“Pinching Zwieback:” Book, Author, Publication Details

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

Last UPDATE: Nov 4, 2023

Barn: Guide Meridian, Lynden, Wa.—mjt

Author Mitchell Toews

After eight years in creative writing, 120 prose pieces placed in periodicals and anthologies (and over 650 rejections 😊) Mitch is launching his first book, a collection of short fiction published by At Bay Press of Winnipeg.

So who is this guy, Mitchell Toews?

Mitchell James Toews is the great-great-grandson of Mennonite Delegate C.P. Toews from Molotschna, Russia; the grandson of C.F. (“Roy,” “Schusta”) and Rosa Toews of Steinbach; grandson also to former “Jantsieda” (residents from the “other side” of the Red River) Diedrich and Marie Harder of Steinbach; and son of the Steinbach Bakery family: Norman “Chuck” and Jessie Toews. He is married to Janice Kasper of Steinbach and they have two married daughters.

Among his stop-overs and occupations: a year (1973/74) at UVIC in Victoria, two years at U of W in Winnipeg and (much later) a Master’s Certificate in Marketing Communication from York U. Mitch founded—with his father and uncle Earl Taves—and operated a small overhead door manufacturing company. In 1996, the now solely-owned business, Hanover Doors, was sold by Janice and Mitch and Mitch’s advertising and marketing career began. In 2016 after time well-spent with companies like Smith, Neufeld, Jodoin Law (Steinbach), Loewen Windows (Steinbach), Yarrow Sash & Door (Winnipeg), and Lynden Door (Abbotsford), Mitch devoted himself entirely to creative writing—a lifelong and much-delayed passion.

Janice and Mitch live in their 1950 lakeside cabin at Jessica Lake in the Manitoba territory that is part of Treaty 1 & 3 land and home to the Métis Nation, just north of the Fiftieth Parallel in the Winnipeg River basin. Their daughters Megan and Tere live in British Columbia and trips to see the families, particularly grandkids Ty, Hazel, James, and Floyd are as frequent as circumstances permit.

Mitch is an avid windsurfer, rower, and cross-country skier and the lifelong rigours of climbing ladders and swinging hammers, along with baseball, volleyball, basketball, and golf all contributed in past days to the current sorry state of his joints.

Book Synopsis

Pinching Zwieback comprises stories that recount events and conflicts from the “Mennosphere”—inwardly oriented communities that can generate wonderful characters and practical, often beautiful, solutions to life’s confusion. Other times, a solution may be elusive.

Hartplatz is the imaginary home for many of the recurrent characters. (Also Winkler, Aldergrove or fictive places like them—a small town pastiche.) These are rural Canadian junctures where vectors intersect: faith and doubt; pacifism in a world at war; honour and temptation; fervour and absurdity; the temptations of the wide welt, and of course, humour. Often gritty, it’s K-mart fiction or maybe better yet: schmaundtfat fiction. (A Low German glossary is provided!)

“God causes it to rain on Chevs and Fords alike,” as Diedrich, the main character in three* of the 20 stories puts it. It’s in this context that the characters resist, pitting their will against that of their foe—the foe they seek to love.

*Other main characters include Matt Zehen, his mother and father, Hart and Justy Zehen, Matt’s grandmother Rosa, and Matt’s close friend, Lenny Gerbrandt. A family tree provides a guide to the cast for readers.

Where to Purchase Pinching Zwieback

“Pinching Zwieback: Made-up Stories from the Darp” 2023 ISBN 9781998779055 by Mitchell Toews (At Bay Press, Wpg). Publication Date October 24, Release Date November 7, Launch Date Nov 8. Contact us for assistance: check with Mitch or Matt on where to buy and also about how to receive signed copies or for information concerning special situations, author appearances, writing workshops, and more.

Requesting “Pinching Zwieback” by Mitchell Toews (At Bay Press, Wpg) at your favourite bookstore or library will get you a copy. Coming soon to libraries in Kenora, ON and Manitoba locations in Brandon, Lac du Bonnet, Pinawa, Altona, Winkler, and Morden. More to follow.

“Pinching Zwieback” 5″X8″257-page quality paperbacks may be purchased:

From At Bay Press: “Individual orders are placed through our website by adding books to your cart and then checking out with our secure online payment. Orders may also be placed over the phone by calling 204-489-6658 and payment will be taken over the phone. You may send an email with any questions or concerns to atbaypress@gmail.com.”

