Acclaimed writer and former Mission resident, Dr. Andreas Schroeder will speak on what it was like growing up Mennonite in the Fraser Valley for the next free President’s Lecture at the University of the Fraser Valley , Monday, Nov. 3 at 7 p.m. on the Abbotsford campus.  

“I’ve heard it said that if you threw a rock at a Mennonite in Abbotsford, it would bounce off his head and hit at least two more Mennonites before it ever touched the ground. I’m inclined to believe it,” says Dr. Schroeder.  

“Despite the large number of Mennonites in the Valley, I suspect that many non-Mennonites don’t know a great deal about either the religion, its culture or its history.” Dr. Schroeder says his talk will describe a little of each, in an amusing, light-hearted way.  

Dr. Schroeder, who received an honorary doctorate of letters from UCFV in 2002, will also read from his latest book, Eating My Father’s Island . He says it is a tale of what happens when a Mennonite (based on his father) wins a small B.C. coastal island in a contest conducted by the Canada Sewing Machine Co. “The tale is actually an unusual literary experiment in autobiography: you take a totally true autobiographical setting/cast of characters (my family on the family farm in Agassiz), then insert a single fictional element (the winning of an island), and then stand back and see what happens,” says Dr. Schroeder.  

Dr. Schroeder emigrated to BC from Germany in 1951 at the age of five. His Mennonite family got off the train in Mission , and settled in Abbotsford for the next several years. Eventually, they were able to buy a small farm in Agassiz , which was where Andreas spent his formative years.  

In 1964, his parents gave up farming and moved to Vancouver , where Andreas finished high school and attended UBC for six years, earning a Masters degree in comparative literature and creative writing. 

Almost immediately after graduating, Andreas began to write full time, earning his living as a feature writer and columnist for The Vancouver Province newspaper and as a freelance broadcaster for CBC Radio. During this time, he also spent several years as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East , living with a Bedouin tribe in the Baalbek region of Lebanon and filing reports from Beirut .  

Upon his return to Canada in the mid-1970s, Dr. Schroeder settled in Mission and lived there for almost 30 years, raising a family and writing magazine articles and books, including collections of poetry, short stories, novels, and works of history, including a popular history of Mission entitled Carved from Wood.

In 1990, Andreas joined CBC Radio’s popular Saturday morning show Basic Black, and for the following 12 years served as the show’s “resident crookologist.” In this capacity, he reported on a wide variety of famous scams and hoaxes from all over the world, a feature that eventually resulted in the publication of three collections of his most popular Basic Black stories: Scams, Scandals & Skulduggery, Cheats, Charlatans & Chicanery, and  Fakes, Frauds & Flimflammery.

It was also in 1990 that Andreas was offered the Maclean-Hunter Chair in Creative Non-Fiction in UBC’s widely acclaimed creative writing department. He still holds that position today. Since moving to the Sunshine Coast four years ago, Dr. Schroeder has been at work on a collection of three novellas that are set in the Fraser Valley and based on his Mennonite childhood here. The first two novellas have already been completed, and the third one is in the final stages. Dr. Schroeder will read from this new, unpublished manuscript as part of his lecture on Nov. 3.

For more information on the free UCFV President’s Lecture Series, visit www.ucfv.ca/lectures