Just sent this bio out. It’s of the long-form variety and I have shorter ones (much) that I use most often. I thought it was kinda fun and less inhibited than some I’ve tried in the past. You tell me?

Bio

After university in Victoria, B.C. and Winnipeg, MB, where Mitchell chose not to take his dad’s advice and follow his creative inclinations, he jumped into adult life. Married at 21, a couple of kids soon after, the couple opened a manufacturing company and commenced to work like hell. After 16 years of busted knuckles, lit & fig, Mitchell and Janice sold their company and he went to work for other hewers and makers of wood products in Canada. Mitch became “the creative guy” for a couple of large manufacturers, working on advertising and marketing communication. He added a degree in marcom to his education and worked in this stream of the creative economy until 2015 when he retired. (It was as soon as they dared!)

Now, Janice and he find themselves living a simple life in their 1950 lakeside cabin in Manitoba. Cold as blue steel in the winter and summers are kinda buggy but they have no real complaints—they left those behind—and they drink drunkenly of nature every day. The only blackfly in the boreal ointment is that they are half a continent removed from their grandkids. “That sucks but whatchergonnado?”

Mitchell’s daily beat, when not fixing or renovating the old girl—their cabin, that is—is to write short fiction and submit to lit mags in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. He has over fifty stories published, a short list of anthology contributions, and one Pushcart Prize nomination. Please see the author’s blog for the full catalogue. https://mitchellaneous.com/write-clicks/

In print, Mitch has made contributions to these available-to-purchase titles: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18450919.Mitchell_Toews Two more are underway but are not yet published.

Mitchell has also written:
✒️ a sci-fi-fantasy novella about an insidious mutant swarm of giant kakkerlaks and a group of stranded teenagers. It awaits the TLC that will allow it to seek self-actualization in the outside world of readers and reviewers.
✒️ A short story trilogy set on the Mexican Pacific coast for which he maintains a bothersome notion that someone could adapt it into a great screenplay; and,
✒️ a noir debut literary novel that is in its first full edit. He is about a year-and-a-half into it. Mitch has connected with a Brit editor to help get this WIP tale of Mennonite mayhem set in the wilds of Manitoba to the query stage.

Mitchell was recently accepted as a “New/Early Career Artist” by the Canada Council for the Arts and this allows him to apply for funding to help finance his second act. He is actively considering opportunities for grant application.

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Last, FYI, here is an unsolicited list of the folks I’d most like to share a beer with, around the campfire here at Jessica Lake:

First, in recognition of Mother’s Day, my great-grandma Sarah Toews who, in 1917 (!) sued her Mennonite Church (run entirely by men) for shunning her. Next, novelist Phillip Roth who first made it “normal” to insert lots of Yiddish into his books and opened up a rich and fascinating way of incorporating culture and setting. I try to follow his lead. In my case, it’s Low German or *Plautdietsch*. One of my true author heroes, Miriam Toews, would also get an invite. She comes from the same little town as me and she, a bit like Roth did for the American Jewish community, opened things up in the conservative Mennonite community.

She comes from the same little town as me and she, a bit like Roth did for the American Jewish community, opened things up in the conservative Mennonite community. Both Ms. Toews and Mr. Roth enlarged the tolerance for dissent from within, especially when offered in a comical or satirical way, despite the serious subject matter.

Both Ms. Toews and Mr. Roth enlarged the tolerance for dissent from within, especially when offered in a comical or satirical way, despite the serious subject matter. She followed the lead of a renowned writer named Rudy Wiebe, who would also have a lawn chair at the fire. CNF novelist, journalist, speaker, socialist and all-around shit-disturber Chris Hedges would be asked to keep things lively—him with a Doctor of Divinity and a Pulitzer and all. Finally, Moonlight Graham, from W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe”, because I love baseball and he seems like a pretty good guy.

P.S. – the Mother’s Day tag would come out under normal, non-Mother’s Day situations. 🙂

Cheers,
Mitchell Toews
Jessica Lake, Manitoba
https://www.facebook.com/mitch.toews
@mitchell_toews
https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/mitchell_toews

I received a forward from a friend who I enjoy a lot and also respect, not a little. He’s a person almost anybody could model their life after and enjoy many improvements in the process. That goes for me, that’s for certain!

Anyway, he’s of a more conservative bent than me, for the most part. Not altogether and not in the context of the current binary way of things. I believe we can disagree civilly.

The forward was about the dangers of large-scale immigration and why we should object to it in Canada. The message closed by encouraging recipients to: “Forward to everyone on your contact list!”

But… “everybody on my contact list” contains mostly people like me: those whose antecedents arrived here with no money, little or no English, next to no desire to learn English, demanding their own schools, refusing to join the army, getting free land for nothing while people who lived here for generations were forced to give up land for these newcomers.

The ladies wore weird headgear, the men’s closets were imbued in octopus ink, women were treated like indentured cooks-maids-baby incubators and every third adult male started his own church when he wasn’t debating buttons versus hooks and other matters of eternal salvation.

I come from a long line of ‘undesirable aliens’ — similar to the ones we Canadians are now supposed to “watch out for!”

I and my kind are lucky our predecessors were given a free, tax-payer-sponsored, gov-enforced sanctuary on the East Reserve, or all the gun-toting Canadian citizens back then might have chased the invading hordes of Mennos the heck back to Mother Russia to get ground up like foarmaworscht in history’s most violent wars.

The wide-eyed Molotschnian folk who arrived here were dependent in many ways on the kindness of strangers. They received that from Canadians — and Germans and Brits along the way, too! Now it’s our turn, even if we don’t like the looks of this incoming bunch. Some of them are religious fanatics. Oba!

By 2050, Canada will be 50%+ Asian and the U.S. will be a Hispanic majority, so really, squabbling now is just a waste of our znackzote-scented breath anyway.

My grandkids are French-Menno-Ukrainian-Metis and I’m proud of it and I suspect old Delegate Toews might be too if he was still around. He is one of those responsible for some of the details of the Mennonite diaspora, back in 1873.

I respect opposing opinions because the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms grants us the ability to be 100% full of horse dung, a by-product that — when frozen — is good for road hockey but wears out its welcome in a warm room full of loud-talking Mennonite settlers’ offspring.

“Disagreement makes the world go ’round.”
— Chuck Toews (to me, my sisters, my daughters, and quite a few others)