Market Copy—Metaphor in the Making

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

The wheels of literature turn slowly, but they produce without rest, grinding out the vast quantity of grist, meal, and fine flour that create the broad imaginative canon that is Canadian fiction.

My personal grindstones have turned out plenty of words—maybe even more than I ever thought I would create. My milestone map looks something like this:

Early Submissions to literary periodicals, anthologies, and contests, Jan/2016-Oct/2023. I began submitting in 2015; however, I was not a Duotrope subscriber until August 28, 2015, so I don’t have accurate submission records for that period, except that my acceptances were zero. 2016-2023, I submitted 501 stories, essays, and interviews with 121 acceptances. Note: Duotrope does not record stats for every market I submitted to, so the submission totals are lower than the actual number sent. I used actual acceptance numbers.

Launch of Debut Collection, Pinching Zwieback “Made-up Stories from the Darp” Oct/2023-Present. With a book out, I continued to submit work for publication in periodicals, etc, but also spent time at launches, other literary events, and Open Mics. I made 123 submissions, with 21 acceptances, and attended 45 in-person events. I’ve had the honour of receiving four Pushcart Prize nominations in the years since I began my imaginative writing life in fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry.

Launch of Debut Novel, Mulholland and Hardbar (At Bay Press) Spring 2026. Having another book forthcoming with my wonderful publisher, At Bay Press, I will once again shift gears in my writing practice. I still hope to maintain a steady stream of short story submissions, so 2026 is sure to be an interesting and busy year.

Mulholland and Hardbar: “Like ‘Fargo’ with a Low German accent, Mulholland and Hardbar follows the four seasons in the boreal: friendship, mistrust, deceit, and violence.”

Here’s an IDEA BOARD look at some of the market copy drafted to date concerning my career and including my short story publication work and Pinching Zwieback. New work, including as-yet unpublished short stories, flash fiction, verse and the 2026 novel will inform these sketchbook ideas with more detail.

Mitchell Toews – Author Profile & Literary Positioning

“One chair, one cracked teacup, one quiet sigh”

Overview:
Mitchell Toews is a seasoned Canadian writer whose stories explore the human experience through the lens of Mennonite life, small-town society, and intergenerational dynamics. Across his work—from Pinching Zwieback to his periodical publications—Toews blends humour, pathos, and cultural insight, offering a layered portrayal of community, identity, and moral complexity. His work is distinguished by its balance of comic observation, emotional resonance, and attention to social hierarchies, family dynamics, and the struggles of outsiders within tightly knit communities.

Themes & Motifs:

  • Coming-of-age & growth: Stories frequently track male protagonists (such as Matt, Lenny, & Diedrich in Pinching Zwieback) navigating the transition from boyhood into adulthood, then into grandparenthood, exploring moral, emotional, and cultural challenges. This trend continues in his upcoming Bildungsroman novel, Mulholland and Hardbar.
  • Cultural heritage & outsider perspective: A recurring focus on Mennonite traditions, language (including Low German), and religious hierarchies, showing both the richness and constraints of cultural identity.
  • Family & community dynamics: Examines intergenerational relationships, the role of women as moral and cultural anchors, and the tension between individual agency and societal expectation.
  • Humour & pathos: Humour often arises from the clash between expectation and reality, offering relief and insight while maintaining the gravity of cultural, ethical, and emotional stakes.
  • Power & agency: Stories explore institutionalized hierarchies, gender roles, and moral courage, often highlighting the overlooked strength of women, the in-between world of children, and the ethical struggles of men.
  • Symbolism & recurring motifs: Bread-making, baseball, and local traditions serve as metaphors for growth, resilience, and cultural continuity.

Style & Technique:

  • Short stories: Each story functions as a “micro-battle” against expectation, building toward broader narrative and thematic arcs.
  • Narrative voice: Experienced, reflective, often balancing insider knowledge with a playful, empathetic eye.
  • Language play: Incorporates Low German and cultural vernaculars to enrich authenticity, convey identity tension, and provide a foreground for the politics of language.
  • Emotional layering: Combines intimate, personal observation with social commentary; uses juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy, physical risk with moral choice.

