The Landscapes that Make Us with Margaret Renkl

Published Sep 30, 2024, 7:01 AM

Danielle and Simone celebrate an author from Reese's Book Club with an all new installment of Shelf Life. Author and contributing New York Times opinion writer Margaret Renkel joins the show to talk about her book The Comfort of Crows. She was Reese Witherspoon's high school English teacher and she shares what she remembers of Reese as a student as well as her love of literature and the power of paying attention to nature in our digital world.

You can find The Comfort of Crows on Apple Books or wherever books are sold. 

Hey fam, Hello Sunshine.

Today on the bright Side, it's time to celebrate the authors of Reese's Book Club with an all new installment of shelf Life.

Today is really special.

It's Reese's Book Club's one hundredth pick, and we're joined by author Margaret Wrinkle to talk about her book The Comfort of Crows.

Fun fact.

Margaret was Reese Witherspoon's high school English teacher, and she's sharing what she remembers of Reese as a student. It's Monday, September thirtieth. I'm Danielle Robe.

And I'm Simone Boyce, and this is the bright Side from Hello Sunshine, a daily show where we come together to share women's stories, laugh, learn, and bright near Day On My Mind Monday is brought to you by missus Myers Clean Day, inspired by the goodness of the garden.

Simone, It's on my Mind Monday, which is our opportunity to start the week fresh with some inspiring perspective.

What's on your mind today? Okay, first, I'm going to start with a temperature check. How do you feel when I say the term humility?

Hmm?

How does it feel in your body?

Danielle, It's one of my favorite words. I love people who exemplify humility.

I think it's actually a sign of confidence.

Hmm. I like that.

Say more about that.

I think people that are humble know their own worth and so they don't have to shout it to the world.

But I'm seeing you not.

I don't know how if you agree with me, how do you feel about the word I do?

I totally agree with you, I think to a point. I think that for a long time, women in particular were conditioned to be humble at the expense of not celebrating their skills, their accomplishments, right, And I saw that in my own home, Like my mom raised me to be extremely humble, and she is an extremely humble woman. But sometimes I do have mixed feelings about that term, because I wonder if you can be too humble and sell yourself short. Yeah, okay, so I've aired my baggage about the word humility. But I recently came across an article in the Washington Post that's all about a different kind of humility, and this is one that I can undoubtedly get behind. And this is called intellectual humility. So intellectual humility is acknowledging that we don't know everything, and that even some of our most deeply held beliefs are fallible. And research shows that intellectual humility is associated with curiosity, open mindedness, and expanding our general knowledge. Plus, people with more intellectual humility are also more likely to really scrutinize the evidence and quote. They're less likely to fall for misinformation and unsupported conspiracy theories.

I also feel like they're more apt to ask questions. Do you agree?

Of course? I think intellectual curiosity and intellectual humility go hand in hand, and the way you get there is through asking question yeah.

Because I feel like people that are like that, are intellectually humble, are not afraid to not know something or to look silly.

Not afraid to admit that you don't know something.

So how do you think we can bring more intellectual humility to our own lives?

Well, the writer of this piece, Richard Sima, laid out some ways that we can cultivate it. He says, the first step is taking a moment to reflect. So before you enter a conversation that you know is going to get heated, remind yourself of all the benefits that we just discussed that come with intellectual humility. And also get clear on your goal for the conversation. I read this book earlier this year, Super Communicators, by Charles Douhig, and whenever people are approaching sensitive conversations, he gives this advice come back to a shared core belief and make sure to emphasize that in the conversation. So if things are getting nasty, say something like, I know we both believe X, or I know we're both aligned here. I know we both want the same things, we just have different ways of getting there. Mmmm. Another way to cultivate intellectual humility is stepping outside yourself. I mean, one study showed that adults who wrote diary entries in the third person instead of the first person had more growth in intellectual humility and open mindedness. There are actually a lot of benefits of thinking in the third person. It can help you kind of pull yourself out of a spiral. And when I think about stepping outside yourself, I also think about travel right, like literally and physically exposing yourself to different perspectives and walks of life. For sure, we've talked about this on the show before.

But when I don't know what to do, sometimes I think about my life as a play and then I sit in the audience and I'm like, Okay, what would I tell my character to do?

WHOA, that's so cool. I don't know that I've ever done that, but that's a really cool thought exercise. Okay. Finally, Tip number three is just have gratitude. Emotions like awe, love and gratitude can help us transcend ourselves and increase intellectual humility least short term, so that can't hurt.

I love that one, and that kind of speaks to what we were talking about earlier. That's the gratitude and humility are so linked.

Yeah.

