Prolific author's latest publication is a tribute to his Mennonite roots
BY ANDREW VOWLES
Look out, James Herriot. A faculty member in the Department of Population Medicine looks set to rival the late Yorkshire veterinarian, not just for sheer literary output but also for the breadth of that output.
Readers browsing next month through seemingly unrelated bookstore shelves might be forgiven for missing the connection between a decidedly academic treatise on health and sustainable development published this summer by Prof. David Waltner-Toews and a new volume of poems and Mennonite recipes written by — what's this? — David Waltner-Toews.
But that's not all. With a bit of luck, Waltner-Toews expects to see his name on the front of several equally disparate books to be published in the next year or so.
He's in the final editing stages of The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty and Managing for Sustainability. “Ourselves in nature” is the epidemiologist's capsule description of this volume, which he has co-edited with Nina-Marie Lister, an urban planner at Ryerson University, and the late James Kay, an ecologist and engineer at the University of Waterloo.
Waltner-Toews is lead editor of its 30 chapters, written by 31 authors from six countries, and co-author of eight chapters. The book will be published in late 2005 by Columbia University Press.
Also in the mill for publication next year by Coteau Books is One Foot in Heaven, a volume of connected short stories about growing up Mennonite in the Canadian Prairies. “These are the voices I grew up with,” says Waltner-Toews, whose parents left Mennonite colonies in Ukraine in 1926 and moved to Western Canada.
In addition, he has nearly completed a mystery novel he's been writing off and on for the past decade. Called Fear of Landing, it's about a veterinarian ensnared in a web of mysterious deaths and political intrigue while working on a development project in Indonesia in the early 1980s.
No surprise: the book is based on Waltner-Toews's own experiences during a project in Java that gave him insights into what he calls “layers of cultures,” questions of national identity, and “layers of silence or who's talking to whom.”
At first glance, those projects look unrelated. But for Waltner- Toews, a line of stepping stones links them to his new book of Mennonite recipes and poems about an archetypal Russian Mennonite woman — “a perfect start to the Christmas season,” he says, pointing to the December launch date of The Complete Tante Tina: Mennonite Blues and Recipes — and to Ecosystem Sustainability and Health: A Practical Approach, a user's guide released this summer by Cambridge University Press.
In fact, for this former literature major who has already published six books of poetry, forging those connections is precisely the point. Hopping from one to another of those metaphorical stepping stones, Waltner-Toews explains that it's all about storytelling.
Scientists come up with theories to explain everything from dinosaur bones to health statistics. Politicians and bureaucrats use narratives to devise policies intended to change the world — or at least their small corner of it. Fiction writers spin virtual worlds to explain experiences of daily life. They're all what Waltner-Toews calls many different local stories that make up some universal narrative, an idea embodied in the manuscript for yet another book with the rather grandiose-sounding title of Looking for A Story to Save the World: Science, Stories and the Health of the Earth.
The problem, he says, is that people insist on holding apart these seemingly disparate stories. In a world where sustainability has become a byword, that traditional silo approach won't do.
“A scholarship for sustainability must somehow deal with the whole richness of life and thus must incorporate poetry and narrative as well as ecology and thermodynamics,” says Waltner-Toews, who is founding president of the Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health.
“Hence, the telling of my personal history — as in The Complete Tante Tina, which is embedded in Mennonite history, which is embedded in the history of European empires — is as important to fostering sustainable development as is my examination of the ecological and health dynamics of communities in Nepal or Kenya or Peru or Manitoba, such as I describe in Ecosystem Sustainability and Health.”
For validation of his theme, he points to a typical reaction to his metaphorical Tante Tina voiced by listeners at his occasional poetry readings (about half of these poems have been published elsewhere since 1979).
Everyone knows a Tante Tina, including the Guyanese poet who approached him after a reading in Singapore to say: “That sounds just like the stories I grew up with.”
Waltner-Toews will officially launch The Complete Tante Tina Dec. 7 at 7:30 p.m. at Waterloo North Mennonite Church, 100 Benjamin Rd. in Waterloo. Published by Pandora Press, the book costs $17 and can be ordered online at www.pandorapress.com, by calling 1-888-696-1678 or through Waltner-Toews at dwaltner@uoguelph.ca.
