Infused with joy

Review of Kirsten Eve Beachy, Martyrs and Chickens: Confessions of a Granola Mennonite (Dreamseeker Books, 2025).

Reading Kirsten Eve Beachy’s new memoir feels like coming home, in all the best ways. Using a series of interconnected essays, Martyrs and Chickens narrates the writer’s life as the daughter of “first-generation Granola Mennonites who went from head coverings to bell bottoms, taught me our history and gave me my first little chicken.” The significance of this Mennonite (and granola) upbringing informs much of Beachy’s memoir, which relies on beautiful prose, incisive wit, and measured authenticity to explore what it means to be a Mennonite carrying the weight of a martyred people, drawn to community and family and simplicity.

The book also includes of chickens. Lots of chickens, and some ducks, too.

Although I’m not a lover of chickens (given a significant bird phobia), Beachy’s essay, “A Butcher of Conscience,” was one of many that recalled my own Mennonite upbringing. There, Beachy describes a day orchestrated by her farm-savvy mother-in-law, who introduced Beachy and her husband to the intricate dance of butchering chickens. The visceral imagery of – well, viscera, transported me 50 years into the past, to watching my grandfather thwacking necks with his ax, then helping my grandma remove pinfeathers from each soon-denuded bird. Like Beachy, my grandparents felt few qualms about this work: butchering is often what farmers do, accepting “the power that makes us carnivores,” Beachy writes, “the secret of making life from life.”

Descriptions of killing animals and eating meat might not seem granola enough for some readers, granola connoting an eco-friendly, natural-and-organic (and maybe even vegan) vibe.

Granola Mennonites seem more apt to bring a More-With-Less Tabouli Salad to potlucks than, say, a bucket of KFC. But Beachy’s memoir deftly complicates any labels we might give ourselves or others, about what it means to be truly granola, but also how we understand Mennonites – and how we share that understanding with others. In “Notes to Myself,” Beachy imagines answering a colleague’s inquiries about Mennonites, the peculiarities of a religious sect that defy easy categorizations, the ways each Mennonite is uniquely individual yet drawn together by equally peculiar cultural artifacts, including a song – “606 in the old red hymnal. 118 in the new [at the time] blue one” – that most Mennonites know by heart.

We are a disparate people, still, a notion Beachy explores in “Me and the Martyrs.” Anabaptists might share the legacy of Menno and the Martyrs Mirror, but even that shared legacy is complicated because “schisms are not uncommon among Anabaptists. It is so important to be right, to be the true church, that our communities splinter to protect the pure from contamination.” The stories that might hold Mennonites together are sometimes lost in translation. Beachy posits that even the oft-told story of 18th-century Jacob Hostetler and the Indian raid, meant to convey Hostetler’s fidelity to nonresistance, is incomplete, the historical record unraveled by contradiction. This leads Beachy to ask more questions about who Mennonites are, and about who she is, unable to be completely herself, even in Mennonite spaces.

As someone who grew up Mennonite, thumbing through my parents’ copy of the Martyrs Mirror, I resonate with the tensions Beachy voices in this and later essays, including “To the (Unattributed) Mennonite Pastor who Said that Children are for Martyrdom.” By this point in the memoir, Beachy has narrated the challenges she and her husband faced in trying to conceive, the vagaries and invasions of fertility treatments, and the miraculous birth of her twins, one who is diagnosed with disabilities. In the essay direct to an unnamed Mennonite pastor who claims we raise children for martyrdom, Beachy reflects on early Anabaptist martyrs, and later ones, too, including Michael “M.J.” Sharp, a young Mennonite peace worker killed in 2017 while serving in the Congo.

What happens when we birth and raise children with an intent other than martyrdom, Beachy wonders, echoing the poet Julia Kasdorf, whom she quotes: “What if we claimed survival – even flourishing – as the fortunate inheritance of New World Mennonites? How would things change if, instead of asking our children, ‘What are you willing to die for,’ we asked them, ‘What are you willing to live for?’” For Beachy, the answer to this question is joy, not martyrdom, an affirmation that Sharp’s own mother had expressed in a note to her son.

Fundamentally, joy is at the heart of Beachy’s memoir, threaded through her discourse on parenting, on farming, on writing, on being Mennonite. And yes, on chickens too, as Beachy writes with joy about a “Doctrine of Chicken,” and what her flock teaches her about prayers and petitions, original sin, and ecumenism; her chickens exhibit joyful acceptance of who they are, reminding Beachy that “it takes little to be deeply grateful.” A duck named Celeste, disabled by a deformed foot, likewise accepts her lot, and in an essay called “Walking,” Beachy describes inventing a tiny shoe from cardboard and plastic to help the bird walk freely. In this braided essay, Beachy considers her grandfather’s assistive devices as well, whether they give him the liberation he craves. The tenderness she feels for both – for Celeste, for her grandfather –resounds in the language Beachy uses to draw their stories together.

The memoir’s final essay beautifully captures the complexities of being a mother and writer, a Mennonite with granola tendencies, a Christian fighting for justice in a post-pandemic world that’s gone mad. “Simple” is framed around her daughter’s joy of watching a new season of the wildly popular cartoon Bluey, which uses the Shaker song, “Simple Gifts,” as background music. Beachy considers different similes for “simple”: simple as a song, as a freezer meal, as a phone call, as a Mennonite dream. (Mostly) tongue-in-cheek, she also provides a Granola Mennonite Dream Scorecard, so that readers can assess their own endeavors at simplicity, from how their gifts are resourced (homemade is obviously superior to buying from Amazon Prime) to whether they are vegan, raise their own food, or succumb to the allure of fast food.

My own score on the Granola Mennonite Dream Scorecard is abysmal, but Beachy suggests that even the most granola of Mennonites might never believe that true simplicity is gained by our most ardent efforts. “Are any of us free from this frantic sense that more must be done?” Beachy asks. Her answer: “Probably not.” The world is a hot mess right now, literally and figuratively, and we can be overwhelmed by a litany of injustices for which our privilege makes us complicit. Despite the sometimes-complicated nature of being Mennonite, and our focus on “correct action, on what we need to do to be good,” we should “draw on the good” from our tradition, rather than being paralyzed by its limitations. “Friends, this world needs so much work,” Beachy writes, “and we Mennonites are here to do it.”

Like the rest of Martyrs and Chickens, this final essay is deeply grounded in Beachy’s understanding of Mennonite faith and praxis, though Beachy doesn’t take herself – or Mennonites – too seriously. There are references to Mennonites dancing, after all, as stiff and stilted as a duck with a cardboard-crafted foot. Still, the book’s closing essay is as the memoir: thoughtful, provocative, and infused with a kind of joy that’s needed right now. Martyrs and Chickens is an innovative and compelling memoir, its stories as familiar as the places we once called home.