One of the reasons I love the word humility is it comes from the Latin root humulus, which means low or grounded, and it's derived from humus, but it means earth or soil. It's so to be of the earth, to be one with nature. And that brings us to our guests today because she's someone who spent a lot of time exploring the connection between nature and the human experience. Margaret w Renkell is the author of the Comfort of Crows, a Backyard Year, which tells the story of the changes of life through seasons. She actually spent an entire year documenting the plants and creatures in her backyard, and she is the one hundredth book pick for Reese's Book Club. Well, there's actually a deeper story there. Margaret w Renkell was Reese Witherspoon's high school English teacher, so this is a full circle.

Moment for student and teacher. Well, after ten years of helping our students fall in love with literature and poetry, students like Reese, Margaret is now a full time writer and contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. So The Comfort of Crows is her third book of essays. Her others include Late Migrations and Graceland at Last, and then her next book, Leaf Cloud Crow, is a companion journal for the Comfort of Crows. Margaret Wrinkle joins us after the break stay with us thanks to our partners at missus Myers. You can learn a lot about a person by their dish soap. Missus Meyers's collection of household products are inspired by the garden and pack a punch against dirt and grime. Visit missus Myers dot com. Margaret, Welcome to the bright Side.

Oh, I'm so happy to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Danielle, Well, we're so excited to have you. Congratulations on being at the one hundredth pick for Reese's Book Club with your latest book, The Comfort of Crows, a backyard year. So we heard that you thought you were being pranked when you found out what happened.

Oh, I've never gotten a text from Reese before. When I hear from reesa is usually through an Instagram message or an email. And so I get this text and it says, Margaret, this is Reese, do you have a minute to talk. I write for the New York Times, so I have some pretty persistent trolls, and I just thought it might be somebody trying to figure out my real telephone number by pretending to be Reese, because there had just been a feature on Rees in The New York Times in which the author Elizabeth Echan mentioned that I had been Reese's high school English teacher, so would have been fresh on people's minds. Anyway, I gave her a little quiz. I said, if you're the real Reese Witherspoon, you'll know who a male teacher at Harpeth Hall in the nineteen eighties what his name is. I figured nobody could look that up really quick and figure it out smart. It would have to be the real Rees, but she popped right up. Tad worked and I said, yes, Hi, Rees.

Well you both shared this really touching video after the announcement was made, and it's this video where you two are walking through the halls of the school where Reese studied English under you. You're in the library, you're looking through books together, and you both got really emotional as you were reconnecting. What was that feeling like reconnecting again?

It was what she was saying, More than you know, I hear from Rees from time to time. Sometimes several years might pass, but I feel like I never miss shows she's in. I never missed films she's made. I watch movies that Hello Sunshine and series is that Hello Sunshine produce, even when Reese is not in them soup. For all these years, I've felt like I've been there, you know, right beside her, even though I haven't been. So really, my emotional response to that what was happening in the library and that video was more about what she was saying at that moment, because she really it's not entirely it's not true, it's really not true at all, but she believes that It's true that I'm the one who made her understand the power of stories and the power of telling stories where people see themselves and recognize themselves in those stories. I remember what she was like as a teenager, and I didn't plant that seed in her. It was already there. It had been there. I think it had probably been there all her life.

Well, she talks about being obsessed with stories from the time she was like six.

You know, yes, that's what I mean.

I'm sure you just nurtured that seed, that that was already there. Well, it was.

Such a huge part of her. She had already started making MOVI. She was just this kid, but she was making her second movie the first semester she was away. I mean, my only communication with her the first semester I taught her was through a fax machine. I sent notes and quizzes and reading assignments and writing assignments to her on set tutor. And then the next semester I was on maternity leave, And so it was the next year that I really got to know her. And I think it was probably not accidental that it was my first class as a mother, The first time I was seeing these teenage girls as almost like my daughters. So the connection with the students I taught that year was especially fierce and strong. But I also just think that Reese was hungry for those stories in those conversations.

There's something that happens when you become a mom where you start to see everyone as someone else's child. At least I don't know that happened for me, it's.

True, and I felt like I, you know, in the in my early years as a teacher, I thought of my students as my almost like myself as a young girl, or like my younger sister. But it was a very big shift in how I understood that these were someone's children and they were entrusted into my care in a way that I hadn't really understood before.

When you say she credits you with her love of stories and really understanding the importance, what do you think she's crediting? How did you teach? What's the thing that you think has stuck with her.

She has said in earlier interviews that I taught her to love hard stories, like hard books, not to be afraid of hard books. I don't know if that's true. I think it's probably that I offered a kind of permission to love a hard book. One of my favorite books when I was in eighth grade has someone else's handwriting on the back of the cover paperback of Edith Hamilton's Stories of Greek and Roman Mythology, And in somebody else's handwriting it says, this book is so boring, But I remember loving it, just absolutely drinking it in. And so I think what maybe she might have meant is that I was loving hard stories, not just hard stories, not just hard books, and not just hard poems, but that it was possible to love something that you did have to sometimes invest a little bit of effort into. It wasn't like surrendering to a book the way we talk about it now. It was more of an intensity than that. And I think it's good to read hard books, but I think it's good to read books that transport us to I think we have different needs at different times of our lives, and even in different days of the week, what are we looking for? Both are valuable, we don't have to choose.

