When Cynthia Yoder of West Windsor reads from her newly published memoir at Barnes & Noble next week, she will bring along her grandmother’s bonnet and her father’s plain coat — props that are both educational and entertaining. Yoder’s book, “Crazy Quilt: Pieces of a Mennonite Life,” weaves together her own life story with stories told by her grandparents, diary entries, old photographs, and recipes.
During a difficult time in her life, she chose to spend a year in Bally, Pennsylvania, in a Mennonite community with her aunt and uncle, Roy and Sandi Yoder. Her grandparents, Henry and Betts Yoder, who live next door, also shared their stories and diaries with her.
Yoder, born in Levittown, Pennsylvania, in 1966, was raised as a Mennonite by her parents, Ray and Edna Mack Yoder. Her father was a minister and she and her older sister, Juanita, were brought up without television, movies, popular music, or dancing. Her parents now live in Harleysville, Pennsylvania, where her father is still a minister.
In 1989, she graduated from Goshen College, a Mennonite school, earning a degree in communications (with a major in journalism and a minor in women’s studies). There she met her husband, Jonathan Shenk. After graduation, they settled in New York City, where he taught high school English. She was enrolled in Columbia University’s graduate school, in literature.
She fell into a depression, and the couple separated after two years of marriage; her husband went backpacking on the other side of the Atlantic from Paris to Egypt. “My depression was a kind of internal bleeding. A rupture of the soul,” writes Yoder. “While I was still living in New York, and for a time in Pennsylvania, my dreams were filled with wars, wounded people, blood.” She also experienced “sinister spirit sightings” by night and by day. Yoder, then 26, dropped out of graduate school and left the city to spend the year finding her Mennonite roots.
In 1993 she moved back to New York and reunited with her husband. She later earned her master’s degree in fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College in 1999.
“At Sarah Lawrence I was studying non-fiction and the memoirs I read influenced my decision to include my own memoir material with stories I was collecting from my grandparents,” writes Yoder. “I showed the book in progress to my professors and they were encouraging.”
After she graduated, the family, which now included a son, Gabriel, decided to move from Mt. Vernon, New York, to be closer to family in eastern Pennsylvania. When Shenk was hired to be associate minister at the First Presbyterian Church of Dutch Neck, they bought a duplex within walking distance.
Soon after, they invited Yoder’s older sister, Juanita Yoder Kauffman, and her family to leave Indiana and join them. (Kauffman, who is an artist with a studio in Hightstown, illustrated “Crazy Quilt.” She will also be at the Barnes & Noble reading.)
Gabriel, now 6, is a first grade student at Dutch Neck Elementary School. He is a Cub Scout, and Yoder joins his den on nature walks, leaf rakes, and fire station tours.
Yoder is involved in the writing group at Plainsboro Public Library and has recently started attending Center Heart, a meditation group in Princeton. She attends Princeton Friends Meeting where she teaches songs to the children.
She also has a home-based business as a freelance journalist, business writer, and public relations consultant. Plans include writing a non-fiction narrative written with her “twin cousin” in Seattle, Tonya Yoder. “We call ourselves twin cousins because our fathers are twins and because of our similarities.”
The title of the book stems from Yoder’s own feelings. “I was putting together pieces of my life that, in the beginning, didn’t seem to really fit,” she says. “Quilting is really important in my family. My grandmother and great grandmother made lots of quilts following a distinct pattern. Crazyquilt is almost like an abstract painting — a chance to be more expressive with color and form.”
Yoder’s non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary publications including Parabola, the Cortland Review, and Lumina. Yoder has created communities around writing, most notably the All Night Reading of Dante’s Inferno by New York Poets and Writers, held annually at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine since 1993. She recently read excerpts from “Crazy Quilt” at the West Windsor Arts Council evening.
Yoder and her husband are in the process of adopting a young child from Nepal. They hope to travel to pick up their daughter before this summer. She writes in her journal:
“It hasn’t been easy. Initially, we were planning to adopt a child through the State of New Jersey, but as we go deeper into the process and talk to more people, we realized there were too many uncertainties about the birth parents’ rights. Now we are planning to adopt from Nepal. But plans, as we know, are fickle.”
For more information about Yoder, visit www.cynthiayoder.com. “Crazy Quilt: Pieces of a Mennonite Life” is available at Barnes & Noble and on Amazon.com. Yoder’s reading and reception for “Crazy Quilt” takes place at Barnes & Noble, MarketFair, on Thursday, January 29, at 7 p.m. For more information call 609-716-1570.
