Connie T. Braun is an instructor of creative writing and the author of The Steppes are the Colour of Sepia (2008) and two collections of poetry. Her academic and personal essays, poetry, and reviews appear in various anthologies, journals, and publications. For over twenty years she has served on boards for the arts and writing, nonprofit organizations, and, most currently, an advisory committee for the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of the Fraser Valley.
"Connie Braun offers us fragments of family past that refuse to be
forgotten: glimpses of happiness, shards of horror and exile. Her
meditations reveal how, at their best, food and sewing and
photographs and family gossip can transform bits of memory into
quiet, understanding beauty."
--Rudy Wiebe, Author of Of This Earth: a Mennonite Boyhood in the
Boreal Forest, winner of the Charles Taylor Prize
"'In the aftermath of violent histories, telling stories and
listening to stories are acts of peace, ' writes this daughter of
World War II refugees. Seeking family memories and public records,
Braun engages a range of writers, and returns to Poland three
times, on 'grief's long migration, ' to claim the lost homelands of
the Mennonites, Jews and Catholics. With beauty and skill, she
renders the implications of a history that reaches from the
Crusades to the concentration camps, determined to trace its
imprint on the generation born into elegiac silence. This book is
essential to any quest to make emotional sense of the displacement,
dispossession, and holocausts of the last century."
--Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Author of The Body and the Book: Writing
from a Mennonite Life, award winning poet
"Silentium is that rarest of books: it accompanies us, thoughtfully
and compassionately, on a journey into tragic and traumatic
experiences without giving into either despair or sentimentality.
Connie Braun shows us how honest, artful language can emerge out of
a dialogue with silence and enable us to experience both grief and
grace."
--Gregory Wolfe, Author of Beauty Will Save the World, founder and
editor of Image Journal
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