In much of your writing, you explore the connections between nature and love and loss and the human experience, and in this book you often observe how nature adapts and thrives despite challenges. So you're sharing personal memories. What has nature taught you about your own life and how has it helped you process your experiences?

Well, you know, I've been writing for all my life, really from when I could first hold a pencil. But I hadn't written a book until my mother died, and it was a very sudden death. She was eighty. It wasn't that she was young, but her mother had lived to be ninety seven, and her grandmother had lived to be ninety six. And my great grandmother grew up in an age without antibiotics or vaccines or she came from a line of very long lived women, and I thought I would have her for another decade dec and a half. And she died very suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, and I was completely I just was lost. A few years before she died, she moved into the house across the street from me. She had dinner with our family every single night. She was a part of my daily life, and suddenly she was gone. I took a lot of comfort from watching that cycle play out in the natural world outside my window. Because all living things die. We don't think about it, but that's what happens. And what I saw out there was that animals grieve. When a squirrel loses a partner, or a hawk gets a squirrel's partner, or a hawk gets a squirrel's baby, the squirrel sits in the tree and cries, keens, just despair and grief. But it still goes on. And when you see creature after creature facing the same thing and going on, it felt like a reminder. That's not why they went on, It's just that it was a reminder that this is just a part of the cycle of how it works, and there's a beauty in it. Older people die because babies are still being born and we have to have room for them. It's part of how it works. And that was very comforting to me during that time. And then there's so many other ways you see resilience and the willingness to try again and move on in all kinds of situations. The flowers that are blooming for the bees today won't be blooming tomorrow, and the bees will find new flowers. They're not cursing the fact that their steady supply of this particular blossom is no longer blooming. They just go on to the next flower. I think that's a nice reminder.

That change is ever present way of describing it. I'm curious how your understanding of home has evolved over time, both as a physical space and kind of as a metaphor for where we feel most grounded.

I think that I.

Am a very I'm a homebody, like I used to laugh. My husband, he's got an itchy foot, he loves, he has a lot of wonderlust. He's a school teacher still, and as soon as school is out he wants to hit the road and go somewhere. And one day I said to him, Honey, there are two kinds of people in the world. There are travelers and there are gardeners. And you're a traveler and I'm a gardener, and we're just you know, we're still just fine in our wife through that.

And they marry each other, those two types of.

People, they marry each other. Well, we certainly did. But I am very happy, very grounded in my little yard. But I think in a bigger sense, in some ways, I think we're just really imprinted on the landscape that forms us, not necessarily the one we're born, but the one where we spent our childhood and so pine trees. When I see pine trees, I feel at home because I grew up in the pine woods of Alabama. I don't live there, I haven't lived there since I was twenty two years old. But a pine tree makes me feel like home. Maybe most people feel that way about It might not be a pine tree. It might be a particular kind of oak or a particular kind of grass. But we see that and we respond to it. We feel this powerful pull toward it because we are creatures of the natural world, even though we live in houses, and we recognize that we are drawn to the landscapes that make us.

We need to take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Stay with us, and we're back, Margaret.

I think you would love my backyard and my parents backyard, because we live down the street from each other, and we live in this desert area of Los Angeles, so we have all kinds of wildlife. We've got bobcats, we've got coyotes, we've got red tailed hawks. And my mom is not such a big fan of the wildlife, Margaret.

My mother wasn't anywhere. I'll tell you the truth.

I come over to my mom's house one day and She's like on her hands and knees spraying this substance around her yard. And I was like, Mom, what are you doing? And She's like, Oh, I'm spraying wolf peece so the coyotes won't come and eat my grandbabies.

This is well, I'm prod the mechanism, Margaret. I want to ask about something you said about the landscapes we grow up with. I think the Southern landscape feels so central to your identity in your writing as well. How has this connection to place shaped how you write and how you move throughout the world.

