On my bookshelf are now three volumes by poet Julia Kasdorf, all published within the past decade. This latest, The Body and the Book, is a collection of ten essays, interspersed with some of the author's previously-published poems. Rounding out the collection are photographs, illustrations, and the poems of several other writers, Jeff Gundy's "How to Write the New Mennonite Poem" and David Wright's "A New Mennonite Replies to Julia Kasdorf."

Each essay explores themes familiar from Kasdorf's poetry - her Amish and Mennonite heritage and her upbringing in Pennsylvania, especially childhood summers spent with extended family in Mifflin County's "Big Valley"; her sense of forged identity and but also dislocation as a result of moving between rural communities and eastern cities (Pittsburgh, New York); relationships with family, friends, and acquaintances; and sexuality. But while these themes all surface repeatedly, the idea of vocation, and especially the artist's work in relation to her audience, is central.

Kasdorf tells us early on that "the body" of her title connotes several specific meanings: the religious community, as in "one body" and "the Body of Christ," as well as the physical bodies of her subjects. Meanwhile, "the book" refers variously to the Bible, the Martyrs' Mirror, and even to particular books that she and others have written. Since this is a self-study, "the book" also literally means the work at hand, the product of Kasdorf's labors to write out of her own experience for Mennonites and others. Readers' responses to her writings - whether warmly receptive, mildly critical, or personally offended - mediate Kasdorf's identity as an interpreter of Mennonite experience.

Kasdorf has a gift for the metaphoric. She likens the process and effects of her own literary endeavors to the extraordinary but eminently practical Mennonite Central Committee meat canner:
"Perhaps the canner does not comply with the most sophisticated or efficient plans for combating world hunger, but it satisfies a basic human need to do something concrete in the face of cruel and confusing times. . . . So in the spirit of the meat canner, I offer these essays: They are composed for relief from whatever was at hand in my life: memory, stories, treasurers, trauma, and the need to make meaning out of loss and change" (pp. xiv-xv).

In a 1995 conversation, Kasdorf commented on differences between prose and poetry, suggesting that expository writing has the potential to be more threatening to readers than does poetry: "Maybe this is what is comes down to: There are the official interpreters of the community, and then when there's an unofficial interpreter, that's quite threatening. . . . Poetry you can sort of fudge. But [with prose}, you're writing in plain English."

By moving to "plain English," but not abandoning her critical stance toward Mennonite church traditions and institutional life, Kasdorf lets readers in on autobiographical details that help to illuminate her passion for writing. In pre-adolescence, she says, "I began compulsively to narrate my life in school tablets . . . . I shaped whatever had happened that day into words. In order to have something to write each evening, I developed the habits of watching and converting experience into language" (p. 12). This child's observant eye, translated into narrative, she recalls, was stimulated by travels back and forth between her own home in western Pennsylvania and the Amish and conservative Mennonite cultures carved out by her relatives in the Big Valley. Sensitivity to her surroundings was also helped along by folk like her grandmother Bertha Peachey Spicher Sharpe (sic.), who Kasdorf calls "my link to the Valley, keeper of its stories, guide and teacher of its ways, cook of its foods-my Mennonite muse" (p. 17). Kasdorf writes about Mennonite experience from many angles, but with particular focus on an ethnicity that is specific to her own Pennsylvania family heritage with its mix of "plain" and "non-plain" cultural expressions. She knows, given the varied ethnic and geographic threads of Mennonite history, that her characterizations are specific to time and place -- not universal.

Moving to "plain English" but simultaneously defending a poet's sensibilities allows Kasdorf to discuss what she sees most lamentable about Mennonite and Amish traditions and ethos. Her portrayals of Mennonite institutions and leaders are, more often than not, cranky. Kasdorf looks for situations, historical and contemporary, where male leaders have received recognition and legitimization for their deeds, while overtly or tacitly contributing to the silence of others. This subject is explored in the book's weakest essay, a musing on the legacy of H. S. Bender, and in a more provocative essay, on the tribulations in 1948 of Goshen-area Amish Bishop Samuel Hochstetler and his daughter Lucy Hochstetler. The Hochstetler case involved legal action against the Amish leader for his treatment of his mentally ill daughter. Kasdorf scrutinizes two well-respected Mennonite leaders who involved themselves in the case - Goshen College professors Guy F. Hershberger and John Umble - by publicly coming to the defense of the maligned Amishman (an understandable impulse, in Kasdorf's view), but yet giving little attention to the predicament of Bishop Hochstetler's daughter Lucy (a transgression, in Kasdorf's view).

It is not surprising that patriarchal stories, shortcomings, and sins are among Kasdorf's complaints about the recent Mennonite past. Kasdorf observes that she came of age in the 1970s when societal changes brought about by the women's liberation movement were readily apparent; yet subordination of women remained a feature of congregational life. Others seemed to assume that she would not be a church leader, even though she was a baptized, active member of her congregation and denomination. She perceived that she "was not being groomed to become a prince of the church," and later came to regard this subtle gender differentiation as betrayal: "Great freedom came with slight expectations" (p. 139). Elsewhere in The Body and the Book, Kasdorf writes about having eventually left the Mennonite Church and making the Episcopal Church her spiritual home.

I identify with Kasdorf's assessment of the costs - personal and churchwide - that came with privileging boys (not girls) in the proverbial "tap on the shoulder" a generation and more ago. Other readers will identify with other stories she divulges from her own experience: the twists and turns in perception that result from digging through historical archives; the treasured story of a child's conversation with one of many hobos who stopped by an Amish home during the Great Depression; or even, perhaps, Kasdorf's trauma, perpetrated over a number of years by a lecherous neighbor man. Again, these are stories Kasdorf offers to her readers for "relief," not least her own.

Kasdorf relishes being an outsider but still sees herself as a daughter of the faith tradition, and she offers The Body and the Book as a sign of her rootedness and continuing interest, even if she is not often present in Mennonite meetingplaces or personally engaged in the church's business. Given her movement away from Mennonite people and places, how long will she claim authority as an interpreter of Mennonite life? It's an open question, not answered by this body of writings. But I'll look for the emergence of another volume of poetry from Kasdorf, a few years from now, to see where she's heading.