Author Archives: doradueck

Because of Travel

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H. and I don’t travel a lot but when we do, it directs my reading.

We took a long-wished-for tour to Spain/Portugal/Morocco this fall, a 4000-kilometre bus ride (with stops of course) that gave us a wonderful overview of three countries. Impressions and bits of experience, such a tour, which both satisfied curiosity and provoked it. Before we went I tried to find books that might provide points of recognition once there, and since returning have enjoyed several books in which the same happens in reverse. Reading, in my opinion, is travel too, the mind not bound by flights or time, but when text and tour overlap in short order, well, it’s a bonus.

So, for what it’s worth, recent reading because of travel. Continue reading →

Personal Narratives of Place and Displacement: Day Three

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I’m not as tired this evening as last. I’m buoyed, in fact, with the energy that the end of a conference often carries–the goodbyes, the summing-up words, the realization that 38 presentations have gone by and wow! they were rich individually and as a collective and we’ll all be carrying fragments of the event home with us, like the baskets of leftovers gathered in the Gospel feeding-of-the-multitudes stories after everyone was fed, for our ongoing nourishment into further endeavours of writing or reading or scholarship or just plain living. Continue reading →

Personal Narratives of Place and Displacement: Day Two

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It’s been a long day, a good day, and I’m tired, but a few thoughts as promised about day two of the Mennonite/s Writing VIII conference. Beginning from the end.

The conference re-located from the University of Winnipeg to Canadian Mennonite University across the city this evening for what was billed as a “Creative Evening.” That is, we listened to five writers of varying ages and genres as well as a pair of musicians: Jennifer Sears, Len Neufeldt (his writing read by Robert Martens), Jessica Penner, Casey Plett, Maurice Mierau and Carol Ann Weaver on piano with Marnie Enns singing. Although not all these artists are young or entirely new to Mennonite Lit, in the main they are newer voices gaining strength and recognition among us, and it was a delight to hear them. Continue reading →