Dear Audience,
If you are curious about these stories and where they come from, you need to know that I wrote them over the last ten or so years. They are my answer to earlier of my writings that did not satisfy me, stories still Realist in habit and motivated by the idea that a narrative and its characters were meant, in one way or another, to teach others something. These stories do not privilege the author, either deliberately or accidentally, via a strategy or as the result of training. The attempt in them is to make the reader laugh at, and sometimes respect, the one who imagines them, knowing that the one who writes them is also laughing at, and sometimes respecting, the one who writes them.
I am the product of literate (sort of) parents, an evangelical Christian church and culture, an older brother who fought in very interesting ways to corner all the attention available to a child, and younger siblings who longed from day one to be not Mennonites but Pentecostals. I speak English, High German, Low German, and know a little French, the French learned out of necessity (though gratefully) in preparation for my doctoral degree. These stories reflect a pre-evangelical Mennonite past that did not believe in or think of believing in a personal relationship with God, but thought of people as simply creatures, the products of God, so all that life brought about in them, including humour, toothaches, sexual and imaginative excitement, social obligations, visits from friends and enemies and the oddity of the variation of the make-ups of human natures, all were reflections of a God 'Who' was not a judge but some 'non-thing' to not think about but of 'Whom' to be in awe.
Douglas Reimer
If you are curious about these stories and where they come from, you need to know that I wrote them over the last ten or so years. They are my answer to earlier of my writings that did not satisfy me, stories still Realist in habit and motivated by the idea that a narrative and its characters were meant, in one way or another, to teach others something. These stories do not privilege the author, either deliberately or accidentally, via a strategy or as the result of training. The attempt in them is to make the reader laugh at, and sometimes respect, the one who imagines them, knowing that the one who writes them is also laughing at, and sometimes respecting, the one who writes them.
I am the product of literate (sort of) parents, an evangelical Christian church and culture, an older brother who fought in very interesting ways to corner all the attention available to a child, and younger siblings who longed from day one to be not Mennonites but Pentecostals. I speak English, High German, Low German, and know a little French, the French learned out of necessity (though gratefully) in preparation for my doctoral degree. These stories reflect a pre-evangelical Mennonite past that did not believe in or think of believing in a personal relationship with God, but thought of people as simply creatures, the products of God, so all that life brought about in them, including humour, toothaches, sexual and imaginative excitement, social obligations, visits from friends and enemies and the oddity of the variation of the make-ups of human natures, all were reflections of a God 'Who' was not a judge but some 'non-thing' to not think about but of 'Whom' to be in awe.
Douglas Reimer
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