Birth Mother [Kindle Edition]

Joanna Wiebe (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Six years ago Joanna gave up her baby son for adoption. Now it's Christmas 1975, and she longs to celebrate with her rural Kansas Mennonite family, but the relationships are tense as they struggle to understand:
• why, after having a baby out of wedlock, do you keep taking up with new men like you’re sampling chocolates?
• what will your worldly lifestyle cause people to think about our family?
• when are you going to have a personal relationship with Jesus?

Struggling with shame and grief, days before the holiday, Joanna launches a road trip to Mexico with her boyfriend and her dog. The dog is run over by a truck, her boyfriend leaves to go back to school, the van breaks down, and she's broke. She disappears into the social chaos of Guatemala City after a 7.3 earthquake, taking up a temporary role as La Maestra with a street gang, embracing a dark, dangerous, and all-absorbing way of life.

A journal of her journey to wholeness, BIRTH MOTHER includes drawings and Mennonite and Guatemalan recipes. The book includes descriptions of the closed adoption process in Kansas in 1969, and Joanna’s experiences at the Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers in Wichita, Kansas.

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 883 KB
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B005IUR8JI
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #307,385 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

More About the Author

When Joanna Wiebe was a young girl, she would observe her mother, tapping away on her black Underwood typewriter, writing articles for church magazines and newsletters. Joanna began penciling stories on the backs of her mother's discarded yellow foolscript.

Over the years, her mother Katie Funk Wiebe became a well-read Mennonite feminist writer, who is considered one of the most influential Mennonites of the 20th century.

Joanna obtained a degree in journalism in 1976 from the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas, and worked as a writer at the Wichita Eagle & Beacon and The Sun, in Wichita, Kansas. She was a freelance travel writer, and worked a ghostwriter for the William Morris Agency in New York City. She wrote marketing materials and was a graphic designer for high-tech companies such as Pitney Bowes, IBM, Apple Computer, Gartner Group, and many more.

In the mid-1990s, she became one of the first designers for the World Wide Web, and her company, OneMind Incorporated, was responsible for the design of healthcare web applications that are now integrated into the suite of offerings of GE Healthcare. She taught technical writing at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario for three years.

In 2005, she became an Information Architect for Orbitz Worldwide, while simultaneously writing many academic papers in pursuit of her master's degree. The degree achieved, she felt an overwhelming desire to write from her heart for a change, and the fruit of that is her first book, Birth Mother. In 2008 she received a master's degree in online learning from Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada, focusing on understanding how human and non-human agents interact to form social learning networks. In 2011 Joanna took a position as Senior User Interface Designer with Amazon.

She writes two blogs, www.joannawiebe.com and www.onemind.com.