Pinching Zwieback: Made-up Stories from the Darp focuses on recurrent, related characters with a common reality: small town Mennonite life. It’s socially engaged autofiction based heavily on the author’s own background and experiences. The loosely linked stories read like a novel with characters whose lives are given form by the past but undergo change as the world reshapes beliefs and circumstances. Author Mitchell Toews’, who grew up in his parents’ Mennonite bakery in Steinbach Manitoba, employs a gritty style containing psychological depth. Toews’ stories reveal the truth behind the fiction. This collection is a blend of memory, fable, and trauma that examines profound moments in which the conflict might be subtle or camouflaged but the consequences are real. A Keatsian, “mansion of many apartments,” the stories combine to offer a broad narrative on how the people once known as the quiet in the land have evolved, and are evolving.

MITCHELL TOEWS has placed stories in 113 literary journals, anthologies and contests since 2016. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Mitch was a finalist in the following major contests: The 2021 Writers’ Union of Canada’s Short Prose Competition for Emerging Writers, the 2022 Humber Literary Review Canada-wide Creative Nonfiction contest, the 2022 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction (U.S.), and the 2023 Dave Williamson National Short Story Competition. The author is currently working on his debut novel and curating a second collection of stories. Mitch and his wife Janice live in their 1950 cabin in the Whiteshell Park and may be found on the water, on the trails, or loose, in the wild air. More conveniently, catch him at the computer on Mitchellaneous.com or Facebook.

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