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list price: $20
edition:Paperback
category: Literary Collections
published: Jun 2022
ISBN:9781987986105
publisher: CMU Press

Return Stroke

essays & memoir

by Dora Dueck

tagged: essays, personal memoirs
Description

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.

About the Author

Dora Dueck is author of the novels Under the Still Standing Sun, This Hidden Thing, and All That Belongs; and the short story collection What You Get At Home (winner of the High Plains Book Award). In 2014 she was the winner of the Malahat Review Novella Prize. In 2022 she published a collection of personal essays & memoir, Return Stroke. She lives in British Columbia.

Contributor Notes

Dora Dueck (born 1950) 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). Her novella “Mask” won the 2014 Malahat Review novella contest. This Hidden Thing was Book of the Year at the 2011 Manitoba Book Awards, while What You Get at Home won 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.

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