Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Memoir) (2010) (26 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to my editor, Helen Atsma, and my agent, Michael Bourret, for their role in shaping this memoir. I would have never thought of writing this story had not my svelte red-headed friend Carla Vissers pointed out that my e-mails from California were sounding a lot like nonfiction. I'm thinking of buying Carla a drink or something. And I never would have moved forward without the active encouragement of Anna-Lisa Cox. I'm grateful to Beth Trembley, Julie Kipp, Laura Roberts, James Persoon, and Jill Janzen for their insight, and to Joanne Jenkins for reading some of the chapters in early draft. Spirited nine-year-old Emma Jenkins had the pluck to dance an Irish jig in the lobby of a symphony hall, thus becoming my inspiration.

It is my parents who played the greatest role in supporting this project. They invited me to stay with them as long as I liked, and were perfectly good-natured when I asked them pressing questions about their Mennonite youth. Also, when I was out writing in their gazebo, sweating it out in the valley heat under a slow fan, my dad would sometimes appear in his long shorts and dress socks, puttering about the backyard. Eventually he'd come over to the gazebo, deposit a handful of ripe cherries, and silently go away again. How sweet is that? And my mom! For her I'd drink scrofulous buttermilk-though in all probability if it's scrofulous, she's probably already finished it herself. In buttermilk, as in life, she's my hero.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rhoda Janzen holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was the University of California Poet Laureate in 1994 and 1997. She is the author of
Babel's Stair
, a collection of poems, and her poems have appeared in journals such as
Poetry
, the
Yale Review
, the
Gettysburg Review
, and the
Southern Review
. She teaches English and creative writing at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.