To our students over the past seven years:

With exam week right around the corner and the reality of the end of this year coming into focus, I wanted to write you all a letter that communicates just a little of our gratitude to you all.

This has been a good place for us. We hope and trust that it has been (and for many of you will continue to be) a good place for you too, a place of learning and growth in understanding—and most importantly, a place where you find safety and love as you continue to become who you have been made to be: unique, loved, imaginative, powerful with words and exacting in expression.

Please know that it is with deep sorrow and gratitude that we say goodbye to each of you. I have not had the privilege of knowing most of you as well as Martin, my husband, but let me speak for him: he has felt deeply honored to be in your company, to teach and to know each of you. His years here were busy beyond my expectation, but that is because he was fully dedicated and genuinely concerned about each of you as scholars, writers, and people. He has loved living among you, teaching you and growing as a teacher and as a person.

These years have been years of learning for us. Many of you come from hard backgrounds and situations that we have never encountered. Whether we are from easy or difficult backgrounds, writing gives us a voice to claim our histories and begin to understand not only ourselves but those around us. You all give Martin and me courage as writers to continue to seek our own voices and to articulate all that is ours.

I know you are all from very diverse spiritual backgrounds and convictions, and that has made our experience here richer. As Mennonite Christians, Martin and I believe that we are charged to find God’s presence in everyone and everything and to value each part of God’s creation as good, charged with God’s grandeur and filled with God’s light, even if that light is very hard to see. As writers, we believe that we are called to engage with every part of life, ugly and beautiful, difficult and easy. We hope for humility and for wisdom, but if we take Jesus’ life and teachings seriously, we must extend our hand in greeting to everyone; with God’s help, we must wrap our imagination even around darkness, trusting that God is there, too. This is a hard task, and one that I continue to approach with trembling. But Jesus charges us not to be pleasant and uncontroversial; on the contrary, his teachings are hard. They point us to a suffering world.

In this way we have not sought to retaliate or even to seek justice. We do this not from a place of weakness but from a place of love. As followers of Jesus and as artists who seek to create and not to destroy, we feel that we must seek peace and reconciliation wherever we can, even—and especially—when it is difficult. Many battles are worth fighting--battles for ideals and values and vulnerable people.  None of those precious things have been destroyed for us--they can't be taken from us so easily.  As we prepare to leave, we are filled with a deep sense of gratitude for our community here, a place that has fed us with unexpected grace. You are, and have been, an important part of that community. Your creativity and courage leaves us speechless.  Our daughters have enjoyed having “the students” in our house and Martin has looked forward to each year of interacting with you with joy.

We wish for you the same sense of abiding peace that we also seek, one that is stronger than anger or grief, a peace that floods into every part of your being, points you to all that has been truly wonderful and gives you the clarity to choose a future filled with hope--and yes, a lot of writing.

Thank you for all you have done to make our sojourn here—a much treasured chapter in our lives—so precious. We are thankful.