Return Stroke: essays & memoir can be ordered from your local bookstore, from Commonword (commonword.ca; info@commonword.ca or toll-free 1.877.846.1593), McNally Robinson Booksellers, or locally (Tsawwassen or Ladner) from me (please message me via Facebook or this blog). It’s listed at Book Manager ( which, I’ve discovered, some independent bookstores use, but not all, so please don’t give up if you wish to order.) Thanks for your interest and support.

U.S. customers, please see Bookshop.org.

 

Review excerpts: 

from a review in Roots & Branches by Robert Martens:

Words and experience are inextricably connected in these essays, which approach being “confessional”–although not in the sloppy new age sense of the world–and bring portions of her life into sharp focus…. [Return Stroke] is packed with sights, sounds, and smell that jump off the page. The range is astonishing…

from a review in The Miramichi Reader by Luciana Erregue-Sacchi:

What I find refreshing about Dueck’s collection is how the spontaneity and immediacy of memories assail one’s day, as vivid as the day those events took place….  Her process to capture her father-in-law in biographical writing is a writing workshop’s dream.

from a review in Anabaptist World by professor Melanie Springer Mock:

Dueck raises important questions about the act of writing memoir… her sense of storytelling and ability to create compelling scenes make Return Stroke a masterful work of personal history.

from a review in Mennonite Historian by Ralph Friesen: 

Return Stoke is by turns personal, emotional, and intellectual. It asks the reader to engage thoughtfully, to join with the writer in probing under the surfaces, and it rewards those who do.

from a review in the Winnipeg Free Press.

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…. 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 gift…

from a review in the MB Herald by Jon Isaak.

“Dueck’s writing is crisp and sparkling, each sentence well-crafted, inviting readers to embrace change in their own lives. Changing one’s mind need not be feared. “The essence of life is change—sometimes difficult, sometimes joyous, sometimes chosen, sometimes uninvited—whatever name one may use for change, the very process of living creates a story full of plot.”

from a review by Kerry Clare of 49th Shelf and Picklemethis blog.

What I love so much about Dueck’s writing and her thinking is that nothing is fixed, and she is eternally curious, taking notes and learning, about the past and the present, much of her work concerned with memory and history, but in such a vital, living way, not as an affirmation but a process of discovery.

Publisher’s 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 resonates — change. “How wonderful,” the author writes, that our “bits of experience, 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.”

What Readers and Reviewers are Saying:

Her work has a muscular quality that will satisfy even those who claim to despise the genre. And it will deepen the experience of reading for those of us who love reading about other lives.

Return Stroke is a book to savour. Read it carefully, the way it was created.

— Shirley Showalter, former president of Goshen College, author of Blush: A Mennonite Girl Meets the Glittering World and The Mindful Grandparent: The Art of Loving Our Children’s Children

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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, author of Making Believe: Questions about Mennonites and Art