McNally Robinson Booksellers (Pre-order available) all locations.

The gift shops at both Mennonite Heritage Village (Steinbach) and Mennonite Heritage Museum (Abbotsford).

CommonWord Bookstore and Resource Centre in Winnipeg, MB

Misty River Books in Terrace, BC

Manitoba Made Events & Shop in Lac du Bonnet, MB

Shop in person: Canadian Bookstore Map

Virtually all ONLINE book sources WORLDWIDE including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Thriftbooks, etc.

Libraries and booksellers in Canada and the U.S. may purchase books from At Bay Press’s distribution partners:

Canada: http://www.litdistco.ca/
U.S.: https://www.casemateipm.com/9781998779055/pinching-zwieback/
Aus/NZ: https://peribo.com.au/

For other countries: Please see https://atbaypress.com/ordering or contact Matt Joudrey atbaypress@gmail.com

Events

https://mitchellaneous.com/2023/10/20/pinching-zwieback-events/

Coming Soon

A first REVIEW of “Pinching Zwieback” by the eminent Canadian author, Poet Laureate, and literary leader, Linda Rogers van Krugel of Victoria will be placed shortly. Several other reviews, from Canada and the U.S., are underway.

Early Praise

“Pinching Zwieback Observations” from Canadian literary notables Zilla Jones, Ralph Friesen, Alanna Rusnack, Armin Wiebe and more.

Follow Mitch & Pinching Zwieback

Follow Mitch’s FaceBook page and this blog (Mitchellaneous.com) for unboring updates, news, and other crumbs and chicken feed as “Pinching Zwieback” struts in wider and wider circles around the coop.

A Toews Prose Sampler

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

From the sleepy stubble fields of Manitoba Mennonite country to the shores of the Rivanna River in Charlottesville, Virginia, here are four not-so-sleepy short stories. Besides my stories, the contents of The Rivanna Review are alive with unique literature, pictures, and book reviews. See the contents, here: https://rivannareview.com/

Single copies and subscriptions are extremely reasonable in price!

These four pieces are original works of mine, examples of “the organic story,” according to Print Editor Robert Boucheron. These stories are not in the forthcoming collection, “Pinching Zwieback” from At Bay Press (October 24), so no overlap!

Sweet Caporal: Life presents many unexpected dramas, especially for teenagers.

Hundred Miles an Hour: Set in the same lakeside location as Sweet Caporal; home to a darker drama.

The Sewing Machine: 1931 Winnipeg is the backdrop for unlikely combatants.

The Seven Songs: Pride, desperation, and deception know no one locale, no religious or national boundaries, and no exceptions.

All Our Swains Commend Her

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

Can’t wait to roll into Van with a couple of grandkids in tow to read at this event! Family day!

I’ll be reading excerpts from my 2nd Runner-up entry in this year’s PULP Literature Raven Short Story contest.

You Figure it Out

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

Hannah Arendt

🤔 Yup…

Editing

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

Editing is difficult but rewarding.

Difficult because you are erasing what you have created. You are subtracting from or changing the very thing that got you in the publishing game! Feels risky.

Rewarding because your changes create something new, all over again. Plus, the editor is your ally and a trusted source that comes to you from a place other than the rocky mass between your (my) ears. Thank God for that.

I am preparing 24 stories for publication in the spring. Several folks are weighing in on my work and each day there’s a knot in my shoulders and that night’s dreams are peppered with flickering replays of scenes from the collection. I wake up, make notes, fall back asleep and then laugh at my scribbled nonsense in the morning.

Here is a segment, edited recently. I offer it as a fast in situ peek at the crime scene. It is from the story, “The Peacemongers” and the topic is Canadian Mennonites during the wars, WW2 in this case, who deigned to be officially named “Conscientious Objectors.” This meant they would work in labour camps in Canada rather than serving in the military.

I thought of Corky’s uncle John who worked at Loeb’s lumberyard. He wore a red vest and a plaid shirt and stood behind the counter at the lumber desk. He was a big man with very white teeth and he would stand there smiling and writing down what you wanted to buy. My dad would always order lumber from him and it always started out the same way. Dad would say, “I need some two-by-fours,” and John would say, “how many and how long do you need ’em?” Dad would reply “twenty pieces and forever!” Same joke every time. Then John would yell for one of the yard boys to come and load the order into our truck, his pencil poised above the order form, looking at my dad over his glasses. “Twelve-footers,” or whatever length he needed, was the answer, served with a slanted smile.

