Dear Reader,
Bonny Reichert, today's guest author, is a National Magazine Award–winning journalist. She has been an editor at Today's Parent and Chatelaine magazines and a columnist and regular contributor to The Globe and Mail newspaper. Bonny was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and lives in Toronto with her husband, Michael, and little dog, Bruno. Her three almost-adult children come and go. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction and teaches writing at the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies and the University of King's College in Halifax. In 2022, an excerpt of How to Share an Egg won the Dave Greber Book Award for social justice writing.
Bonnie's new book, How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty, is a moving culinary memoir about the relationship between food and family--sustenance and survival--from a chef, award-winning journalist, and daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
You could win one of five copies of How to Share an Egg. To enter the drawing send an email to: [email protected] Please be sure to include your preferred mailing address.
Welcome to the book club Bonny Reichert..
My parents loved music, and in our den with the black leather couches and red carpeting, there were speakers, a turntable and a lot of records--soundtracks from musicals, Barbra Streisand albums, late Beatles, and an assortment of other '70s rock and pop acts. Still, I didn't see myself as a musical kid. When I was seven or eight, I took piano lessons from a lady whose house smelled like mothballs, but the lessons didn't take and, except for a one disastrous stint as a third clarinetist in the school band, that was it for my musical education.
Or so I thought. About five years ago, my daughter came home from high school one day and announced that she wanted to learn guitar. Guitar! It was the coolest of all the instruments I couldn't play. We drove to a music shop on Bloor Street and picked a beautiful parlor-sized acoustic; next, I found a teacher name Nikku. I was on the phone with him, setting up her lessons, when I was surprised to hear myself say, "Since you're coming to give my daughter lessons, would you consider giving me lessons, too?"
My daughter and I shared that one guitar for a year. I wasn't particularly good at it, and I'm still not. I'm still taking lessons, still working on my chart reading and my barre chords. But every once in a while, when I look at myself from further away, I feel a thrill in knowing that I'm not just a music lover but a music maker. Me, the girl who cried over Fur Elise in a basement that smelled like mothballs.
Like cooking and painting, guitar is good for my writing. After forty-five minutes of strumming, I come back to the desk with my mind warm and open. A writing problem disappears; a solution clicks into place. But it's more than that. Guitar is good for my soul.
Can people change? When I got divorced in my twenties, this was the question that plagued me night and day. Should he change, should I change. Could we, even if we wanted to? Picking up an instrument at fifty-two didn't make me into a different person. Not quite. But learning guitar expanded my idea of myself, and what that self was capable of. The bigger self started and finished a book I thought I could never write. The bigger self wants to learn ballet. The bigger self just bought a fancy electric guitar, and she doesn't really plan to share.
Love,
Bonny
Enter to win one of five copies of How to Share an Egg. To enter the drawing send an email to: [email protected] Please be sure to include your preferred mailing address.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
Posted by: |