Critical Highlights (Summarized):

  • Armin Wiebe: Toews explores facets of Mennonite life others avoid; combines comedy and tragedy; portrays multi-generational sagas with depth.
  • Donna Besel: Gives sharp insights into the limitations of closed communities; parallels with Miriam Toews in examining cultural clashes.
  • Ralph Friesen: Steinbach’s Mitch Toews champions the underdog; balances humour with heartfelt engagement; moral courage and love as central outcomes.
  • Zilla Jones: Asks universal questions of belonging, conformity, and dissent that emerge in vividly local settings; metaphorically rich prose.
  • Linda Rogers Van Krugel: An author skilled in exploring outsiderhood, moral complexity, and intergenerational growth; offers mastery of language, humour, and cultural nuance.
  • Winnipeg Free Press: Mitch Toews writes with grit, humour, and tenderness, elevating everyday prairie life into unforgettable art. He’s an authentic storyteller—rooted in Mennonite prairie life, yet speaking to the universal. He captures the rhythms of small-town life and renders them with warmth, wit, and lasting resonance.

Positioning:

  • Strengths: Skilled storyteller bridging cultural specificity and universal themes; adept at linking humour and emotional depth; strong voice for intergenerational and small-town narratives.
  • Unique points: Mennonite cultural insider-outsider lens; layered humour; complex portrayals of gender, hierarchy, and morality; recurring motifs (bread, baseball) anchor stories in tangible, evocative imagery.
  • Audiences: Readers of literary fiction, Canadian prairie literature, “Mennolit” and other cultural heritage narratives, coming-of-age sagas, and intergenerational stories; fans of Miriam Toews, Armin Wiebe, Patrick Friesen, and Andrew Unger.
  • Framing line: “Mitchell Toews writes with wit, wisdom, and heart, turning the intimate worlds of Mennonite family life into universally resonant stories of growth, moral courage, and the humour inherent in navigating the expectations of community and self.”

Artistic Ethos:

“I come to writing fiction from the storyteller’s places: the campfire, the backseat on a long drive, the bar stool.”

Am/Want to Be/Will Be

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

I’ve been working a lot lately on what kind of writer I am . . . what kind I want to be . . . and what I will eventually be. There are countless English language journals, anthologies, bookshops and libraries in the world, and that translates into I-have-no-idea-how-many fiction readers. Regardless of the actual number, I know and accept that I can’t be the writer for all of them.

What I can be is a writer who is consistent in certain core ways and is comfortable with that. Maybe most important in these fractious times is to be aware of what my writing constitutes and what it does not.

Self-analysis begins with “self,” so here is a scratch-coat version of the literary and authorial elements I believe are most important to me. For context, I’m nearly seventy years old, a prairie resident who began my fiction practice in 2016, after 20 years in advertising and marketing. I have one published book, “Pinching Zwieback” (At Bay Press, 2023). I’ve published 142 individual stories (including excerpts, interviews, poems, and essays) and have a novel forthcoming in the spring of 2026. With any luck, I’ll also have another book out sometime after that.

That’s a lot of words, so I BETTER know what I am and what I’m not.

Yep List

√ Prioritize quality of prose and storytelling
√ Commitment to craft over cachet
√ Focus on regional or rural sensibility—without being provincial
√ Heartful, deeply human prose with unshowy language
√ Value meaning and emotional depth over literary fashion

“Be political—but to be heard, be quiet and mature in a noisy era.”

√ Write place-based prose with resonance
√ Be humble and consistent (AVOID pomposity!)
√ Hold to empathic realism and clarity
√ Recognize that emotional intelligence, rural ethics, and cultural humility are the ethos of your readers
√ Moral nuance and intergenerational narratives are central traits in the writing

“Emotion must be earned through character, situation, and moral complication.”

√ Embrace moral ambiguity—we all have it
√ Spiritual content need not be religious content (no sermons)
√ Build on strong character underpinnings and clean prose with a steady, but constant, moral arc
√ Be attuned to displacement, contradiction, and the need to belong
√ Interrogate beliefs and also what people “get away with,” and at what cost?