‘

Dad said John had been in a C.O. camp during the war. He told my dad stories about it and how he made lifelong friends there. “Some were in the camp for other reasons, but most were there to follow the Word. That meant something to us and it was like our battle, to stay true to what we had been taught and to what we would teach our children.” I heard him talk about this to my dad and other men at the lumberyard. He stood straight up and looked into the eyes of the person he to spoke to. His voice was firm and he was not trying to convince anyone—he was just telling it. I was too young to understand everything, but thought he was telling the truth, exactly as he knew it and believed it.

.

I sometimes felt as though John and many others like him in our town believed, maybe secretly, that God was the biggest, toughest, most bad-ass Mennonite of them all. As if God would do all the fighting for us, and He would take no prisoners. I’m not sure that made our desire to live a life of pacifism any better. Possibly worse. It made God seem to me like a kind of bully—forever smiting Old Testament armies and kings that He didn’t like and constantly fighting with the Devil. Like Archie and Don, who fought almost every day after school at the corner of Hannover and Kroeker, accomplishing nothing but scuffed chins and bloody knuckles.[MT1]

 [MT1] Added 22-09-10 in a moment of random inspiration.

—Considered but not promised, for “Pinching Zwieback” At Bay Press

A Collection of Short Stories

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

Here it is… the announcement I’ve been waiting to make public since my story in grade four at Southwood School in Steinbach made it onto the classroom bulletin board.

Bigger me, bigger bulletin board.

Cheers, respectively, to teacher Miss Hildebrand and publisher Matt Joudrey.

“Pinching Zwieback” is a themed fictional account of the lives and characters in a place on the Canadian prairies called Hartplatz. It features the Zehen family and many others whose comings and goings represent events both real and imagined under the Prussian blue sky. Among them: Hart & Justy, Schmietum Jake, Pete Vogel, and Matt Zehen, whose journey is observed from childhood to later in life. Characters that really schmack!

More info as we get closer to the spring 2023 launch. Watch this space and my Facebook and Twitter pages. (LinkedIn too.)

two flash collections to love

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

Here are two flash fiction collections to love:

“Small Shifts” edited by Shawn L. Bird (Lintusen Press) https://lnkd.in/gRNdw659 and “This Will Only Take a Minute — 100 Canadian Flashes” edited by Bruce Meyers and Michael Mirolla (Guernica Editions) https://lnkd.in/gp6fJVcE

Many exceptional writers with some of their best stories in two books packed tight with wisdom, pathos, and humour. Plus, the boring bits have been removed. (As flash lovers already know, this is what generally happens.)

#flashfiction

“Died Rich” Coming to Fabula Argentea

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

My heartfelt tale of a neophyte basketball player—slash—jung Reiba ☠️ will be included in the May 2019 edition of the American literary magazine Fabula Argentea. 

https://duotrope.com/listing/8261/fabula-argentea

Thanks to Editor Rick Taubold for accepting my work. This is a “silver story” of both friendship and hardship that comes from personal experiences and a buddy who left too soon.

Active since 2012, Fabula Argentea receives over 500 submissions per year and from that produces three issues of about 8-12 stories each. Here’s an interview with Editor Taubold that succinctly describes the magazine’s approach:

https://duotrope.com/interview/editor/8261/fabula-argentea

allfornow,
Mitchell

☠️

jung Reiba is Plautdietsch (Low German) for “young pirate”.

 

Fiction on the Web Presents “City Lights”

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

My short story, “City Lights” is up on Fiction on the Web. FotW, based in London, is one of the first literary magazines to appear online. It was founded by writer-editor-screenwriter Charlie Fish and has been running continuously since 1996.

An earlier version of “City Lights” first ran on LingoBites as “The Light Pool” and is available on that site in English and Espanol, in both text and audio. It’s a dark story of class conflict, bias and selfishness.

Another story of mine, “Nothing to Lose”, was chosen for inclusion in “Best of Fiction on the Web”, an anthology that launched in January of 2018 and contains 54 stories from FotW’s 23 years of publication. This outstanding collection is available for £16.99 | USD$19.95 and all proceeds go to the Guy’s and St. Thomas NHS Foundation Trust.

You can buy the book from Amazon (UK link, US link).

 

allfornow friends,
Mitch
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Where I am Less-lesser-known

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

A friend and colleague signed his writerly email, “in the struggle”. I liked that in a whole bunch of ways. My new occupation is revenue-negative and offers many noble struggles. I’m in it, for sure.

