Laura C. Stevenson

Recent Books

"Laura C. Stevenson's wonderful RETURN IN KIND shows us the depth and spirit of geography: how generations, living and dead, can sing from a single patch of ground. Her main character, Joel Hendrickson, has lost his wife and is left land from her family in the stark beauty of Vermont; it is an inheritance which, he soon sees, offers answers to mysteries about his wife, Letty, and about his own soul. A vivid cast of characters, living and dead--the wise Eleanor, the stunning young Charlie, the ghost of Nathaniel--surround him in this place of discovery, darkness, rebirth; Stevenson stitches their lives together--their meaning for one another--brilliantly. The work is a rarity, steering clear of popular strategies and offering unrelenting honesty. This is a powerful read--a highly intelligent, moving, and humane novel."

Joseph Hurka author of Fields of Light: A Son Remembers His Heroic Father (winner of the Pushcart Editors' Book Award) and the novel, Before.

About Deafness

Laura has spoken about deafness:

Laura gave the Edmund Lyon Memorial Lecture at the National Technological Institute of the Deaf in Rochester, New York, December, 2011. Lecture

Laura has written directly about deafness in two articles:

"A Wall of Glass," Potash Hill: Alumni Magazine of Marlboro College, Winter 1991

"Memory, Music and Cochlear Implant," Seneca Review Fall 2009/Spring 2010, Volume 39, No. 2

She has written indirectly about deafness in two books:

The Island and the Ring, in which the the tyrant Ascanet punished Eliar, a master lutenist, for his refusal to betray Elyssonne by making him deaf

Return In Kind, in which the major character Eleanor is a late deafened adult facing total loss of hearing.

Copyright Laura C. Stevenson 2010