LETTERS

Dear Editors:
I encountered DreamSeeker Magazine for the first time this fall, thanks to an email forward from my mother. I’m glad to discover a journal in the Anabaptist tradition committed to publishing “voices from the soul.” Many thanks to you and the others involved in this creation!
—Kirsten Eve Beachy

Dear Editors:
I’ve been reading Dreamseeker Magazine on the web since it began, and it’s all right. Frankly, though, I miss Mennonot, for which I was a regular columnist. (For more see www.keybridgeltd.com/mennonot/)
It seems impossible to support a Menno arts magazine with that jazzy, irreverent, Mennos-on-the-edge flavor where avant-garde Mennos can get together and say f—. Don’t get me wrong, Alan Kreider and Daniel Hertzler have their place, but the Beat Generation they are not.
And now The Other Side is folding. Alas.
—Ross Bender

Dear Ross:
I concur, DreamSeeker Magazine is not Mennonot! My wish is for a forum where some articles trend toward Mennos on the edge but willing not to say f— because that will cut other worthy readers out of the audience. My ultimate wish—though the trend is not terribly promising so far, since readers on the traditional side seem not to be as large an audience—is for enough vigorous traditionalist writers/readers to speak up to enable giving more latitude to writers/readers on the other edge.

I say this because of course DSM could publish farther and farther on the left edge, but then eventually it would become only a clich¾—another place to go for ideological ranting to the converted. I weary of that.

On the other hand, if over time DSM becomes known as a forum where you can push the edges on left or right (or yet other shades of the spectrum), then the mix of voices will help the magazine as a whole transcend ideological screaming even if particular voices, whatever their leanings, are strident.

In addition, we’ll see if this is a vain hope, but the effort is to position DSM as having an inner circle of Mennonite readers but also outer circles (with inner/outer here not meaning better/worse) of readers from many other communities.
—Michael A. King