Canadian - Writer | 1964 -
'Irma Voth' is my sixth book, but it's only the third time I've featured Mennonite settings and characters.
Miriam Toews
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I would never want to deny my Mennonite background and culture; I'll always feel like and be identified as a Mennonite and therefore possess that little extra authority on our beliefs. I also see myself as a Canadian writer.
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Like every Canadian, I have been taught that one of the most important functions of art is to supply and elaborate the myths and narratives of nationhood.
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Canada has, at times, represented itself as a country in a valiant struggle against powerful and menacing agents that are indifferent to its special practices and sensibilities - most especially American culture. It's the old, outdated garrison mentality.
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I don't even know what 'successful' means. We're all failures. Look at the world. We're all complicit.
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When a person becomes a legend, the very thing that makes them human and knowable is killed off, so it's like being killed over and over and over again, for all eternity.
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A person might see that I've blurbed a certain book and decide they want nothing to do with it! Like, 'If that reprobate Toews likes it, forget it!' So, it's a crapshoot. But it feels good to be able to praise a book that I love or that has been written by a new writer.
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The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it's torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.
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At one point in my life, I wanted to do a master's degree in Irish literature, but I ended up getting pregnant instead.
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I spent 18 years in a small Mennonite town in the middle of the Canadian prairies.
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Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page!
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