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2007-11-20 issue:

Q&A with Rudy Wiebe

by Anna Groff

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Rudy Wiebe is a Canadian author and professor emeritus in the English department at the University of Alberta.



Wiebe won Canada’s most prestigious prize for fiction writing: The Governor-Generals Award (equivalent to the Pulitzer prize for fiction) for Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and A Discovery of Strangers (1994).

He released his most recent work, Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, in 2007. The memoir tells stories of his childhood growing up in his Russian Mennonite family in remote Saskatchewan through age 12.


TM: How was the writing process for this memoir different than for your novels?

R.W.: I was trying to remember the facts of my particular past, and make stories out of them in keeping with my memories.

What makes this memoir “happy and nostalgic,” as it has been described?

Though there was hard work in the thirties, I grew up in a loving family and a caring community. No heavy traumas, no violence: though of course there were deaths.

How did you decide to include photos and mementoes in the memoir? What was the selection process like?

Photos help you to remember, and they also tell the reader more than certain words; maybe even more than I’ve seen in them, after long looking.

Why was it important to move between using High German, Low German and English in the memoir?

To give the reader a sense of the three languages I grew up with; which helped me become a writer because the genius of language is most easily seen when you instinctively know several.

Why did you devote so much attention to the women (mother and sisters) in your life in the memoir?

For a small child, his mother is the first world he knows; and his nearest siblings. I had three sisters nearest my age, and my sister Helen, because of her personality, life and death, was particularly close to me.

Some have said the memoir ends abruptly. Do you agree? Why did you choose to end it that way?

It basically ends when we leave our boreal forest homestead farm (where I was born) and move 400 miles to a prairie town; also, at twelve and a half years, I’m about to become an adolescent: both good reasons to stop there.

How have Mennonite’s attitudes towards fiction writing changed from when you started being published in the 1960s until now?

There is a new world, now, of English language and learning in the Russian Mennonite community which wasn’t there in Canada before the 1960s.

Are Mennonites today more open to the truth-telling that often happens in fiction writing?

They are much more knowledgeable about what novels do, how they work on our imaginations. There is no comparison between the earlier world of recent immigrants and the present literate comprehension of the North American way of life.

How have other writers with Mennonite backgrounds influenced Mennonites’ general attitudes towards literature and fiction?

Yes, they have, especially in the last 20 years when Mennonite writing in all literary forms—fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction—has completely changed our appreciation for written art forms.

Describe the effect of church people’s criticism of “Peace Shall Destroy Many” and your loss of the job of editor of Mennonite Brethren Herald. Did you consider quitting fiction-writing or altering what you wrote? Or, did it spur you on?

I never considered not writing more fiction just because several Big Men—Groote Manna, as my father would say—in the church didn't like what I wrote. A very full account of that entire experience is in the essay “The Skull in the Swamp” in my collection, River of Stone, Knopf Canada, 1995, pages 249-273.

What does it feel like to win literary awards?

It feels good: it indicates that at least one jury of three of your peers thinks highly of your work.  In another sense, awards are not good: literary works are not like athletic competitions where one point makes you the absolute winner; they are more like a garden—many flowers, not just one, are exceptionally beautiful.

Which of your books would you recommend for a first-time Wiebe reader to begin with? Why?

There’s a long list to choose from, and it depends on your literary interests and skills. If you like relatively straight-forward realistic stories, try Peace Shall Destroy Many or Sweeter Than All the World. If you enjoy impressionistic complexity, read A Discovery of Strangers or The Temptations of Big Bear. If your interest is more fact-based non-fiction, read Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest or Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman, which Yvonne Johnson and I wrote together.

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