing, nonprofit organizations, and, most currently, an advisory committee for the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of the Fraser Valley.
