Jeff Gundy’s Walker in the Fog is, first of all, a record of the author’s sojourn among the Mennonites of the American Midwest and beyond. Gundy is both poet and critic here, actor and observer. His diverse reflections, composed over several decades, are alternately meditative and probing, speculative and documentary, critical and playful. Gundy is interested in Mennonite/s writing, in the nature of art, the artistic process, the communal reception of literature, and the character of interaction among writers, and between writers and their worlds. Art—literature in particular—is for him "the place where the communal memory is maintained and negotiated." For Gundy the communal memory concerns Mennonites. He is always after the Mennonite point of reference, the Anabaptist footprint. Gundy has been captivated by particular authors and texts and points of view. Although he invites his readers to consider the words of figures as diverse as Plato and Kristeva, Blake and Pound, Rumi and Kierkegaard, he lingers over none of these. That is, while he engages these "outsiders" in passing, his attention settles always on what he calls "some sort of Mennonite connection." As he roams the Mennonite territories he knows, he attends not only to creative writers like Rudy Wiebe, Patrick Friesen, Di Brandt, Julia Kasdorf, Jean Janzen, and Keith Ratzlaff, but also to Mennonite critics, historians, sociologists, and theologians. The wide-ranging web of allusions and connections he plants and nurtures in his reader’s mind traces the scope of his investigation, which is tenaciously oriented toward a focal center even as it leads ever outward. Jeff Gundy, poet and critic, has participated in and observed Mennonite writing from the earliest years of its emergence as an area of performance and inquiry. As an engaging and perceptive commentator in the field, he draws on creative insights that are at once personal and passionate, lively and concrete. He interacts freshly and provocatively with the spheres he encounters, musing with insight and good humor on the cultural landscape he and the writers who draw his attention inhabit. This volume, like Di Brandt’s Dancing Naked and Julia Kasdorf’s The Body and the Book, offers its readers a prismatic perspective on what it means to be a writer among Mennonites. Every one of these titles—including Gundy’s own Walker in the Fog—reveals that these poets attend, first of all, to the sensory world. What all these poets have to say is rooted perhaps not precisely in what W. B. Yeats called "the rag-and-bone shop of the heart" but certainly in embodied experience, in lived encounters. The essays published here reflect those things that happen when one living force comes into contract with another. Here are salutations and embraces, questions and exclamations. Like Brandt and Kasdorf, Gundy is ever conscious of his place in every encounter, and his text, like theirs, is self-reflexive. Despite his claims to a peculiarly Mennonite humility, Gundy energizes his work by foregrounding his presence relative to the subjects he addresses and the figures he embraces. Between the covers of this volume a reader is invited to travel with Gundy in the territory of Mennonite/s writing and to encounter, along the way, signs and allusions that suggest innumerable tracks to be taken off the main path of investigation. Gundy has named this book Walker in the Fog as if, as he remarks, to suggest that as individuals traverse the landscape he charts, their view must inevitably be obscured. As readers we would enhance our tour, he remarks, if we "listen to others’ reports . . . very carefully." He proposes for us here a singular report on this terrain—the geography of Mennonite/s writing—and suggests to us a particular, luminous path. —Hildi Froese Tiessen Walker in the Fog orders:
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