North Wichita News

Memoir takes writer on deep dive into land, heritage, history

Raylene Hinz-Penner will be talking about her book “East of Liberal: Notes on the Land,” published in December 2022, at Kauffman Museum on Sunday, Feb. 26, at 3 p.m. in the museum auditorium.

Although she essentially left her family land in southwestern Kansas when she went to college decades ago, Hinz-Penner has been thinking and writing about it ever since.

There will be books for sale and Hinz-Penner will sign them after her talk.

Hinz-Penner is describing her presentation as “Exploring the Myths, Contradictions and Resilience.” The program is part of Kauffman Museum’s periodic Sunday-Afternoon-at-the-Museum series.

Exploring the Land is classified as a memoir. Hinz-Penner also calls it “a personal land acknowledgment.”

She’ll talk about the central tension of the book: reconciling “an idyllic childhood” with “the thorny issues of settler accountability, the knowledge that the land on which her family thrived in the 1950s and ’60s was once homeland to peoples who were forcibly removed from the land.”

After retiring from a career teaching Contemporary American Literature and Creative Writing at Bethel College and at Washburn University in Topeka, Hinz-Penner has been devoting more time to writing about place – the land and its peoples, history and geography.

Her first book, Searching for Sacred Ground: The Journey of Chief Lawrence Hart, Mennonite, was published in 2007 by Cascadia, the publisher of East of Liberal.

She also has a manuscript of poems and field sketches about the Topeka site where she lived for 20 years, Field Notes on the Levee.

This includes the forced Potawatomi march from Indiana to Kansas in 1838 and their early life on the land where Hinz-Penner lived in southwest Topeka. 

Now living in North Newton, Hinz-Penner is an active member of Bethel College Mennonite Church, maintaining wider fellowship status with Southern Hills Mennonite Church in Topeka.

Regular Kauffman Museum hours are Tues.-Fri. 9:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 1:30-4:30 p.m., closed Mondays and major holidays. Admission to the special exhibit, “Reeds and Wool: Patterned Screens of Central Asia,” and the permanent exhibits – “Of Land and People,” “Mirror of the Martyrs” and “Mennonite Immigrant Furniture” – is $4 for adults, $2 for children ages 6-16, and free to Kauffman Museum members and children under 6. The museum store is open during the museum’s regular hours. See kauffmanmuseum.org or the museum Facebook page for more information.

Original source can be found here.