Return Stroke

Dora Dueck

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Hardback

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English

Wipf & Stock Publishers
10 February 2023

Memoirs; Religion: general; Protestantism & Protestant Churches

"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."

By: Dora Dueck
Imprint: Wipf & Stock Publishers
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 14mm
Weight: 485g
ISBN: 9781666768831
ISBN 10: 1666768839
Pages: 234
Publication Date: 10 February 2023
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

"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."

Reviews for Return Stroke

"""Dora Dueck outdoes herself with every book that she writes. I marvel at her craft. Every word counts and every trope (like the one in the title!) illuminates the territory. This is the kind of writing that invites a reader to slow down, to savour the beauty while pondering the intersections of history and poetry. Dora Dueck is surely one of Canada's finest writers of both fiction and creative non-fiction."" --Magdalene Redekop, Professor Emerita, University of Toronto ""The essays show an exacting, determined, frame of mind. And they illustrate that, like Rudy Wiebe in Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, Dora Dueck will use the materials of her youth, her culture, her faith as ingredients for the ideas that have been visiting her since her youth...The reader will do well to look for undulating motion in the essays. There's a dance between then and now, certainty and uncertainty, wondering and knowing, the author's story and the story of others in her life, and between places and landscapes in Canada and in Paraguay...This is a book to savor. Read it carefully, the way it was created. I am quite sure, if you do, that you too will feel jolts of insight."" --Shirley Showalter, author of Blush: A Mennonite Girl Meets a Glittering World ""Dora Dueck's Return Stroke: essays & memoir is a gift.... If there is one word to encompass the collection it is integrity--intellectual, spiritual, emotional and something else, something to do with a blend of steadiness and risk, a vibrancy in containment, a clarity without melancholy. A must-read for those interested in Mennonite history, to be sure, this collection expands our thinking and merits a vast readership and new admirers. Former Winnipegger Dueck threads in references to a wide range of thinkers and writers, drawing on invigorating debates among biographers, theologians, feminists, historians and fellow fiction writers. Reading Return Stroke engenders the best kind of stillness: we are thinking and often feeling, but in concert with our intellect, alert to the act of reading itself. May Dueck be assured that the return stroke, that lightning flash back between her words and her readers, will be achieved many times over; a gift from her and our good fortune in turn."" --Sara Harms, Winnipeg Free Press"