Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors compare their recently released books to weird things. This week, Jennifer Sears writes about What Mennonite Girls are Good For, her new story collection out from the University of Iowa Press.
If What Mennonite Girls are Good For were an Amtrak train route, it would be the Lake Shore Limited, the one that pulls out of Penn Station in late afternoons and sends you up the Hudson River before it makes a sharp turn west, funneling you past factory towns and farmland, through so much dark. My book would insist you get out before Chicago and lead you into some small town that would want you to know the city you just came from isn’t at all what it pretends to be.
If What Mennonite Girls are Good For were a hymnal, it would be heavy with back matter and annotations. It would include predictable four-part harmonies––“Amazing Grace” and “For the Beauty of the Earth”–– and songs for fewer voices: Simon and Garfunkel’s “50 Ways,” Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane”, Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” a bit of Madonna, and one of the arias Maria Callas sang when she was still young, still a believer in dreams.
If What Mennonite Girls are Good For were a funhouse, it would not find its own way out.
If What Mennonite Girls are Good For were a petroglyph, it would be a faint mark on a topographic map, a site waiting alone on a western Kansas plain. Always threatening to slide off the crumbling rock and turn into dust, it might unnerve you with its silence. My book would even like such things about itself.
If What Mennonite Girls are Good For were a recipe from the More with Less Cookbook, it might be “Easy No-Knead Whole Wheat Bread,” “Bread and Butter Pickles,” homemade “Wheat Thins,” “Our Children Love Liver,” “Sweet and Sour Lentils,” or “Mother’s Grape Nuts,” “Dandelion Salad,” “Sopa Paraguaya,” or “West African Ground Nut Stew.” My book would want you to linger over the descriptions and introductions, the names of testers and contributors. It would ask if you too feel a pull toward that plural first person: us, we, we.
If What Mennonite Girls are Good For were a family-owned truck stop on a naked stretch of Kansas highway, it would play old school country music. It would be open 24/7. It would remember you.
If What Mennonite Girls are Good For signed up for voluntary overseas service, it would not make regional requests. It would check the box that says: where needed most.
If What Mennonite Girls are Good For were a station wagon, it would be an old Ford Fairmont with cushioned bench seats, basically a set of open arms on four wheels. It would be the first car to see you walking beside the road. It would offer you a ride. And if you accepted, my book would listen so intently to whatever story youneeded to tell, you might not even realize you, too, were entering its narrative. . . yes, if my book were you.
Jennifer Sears is an associate professor of English at New York City College of Technology/City University of New York. Her writing appears in The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Witness, Guernica, Ninth Letter, Fence, North American Review, and elsewhere.
Buy What Mennonite Girls are Good For here.