One Book One Province: Bread & Water

Description

Join us as dee Hobsbawn-Smith reads from and discusses her collection of essays entitled Bread & Water, the 2025 One Book One Province selection.

Additional Information

Celebrate the 2025 One Book One Province selection, Bread & Water, with an author reading, public discussion, musical performance by Artie Balkwill, and a sampling of local artisanal breads.

About One Book One Province

The Saskatchewan Library Association introduced One Book One Province Saskatchewan in 2017 to give the province’s residents an opportunity to engage with a shared experience around a book. Our aim is to create an experience that supports literacy, creates a reading culture, raises the profile of libraries and literacy organizations, and builds community engagement through a shared experience. Each year, the SLA selects a title by a Saskatchewan Author that builds awareness and understanding in topics such as diversity, reconciliation, or an aspect of our provincial history.

About Bread & Water : Essays

When chef and writer dee Hobsbawn-Smith left the city for rural life on a farm in Saskatchewan, she planned to replace cooking and teaching with poetry and prose. But—as begin the best stories—her next adventure didn’t quite work that way.

Food trickled into her poems, her essays, her fiction. And water poured into her property in both Saskatchewan and Calgary during two devastating floods.

Bread & Water: Essays uses lyrical prose to examine those two fundamental ingredients, and to probe the essential questions on how to live a life. Hobsbawn-Smith uses food to explore the hungers of the human soul: wilder hungers that loiter beyond cravings for love. She kneads themes of floods and place, grief and loss; the commonalities of refugees and Canadians through common tastes in food; cooking methods, grandmothers and mentors; the politics of local and sustainable food; parenting; male privilege in the restaurant world; and the challenges of aging gracefully.

It is an elegant collection that weaves joy into exploring the quotidian in search for larger meaning.

Click here to find a copy of the Bread & Water: Essays to borrow.

About the author

Award-winning essayist, poet, fictionist, Red Seal chef, educator, and food writer dee Hobsbawn-Smith lives rurally on the remnants of her family’s farm west of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in Treaty Six Territory, with her husband, the writer Dave Margoshes. An ex-restaurateur and longtime freelance journalist, she has written ten books in several genres and recently completed a new essay collection and a new poetry collection. She’s served as Saskatchewan’s 10th Poet Laureate, as Saskatoon Public Library’s 35th Writer in Residence, as a mentor and editor, and as leader of Slow Food Calgary and then Slow Food Saskatoon. Called an educator “blessed with whimsy and precision,” she has taught thousands of adults and kids to cook. Her most recent book is Among the Untamed, which received the 2024 Saskatchewan Book Awards’ Best Poetry Award. Her novel Danceland Diary was shortlisted for the 2023 Sask. Book Awards Fiction Award and was a shortlisted finalist for the Glengarry Book Prize. Bread & Water: Essays, won Sask. Book Awards’ 2022 Nonfiction Award, and Taste Canada’s Gold Medal for Culinary Narrative. Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet, won three international awards for its portrayal of the politics and challenges of small-scale sustainable growers. In her spare time, dee gardens, grows orchids, cooks, quilts, writes, runs, reads, does crosswords, plays with her dog, and watches period movies and whodunnits. A lifelong learner, dee hopes to learn to play her guitar before she turns eighty.

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