Hello Armin Wiebe:

This is the honours student from Windsor, David Gilmore. I would like to begin by telling you how much I enjoyed The Salvation of Yasch Siemens. I thank you for taking the time to do this interview and hope my questions are interesting.

A.W.     Hello J.D. (I hope that's not Jack Daniels.)

J.D.       How important is the setting of the story, the Mennonite community, to the narrative?

A.W.     The setting is extremely important to the story. The characters, the language, the events all come out of the setting. I think stories without settings that matter usually don't matter much anyway.

 J.D.     Yasch does not have any success in getting together with the women he desires, like Fleeda and Sadie. Why do you make him so pathetic in his love quests?

 A.W.     Aren't all young men pathetic in their love quests? Young men who score too soon tend to be washed up too soon. Love quests are pathetic--that's why we go heista kopp in love.

J.D.        How important is the location (land) of the story to the book?

A.W.     The land is important, although I don't spend much time describing it. I think the physical landscape is evoked by my characters and their language.

J.D.     Why is Yasch's family, especially his father, almost non-existent in the story?

A.W.    Yasch's family is his mother. His father is dead. My male characters seem to have lost their fathers. This may be because my father died before I wrote these novels; it has just come out this way. The fathers will appear when the stories are ready.

J.D        In Chapter 8, why do you repeatedly switch back and forth from Yasch's present to his past?

A.W.     This seemed like a way of presenting the reader with Yasch's testimony at the same time as presenting his spiritual struggle.

J.D.     Why do you make Emmanuel such an obvious representation of Christ?

A.W.    I suppose I was still inexperienced and thought the reader wouldn't get it. And I was playing with myth, which was fashionable at that time.

J.D.     Why do you suddenly introduce Canadian politics at the end of the book?

A.W.    I have been interested in Canadian politics since John Diefenbaker was PM; as well, the leadership convention that dumped Joe Clark and elected Mulroney happened in Winnipeg at the time I was writing. I was writing a collection of stories, not a novel; that's why the novel has a less than perfect shape, just like the Bible.

J.D.     How much of this book is autobiographical? (I know this is a typically-asked question and will understand if you want to skip it.)

A.W.    My grandfather drove a '51 Ford for 13 years. That should take care of the auto part of your question. I never climbed a TV tower.

J.D.     What is the significance of television in the story? It is mentioned at the beginning but not again till the end of the book.

A.W.    The world of Yasch is really the world before television. The arrival of television was a major influence in the demise of the language and culture of the world Yasch lived in. Besides, television was sinful and I didn't want to have too much sin in my book.

J.D.     Yasch seems to find some success at the end of the story, yet he never seemed to push for it. He spent his whole life settling. Is this how you feel about him? Why or why not?

A.W.    Well, Yasch is rather a lazy fellow who uses being born on the wrong side of the double dike as an excuse not to try all that hard. His salvation comes when he marries Oata, and the farm. Had he had more ambition he would have become premier of Manitoba.

I hope these answers are satisfactory. Asking a writer to comment on his own work is rather weird in some ways; fiction writers lie; the book a writer thinks he wrote is often not the book the reader reads. If you want to know what a scholar makes of my novel ask Prof. Brandt for the essay, "The Pickling of the Mennonite Madonna" by Magdelene Redekop at Victoria College.

If you need help with my language see my third novel, The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst. It contains An Illiterate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Gutenthal Galaxy. It may also explain why Canadian politics.