I have always been the “man of action” type. If I have a problem, I set about fixing it without delay, despite not knowing what the hell I’m doing.

“What are you looking for?” Janice often asks, in a reasonable effort to help as I buzz by, like an angry wasp looking for something to sting.

“I’ll know when I find it,” says I.

So too, it goes with writing. I received some professional prep along the way in my days at Dun & Bradstreet, but those reports were so clipped and “factoidinal” that even the current U.S. President would find them too brief. (If he spoke English, which Las Vegas stakes at 4:1 that he does not.)

My long wasteland sojourn as a propagandist for various window and door makers also gave me some writing chops, but not, I fear, of the MFA/bright new voice variety. For example, I once penned this slogan for a wood window and door manufacturer: “Dedicated to Wood”. I did, it’s true, not see eye-to-eye with my boss — nice fellow though he was/is — and I let that obvious, smirk-inducing double-entendre go to bat for us, so to speak, partly out of my mean spirit. (He approved it, so – I guess it’s on him.)

So, unprepared as I was, the last three years of writing and submitting stories to literary magazines and contests has been educational! I’ve relied on my lifelong survivalist instinct and “Imma quick learner, eh,” attributes to see me through. Now I have a truly gifted freelance editor on ‘my team’ and my learning curve is a-spikin’.

The thing that continues to puzzle and inspire is the audiences that I have found – or that have found me.

The twitter graph above tells the tale. My stories tend to do well in the U.S. and also in the U.K. & Ireland. Canada is on the podium, but you’d think — at least I did — that the True North would be my base. I supposed my hometown crowd would be the one that GOT all my arcane references and cheered every goal and razzed the penalties.  (“REJECTIONS SUCK…REJECTIONS SUCK!”) Instead, my Canadian twitter followers are third ranked.

Granted, my >4K sample of twitter stats is an imprecise demographic, but at least it gives me some kind of a read on who out there is, uhh, reading me and where they’re from. (57% female, mostly professional and making more money than I ever did flogging fenestration.)

I suppose part of it is because my stories of Canada and its small towns, quirky Mennonites, zillion-tree forests, and sparkling waters are a fresh take for U.S. and U.K./IE readers living in crowded cities filled with unminded gaps and too-handy handguns.

I went with this apparent vibe and have hooked my word wagon to the star of a London-based editor. Mr. McKnight also gives me insight as to why Brits and other non-Canucks might appreciate my oblong characters from a square world.

As I write my novel, I have felt the subtle nudge from Albion and have included some characters from further afield:

1200px-EnglandCornwall.svg

Billy Penrose: a Cornishman transplanted to the prairies; a lover of the Boreal biome and at home in his adoptive Canadian version of the 50th parallel – far from his salt-soaked origins. He is my MC’s Grandfa.

 

 

Patel: An Indo-Canadian youth, born in Canada and a friend to the MC. He is subject to the racism and ignorance that was (and is) part of the Canadian patchwork quilt society. This character is both a tip of the metz to my 2% follower-reader cohort from India, and also a reflection of my own life experience on the University of Victoria campus in the mid-seventies.

* * *

us flag reader

Sooo, seeing as 53% of you reading this are statistically-likely to be American, and I have already twisted your tail by teasing your Pres (“Ol’puddin-head”) I should acknowledge you – a loyal and mighty clan.

Several U.S. literary sites have done me the honour of accepting my work. I do have quite a few U.S. points of reference in my stories because, well – we’re neighbours. Also, I’ve worked for and with Americans and much of my travelling has been in the States.

baseball
My most recent publication will sit on a rocking chair on the front porch of a Berkeley, CA publication: riverbabble. This site has been in operation since 2002 and I feel a special thrill to be included.

My story here is based in part in Tacoma, WA and also spends some dreamy time in a ballpark somewhere along the Canadian/U.S. border. In the era the story is set, there were cross-border leagues in operation featuring teams from neighbouring states and provinces. It was “country baseball”, all bruised knuckles and peeling paint, but it embodied the kind of earthy, poetic beauty that I find in almost all sports.

Anyway, you can find many wonderful poems, flash fictions, short stories and essays here: riverbabble 32 Winter Solstice 2018, including my fiction, “In the Dim Light Beyond the Fence”.

riverbabble 32 cover

Tray Bong! 

allfornow friends,
Mitch
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