Steinbach is set in the flat Canadian prairies, about 40 miles southeast of Winnipeg. She was wearing her favorite Neil Young shirt which she admits she’d also worn the day before. On a recent day, she hadn’t passed a brush through her straw-colored hair, instead tying it up in a hasty knot. “I wanted them to explore the questions I’ve had, more or less, my entire life,” said Toews, who although she’s recently become a grandmother, still looks like a teenager. In Toews’s fictionalized version, that was not an option. She imagined the Bolivian women as her kin, even giving them her family names, and set them in a hayloft to debate three options - do nothing, fight or leave. It was much more traditional than Steinbach, eschewing electricity, motorized vehicles and all entertainment. The colony was named after her home province of Manitoba. Toews first heard about it through the “Mennonite grapevine,” and the story wouldn’t release its claws. After more than three years, two men were caught in 2009, and seven more confessed to spraying a bovine anesthetic into their neighbors’ homes at night, and then raping the unconscious women and girls. Many believed they’d been attacked by demons. It is based on the real-life horror story of women in an ultraconservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia, who woke up to headaches, bloodied sheets, and bruised bodies. “Women Talking” is her eighth book and the one that most firmly directs its gaze at the moral failings of - and her hopes for - the small Protestant sect in which she was raised. “Now I’m here and what do I do? Think about Steinbach all the time,” said Toews, 54. It’s a world away from the small Mennonite town of her childhood, Steinbach, Manitoba. “I wondered about myself at that point,” said Toews (pronounced taves), sitting in the small, brick Victorian house she shares with Elvira and her common-law spouse, Erik Rutherford, in a dense, downtown Toronto neighborhood. So, the celebrated writer - who in Canada is more famous than many hockey players - crept out of bed, made her way down to the living room and turned on her computer.
This night, her Mennonite conscience had found something far more mundane to worry over: Toews had promised the department store saleswoman who so kindly helped her pick out the right pants for her 83-year-old mother, Elvira, that she would send a complimentary email to her boss, and she’d forgotten. She wasn’t having another dream about her sister’s violent death, or her father’s, or the rapes suffered by the women at the center of her latest book, “Women Talking,” to be released April 2 in the United States. TORONTO - Miriam Toews woke up the other night, her heart racing.
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