An existential crisis, a need to disconnect from a highly digital job, a love of books and a bread making hobby are all the ingredients in the rather unusual recipe responsible for Hannah Griffin’s bi-weekly Substack newsletter: Good Book, Good Bread.
Griffin, who grew up in Toronto, moved to BC when she was 21 where she’s lived in Invermere, Fernie, Squamish and on Vancouver Island. After completing a master’s degree in journalism at New York University, she worked at a community newspaper on Northern Vancouver Island, then at a paddle sports media company before traveling to Mongolia, where she spent time working on freelance projects.
“After that I had a little bit of an existential crisis about working in journalism,” Griffin said. “It was just a rough time to be in the industry, and I was having trouble finding my footing. I was starting to work at different tech companies in the climate and environmental space.”
She moved to Revelstoke with her partner Steven last fall.
“In early 2022 I was not feeling very creative and really missing writing and was getting really into baking bread,” she explained. “I want[ed] to find something fun and creative to do on my own time.”
When asked about the catalyst behind marrying a book review with bread making, Griffin said she just wanted to start a newsletter about book recommendations, but then realized there’s already a lot of those.
“I was feeling like my friends were getting sick of me telling them all about the books I’d read, so I started this newsletter to kind of still get to do that writing and thinking creatively about matching a bread with the book and doing it just for fun twice a month,” she told the Mountaineer.
Griffin’s venture into bread making began pre-pandemic when she saw a sign on a bakery window in the neighbourhood in Squamish she was living in at the time, offering free starter.
“Working in tech and having a job that was really online, it just sometimes felt like you never do anything tangible. It’s just really satisfying in two hours you have a really pretty, delicious loaf of bread.”
Each review has a theme, which Griffin said she thought was a more interesting way to dive into the content. To come up with the theme, Griffin often daydreams a bit. In her most recent newsletter, she reviewed Yellowface by R.F. Kaung, a story of a young woman who steals her successful author friend’s manuscript after she dies, and then passes it off as her own.
“That starts in the first chapter of the book, so the whole book is about her secret slowly spilling out,” she said. “That’s the main theme of the book, so I want to make a bread that is like a stuffed bread, so when you bake it, it can’t contain its filling.”
Sometimes, connecting the book to a bread comes easy. Like when Griffin reviewed The Wager, the story of a 1600s shipwreck written by David Grann.
“[They] didn’t know if you had limes on board that could really stave off scurvy. So, I thought OK, do a citrus bread,” Griffin said.
Other times, Griffin has to think about the bread and book pairing for a really long time. Her biggest struggle to date was a graphic novel about an illustrator whose girlfriend died of cancer when he was in his 20s.
“They were just really young to be dealing with it, and it was just this beautiful book about it. I just couldn’t figure out a story about grief and death, how I could connect that to bread. I actually can’t remember what I connected with it, but I remember having to think about that one for a long time because it’s not something light or that lends itself to thinking about baking very easily.”
It’s also been challenging to switch from the objective journalism-style of writing to a more personal, first person narrative.
“It’s not my inclination to write in the first person, but I guess I’m doing it more lately,” Griffin said.
Looking to the future, Griffin enjoys writing the newsletter and plans to keep doing it. She also has plans to start a business involving bread, but she isn’t quite ready to spill that news yet.
You can read Good Book, Good Bread on Substack.
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