“Always be curious and honest about fairness, decency, and failure in the story.”

Nope List

× No authorial moralizing
× Reader catharsis is never the primary objective—no melodrama or superheroes
× No authorial identity—tell the story and let social class, rurality, and age arise through the fiction
× Write lean but never at the expense of the emotional arc or the distinctiveness of place
× Create quiet stories, but don’t be afraid to “make the quiet sharp”

“As soon as it’s read, it ceases to be your story—it belongs to each individual reader.”

× No apologies (Sin Qua Non)

Photo by Eric Peters

Coming Portage & Main Attractions

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Winnipeg Free Press/McNally Robinson Book Club

With thanks to At Bay Press, The Winnipeg Free Press, and McNally Robinson Booksellers!

Book Club
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/book-club

Ambition

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Anthologies

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

When I began submitting stories to lit mags in 2016, I noticed a few calls for submissions to anthologies. Some contests published print anthologies of the longlisted stories. Other anthologies were not open to submissions. Instead, they contained stories the editors had hand-picked for their collection.

I wondered if my work would ever be good enough to submit to an anthology, never mind have a story invited for inclusion.

As these things go, there are varying levels of anthologies. My hardcover Norton Anthology text in 1974 at the University of Victoria would be one level. I did not aim quite that high, but I did offer my work to a few and over time, others asked to include stories I had written.

My stories (18 in total) have been in 16 anthologies. I am not as active in pursuing them as I was, but I still greatly respect the form and enjoy being included in an eclectic and far-flung grouping of authors.

Here’s my printed anthology publication list, to date:

Best of Fiction on the Web: 1976-2017, 2017, U.K.
The Machinery: Fauna, 2017, India
Just Words Vol. 2, 2018, Canada
The Immigrants, 2018, U.S.
We Refugees, 2019, U.S.
The Best Short Stories from the MOON, 2019, U.S.
A Fork in the Road, 2020, U.S.
Just Voices, 2020, Canada
Anthology of Short Stories Summer 2021, 2021, U.K.
This Will Only Take a Minute, 2022, Canada
Small Shifts: Short Stories of Fantastical Transformation, 2022, Canada
Framework of the Human Body, 2022, Canada
I Used to be an Animal Lover, 2023, Australia
Hardboiled and Loaded with Sin, 2023, U.S.
Prine Primed, 2024, U.S.
Nona Heaslip (Exile) Best Canadian Short Stories, 2024 (forthcoming), Canada

I hope to continue to contribute to excellent collections like these. Every time I work with an editor, I find I improve as a writer and my work benefits with some lustre or refinement that it might have otherwise missed.

I have been nominated four times for the renowned Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses Anthology but so far, no room under that prestigious umbrella for me—so there’s still a lot to aspire to.

Advice from an Emerging Artist

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

On Thursday, February 29 poet and essayist Ariel Gordon of Winnipeg and I motored to Brandon, Manitoba to present workshops and readings at the Western Manitoba Regional Library downtown branch. We represented our mutual publisher, At Bay Press.

It was an outstanding event, well-attended by an enthusiastic group. Both Ariel and I have posted about it on Facebook, Instagram (prosebytoews), X, and elsewhere. Ariel did a poetry workshop on urban ecosystems and I introduced my break-out session on “Writing Your Culture.” Both of these programs had full classrooms and the reading was also—collectively speaking—pleasingly plump.

We had a Q & A at the “end of regulation time.” (In my imagination, Brian Propp scored the winner, assisted by Ralph Krentz. . . For all you Wheat Kings hockey fans out there.) I really enjoyed the conversation.

One of the questions was concerning “advice for young writers.” Ariel made some valuable suggestions in response. When it was my turn, I held back on expressing my immediate reaction to the embedded inference that all emerging writers are “young.” Of course, many are, but just as we no longer use ONLY male pronouns when discussing a group. . . “If a writer wants to succeed, he must blah-blah-blah,” I find it inappropriate and incorrect to add the fuzzy modifier, “young.” Presumptive gender-fixing (he-him-his) now sounds foreign and antiquated to our ears, and I long for the time when “young” and “emerging” are not used as synonyms for early career artists.

