Return Stroke: Essays and Memoir

These graceful, probing personal essays by award-winning fiction writer Dora Dueck engage with a diverse range of ideas (becoming a writer, motherhood, mortality, the ethics of biography, a child's coming-out) because in non-fiction, she writes, "the quest for meaning bows to the experience as it was." Yet within Return Stroke, one theme in particular does resonate--change. "How wonderful," the author writes, that our "bits of existence, no matter how ordinary, are available for further consideration--seeing patterns, facing into inevitable death, enjoying the playful circularity of then and now." The book's title, Return Stroke--the title of one essay, where it literally refers to lightning--suggests such a dynamic: "When I send inquiry into my past, it sends something back to me." The topic of memory, in all its malleability, impermanence, and surprising power, is especially central to the collection's concluding piece, an absorbing memoir of the author's 1980s life in the Paraguayan Chaco. Whether she is discovering the more meaningful part that imagination holds within her religious faith or relating with astonishing clarity and honesty the experience of giving birth away from her home country, Dora Dueck's beautifully written essays and memoir make her an insightful and generous companion.

Author: Dora Dueck
Publisher: Wipf & Stock Publishers
Published: 02/10/2023
Pages: 234
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.71lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.50d
ISBN13: 9781666768824
ISBN10: 1666768820
BISAC Categories:
- Religion | Christianity | Mennonite
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs
- Religion | Essays

About the Author
Canadian writer Dora Dueck is the author of four books of fiction, All That Belongs (2019), What You Get At Home (2013), This Hidden Thing (2010), and Under the Still Standing Sun (1989). Return Stroke is her first non-fiction title. Dueck's novella "Mask" won the 2014 Malahat Review novella contest and the novel This Hidden Thing was Book of the Year at the 2011 Manitoba Book Awards; What You Get at Home was the winner of the High Plains Award for short fiction. A lay historian and former editor, Dueck grew up in Alberta, resided later in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Paraguay, and has retired to British Columbia. She and her late husband Helmut have three children and ten grandchildren. You can find Dora's writing on her Borrowing Bones blog.