Most writers spend their careers deciding what parts of themselves to reveal on the page. College of the Rockies English and Creative Writing instructor Nathan Dueck took a different approach: he wrote a book about the things he’d rather people didn’t know.
His latest book, Nathan Russel Dueck (1979–): Mortifications, is a memoir, a shift in focus after publishing two poetry collections. It’s been described as funny, uncomfortable, reflective, and, according to Nathan, completely unplanned.
“I wrote a memoir by accident,” he says.
The book began during the pandemic as a personal challenge. Nathan started sharing self-deprecating anecdotes on social media, wondering if he could write about an embarrassing moment every day. Months later, a collection of stories had emerged.
“Then, after a couple months, voila, I had accidentally written a memoir.”
Those stories range from the awkward and cringe-worthy to the surprisingly profound. The common thread is embarrassment, a subject Nathan admits he knows a lot about.
“My wife likes to joke that I’m the most embarrassed person in the world,” he says.
Many people would prefer to bury those memories. Instead, Nathan put them in a book.
“I thought, why not let them go? Why not make them other people’s problems!”
While Mortifications is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, it also explores something deeper. Humour, Nathan explains, isn’t just part of his writing style. It’s how he processes life’s awkward moments.
“The only way I’ve found to show my face in public is to learn how to laugh at myself.”
That combination of comedy and vulnerability is what gives the book its emotional weight. Readers may laugh at stories that include spectacular misunderstandings, everyday social disasters, and even a memorable Dairy Queen order gone wrong, but beneath the humour is an exploration of shame, identity, and the moments we’d all rather forget.
Despite describing many of the stories as highly specific to his own experience, Nathan has been surprised by how often readers recognize themselves in them.
“Friends, some close, some distant, wrote to say they’ve had comparable experiences,” he says. “I suppose I do hope that readers recognize themselves in the carnival-mirror of my stories.”
The memoir also touches on his Mennonite upbringing, a background he says shaped virtually every aspect of his life.
“When I left my small town to go to University, I was continually amazed by the variety of people I met and the various ideas they had,” he says. “It was intoxicating.”
For students who know him primarily as an instructor, Mortifications offers another lesson entirely: the value of creative courage.
“There are times when the world gives you something to write about,” Nathan says. “You should write about it, of course, but you sometimes need to muster the courage to write about it.”
That willingness to take creative risks is something he hopes students see as attainable.
“It was inconceivable to me that I could write something that someone else would read until I met a few writers,” he says. “Students don’t have to be that important to write something important.”
As for what’s next, Nathan is returning to poetry. His forthcoming collection, Collective Work, is scheduled for publication by the University of Calgary Press. The journey to publication took six years from first draft to contract, a reminder that writing is often an exercise in patience and persistence.
Publishing Mortifications has, in many ways, helped Nathan make peace with some of the moments that inspired it.
“I’m confident that I’m free from most of these embarrassments,” he says.
But freedom, he has learned, is not quite that simple. As a father, he now finds himself experiencing a different kind of cringe when his children face the same kinds of awkward moments that once kept him awake at night.
“The gift the book gave to me is that my offspring can see with their own eyes evidence that their dad survived it,” he says. “So they might believe it when I say they’ll survive it, too.”
For a book built on mortifying moments, that’s a surprisingly hopeful ending: embarrassment may be universal, but so is the ability to move beyond it.