Hot air rises. Heat travels in any direction. When we say “heat rises” in an assured, generalizing, scientific-sounding manner, we become General Wrong of the Wrongsville Army.

Okay, mini-rant over.

I gave several points of advice and I was pleased with the repartee, as John Prine might sing. This morning, over a cup of familiar, at-home coffee, I thought of another way to answer, and it goes a little sumpin’ like this <guitar lead-in>:

“On a business trip to the Green Building Conference in Chicago about 15 Marches ago, my colleague and I stopped in at a pizza restaurant. The place was packed and full of loud hubbub and stratified layers of cigar smoke. We opted for outdoor seating, under the radiant red glare of heaters.

As we waited, we watched a local resident at work. A fat, filthy Norway Rat was trying to free a pizza carton that was wedged beneath a car tire. Grunting, sniffing, scurrying, its pink tail waved and curled and flexed with intense determination.

Pausing for breath, it sat on thick hanches and pondered. Whiskers twitched in a nature-copies-Pixar way. Abruptly, it went to the loose end of the box and, clamping down with white canines, tugged repeatedly like a tow truck trying to jerk a car out of the ditch. Snarling with effort, the noisy activity attracted one of its swarmmates to the scene of the pie.

Without hesitation, Rat Due, as we named the newcomer, immediately joined Rat Uno and in seconds they were pulling in perfect unison, a rodent duet. Outmatched at last, the box lid gave way in ripping surrender. Rats Uno and Due plundered the contents and made good their tail-waving getaway.

My advice to emerging artists: Sometimes you are Rat Uno, and sometimes you are Rat Due, but don’t just sit in the comfort of the mischief and watch.“

CHEERS to playwright and English & Creative Writing Asst. Prof. Dale Lakevold. He brought along a swarm of talented students from Brandon University, and like the Marino’s Pizza he supplied before the event, his contribution made our day. Thanks too to WMRL Mgr. of Programming & Community Svcs., Alex Rogowsky who prepped and managed our twinkly evening.

Three Reviews—Confluence; Trifurcation; Sangam

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“Pinching Zwieback: Made-up Stories from the Darp” Mitchell Toews (At Bay Press, 2023)

Here is a triumvirate of REVIEWS for my debut collection of short stories: Tim Huber, Associate Editor of Anabaptist World…Patricia Dawn Robertson, a familiar Canadian reviewer, critic, and writer with a review from the Winnipeg Free Press…Robert Boucheron, writer and editor/publisher of the Rivanna Review of Charlottesville, Virginia and his review as it appears in Ottawa’s Literary Heist.

New books for 2023: Fiction books
Chekhov of the darp
Stories from the Darp

And, here’s where to buy your copy, and where to send your friends to get theirs: https://mitchellaneous.com/2023/12/17/where-can-i-buy-pinching-zwieback/

Libraries & BiblioCommons

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Want to borrow PINCHING ZWIEBACK from your local library? NO PROBLEM!

Services like BiblioCommons are linked to At Bay Press and a copy can go to your local library in Canada, the US, the UK, or Australia. ALMOST ANYWHERE. Just request Pinching Zwieback by Mitchell Toews (At Bay Press, 2023) and you can get it. . . In Burlington, Springfield (all of them), Come by Chance, WaWa, Walla Walla, and Wallaby Junction.

Okay, I made the last one up. But seriously, it’s AVAILABLE!

(Or BUY it here: https://bit.ly/BUYpinchingzwieback)

The Shuffling of Souls

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Image: *Preservings* Issue Number 47, FALL 2023: “Marriage of Russlaender Maria Pauls and Old Colony Cornelius Driedger, March 1927. JAKE BUHLER PRIVATE COLLECTION

Here are some thoughts about class and gender conflict with quotes from a variety of observers.

“The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education.”—MC Gabriel’s thoughts in “The Dead” from James Joyce in Dubliners (Public Domain).

Is Joyce’s judgemental Irishman not interchangeable with a haughty Russlaender attending some inelegant, rustic affair in a prairie podunk like Gruenfeld or Neubergthal? Could this class-conscious thinking—reductive and dismissive—just as well be aimed at some random Kanadiers; a huddling of farmers in hand-me-down Sunday suits? Are Mennonites not just as guilty as any ethnic or religious group in their tireless search for an unloved “they” to diminish?

“That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Men made the truth and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts… There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon.” —Author Sherwood Anderson from the prologue of Winesburg Ohio (Public Domain).

The distant cannon fire of class and gender warfare, this time from the rolling hills of Middle America, where sinners and their sins are pilloried by the colour of their licence plates.

“I had heard about Mennonites all my life, about the brawls, the fist-fights at socials and hockey games. The hypocrisy as they kept liquor out of their town, but then drove to La Broquerie or Ste, Anne for booze. How they’d look down their noses at us for doing in the open what they did in the dark,” —MC Richard’s acute observations from Matthew Tétreault‘s Hold Your Tongue (NeWest Press, 2023) summarizes the abrasive relationship common between Francophone/Métis Ste. Anne, Manitoba and its nearby, predominantly Mennonite neighbour, Steinbach.

“I hear them (the ‘wealthy church ladies’) get up from the living room and walk past the kitchen. They’re coming down the stairs now, all talking at once. Like cedar waxwings, in a flock, turning in the sky, then landing as one. Beautiful in a way, but still capable of turning on you. Hurting you to make things better for themselves.”—MC Justy Zehen’s thoughts in “Willa Hund” from Pinching Zwieback (At Bay Press, 2023).

“This book is a double bun, doughy anecdotes from a spirited childhood coupled with the realisation that manhood is a more complex goal than just being strong, especially when strength translates into bullying, especially of women, the archetypal bakers of the author’s imagination.” —Linda Rogers van Krugel in her REVIEW of Pinching Zwieback (At Bay Press, 2023).

The quiet shuffling of souls—betraying different classes, genders, racial origins, and beliefs both phobic and apologist together with their ironfast allegiances—appear to be present in all groups, denominations, and Gemeinde: from those who jumped the turnstiles on the Ha’Penny Bridge to those living in the dusty towns of Southern Manitoba to the Buckeyes of Ohio and beyond.

As an author with a momentary, leaky thimble full of influence, I have made an effort to recognize and embed some questions about this “prost” (ignoble) trait that I see in myself and in Mennonites and their selfish schisms. The unfettered compulsion to divide and re-divide until the original differences are impossible to discern. This flaw is present without relief in my life experience outside of Mennonite familiars too. It’s in all the places I have been and in all the people I have learned to know. I’ve seen more marketing and public relations and gossipy slander in these social groups than in all the thousand vulgar ad campaigns I created, put together.

Are we all Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du mal?” Or is there is hope? My conclusions in “Pinching Zwieback” are doggedly optimistic, but then, I set out to put hope into every circumstance, even the most vile. I did so despite the constant human wickedness and the despair it has caused. In the end, I suppose I’m like the character Justy Zehen, “I don’t want to be a little Russian boy hiding in the rhubarb.”

A Review of Pinching Zwieback

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https://bit.ly/WFPpzREVIEWpdRobertson

Here are stories written and compiled over the years 2015-2023. Many of them are based on my personal experience in the half-century from the late Fifties onwards but have been given the cloak of fiction. It is Autofiction that is meant to be read in the spirit of openness by all members of the human congregation.

Stories written, submitted, rejected, re-written, combined, disintegrated, edited, and re-submitted many times. Like a treasured recipe, altered and fine-tuned and dependent on the ingredients at hand.

In the end, I believe At Bay Press and I have made a collection that is comfortable on a wide variety of bookshelves, nightstands, coffee tables, and in commuter jacket pockets. An eclectic variety of readers; including but not just Mennonites, nor Anabaptists or Christians, and not just those who are none of those.

I hope all my readers, no matter their filters or experiences, can draw from this book. My aim is to make available meaningful connections for readers and provide thoughtful enjoyment through the characters’ lives and interactions. I also want to enable readers to relate when read as stand-alone vignettes or when viewed as a whole, from the broader narration that the plenary arc seeks to achieve.