You know, most people don't think of the South this way, but the South is a hotbed of biodiversity. And part of the reason for that is that so much of the South is still rural. Before air conditioning, there was no industrial revolution in the American South, really because it was impossible for people to live here. They couldn't imagine. Now, everybody moves here from everywhere else in the world. We have a huge immigrant population. We have a huge migratory population of people coming from California and from Chicago and from New York because they like it it's a little warmer, among other things. But I think that because I was so interested in lizards and toads and frogs and bats and birds and little crawling things of every kind. And to still have that biodiversity, I mean, it's being lost rapidly, as it is everywhere because people haven't learned to treasure it and protect it. But we have plants growing just on the side of the road in rural Alabama. I'm a rural Tennessee rural Georgia that are on the endangered species list because they live in such a specific ecosystem and you can still just stop at a vacant lot and see them. Now, if you stop somewhere to put gas in your car and just walk next door, there's very likely to be something blooming there that you will never see anywhere else in the world. And I think that's part of it.

Margaret. I want to tell you about my experience reading The Comfort of Crows. I find myself often rushing through books so that I can check them off my backlog list, not all of them, but some of them, because I always have this like productivity monster on my shoulder that's like be more efficient, do things, you know faster, and get things done. But when I read your writing, I completely slow down, and no one does this to me. You have these magical powers where your words just completely like call me and give me this piece. And one of my favorite quotes from your book is this one. The natural world's perfect indifference has always been the best cure for my own anxieties. And I just found so much comfort in your book and your writing, and it felt like a refuge for me even as I was moving through some daily stressors of my own. So asking, as someone who's envious of that kind of writing talent, what's the secret to perfecting writing that makes the reader move at a gentler pace.

You really couldn't have said anything that would make me happier, because that is exactly what I hoped would be the effect of the comforter Crows. And I'll just be completely honest because that's I wrote that those essays to do that for myself, because I am as prone to racing thoughts and anxieties and worries and to do lists that never get done as anybody is. It's kind of like when people say how do you maintain your sense of optimism? And my kids laugh because I am not an optimistic person. But when I write what I'm writing is in some ways what I need to read in the process of putting words on the page, And for me, they almost always start with a pen or a pencil and a notebook. Lining words up one after another after another after another is a kind of focus that my brain doesn't naturally have in any other context. So even if I'm pulling weeds or I'm walking on a trail in the park, my mind is running pretty wild. But when I'm writing word by word by word by word, I can't race ahead. If I'm typing, I can because I can type really fast, but I can't write any faster than I can write, And I think that that's physical slowness has a way of slowing my racing thoughts as well. And I do think that you don't have to be writing an essay a week about your wild neighbors to have this effect. But if people can bring themselves to write down a few words, to give themselves permission, first of all, to put the phone down and just go and sit and listen to the birds, or to watch what's happening among the wild creatures. What are the bees doing in the flowers, and why are some of them still in some of them moving so quickly and studying them and trying to figure it out. Oh, that one's asleep. That bee is asleep, it's gotten tired, and the other bees are still working. So when you have permission to slow down and pay attention and then to word by word by word, write down your thoughts about what you've seen or what you've heard, or what you're experiencing, it has that way of slowing the autonomic nervous system. It makes your heart beat slower, it makes your thoughts stop racing. It always has for me. That's what I think.

It's so clear from reading this book that you experience nature differently. So can you take me into your world for a minute. How do you experience nature?

Like?

Walk me through the first couple of things that you do when you're outside.

It's almost unconscious, I think. For me, I don't think. Okay, first I'm going to check the flowers. Then I'm gonna check the trees, then I'm gonna check the very bearing bushes I've planted. I've been We've been in our house twenty nine and a half years, so we've over the years.

It was just the.

Typical sterile suburban backyard with privet and nandinas and use just regular old landscaping plants that don't feed wild animals. And we've slowly added over the years native plants, plants that are native to the South that produce berries or produce seeds or nuts, so that there's always something to feed the hungry creatures in the yard. And if you have planted to feed the wildlife, the wildlife comes to you. So you're just kind of looking around, Okay, what's blooming, but also who's drinking in the nectar? Oh, I didn't realize that hummingbirds also eat insects. They're not just drinking nectar from flowers. In the process of observing, you're taking mental note. This is a world. Every single day there's something I didn't know about the world. And you would think at my age, I'm sixty two, i'll be sixty three next month, and I've been doing this for a long long time, there wouldn't be any real surprises in this yard. But there always are, and so I'm looking for the surprises. I'm just wandering around with no agenda. I'm just looking at what catches my ear, catches my eye, what's scent I can follow to see if something's blooming that I hadn't realized was in bloom. I have a bird bath on my deck rail. I have a bird bath on a pedestal in the yard. I have a dish of water low to the ground for creatures like possums and raccoons and foxes. And you put water out, you bring wildlife very close, and they don't. You can't just sit on the backsteps and watch them come up and drink, but you can stand in the window and look. I do a lot of spying on my wild neighbors.

I think you're a Disney princess, Margaret, and you didn't even realize it. You're snow white. I mean, you just you can't change my mind.

With the little birds lighting on my finger.

As you mentioned earlier, you're a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and you recently addressed this the Freedom to Read campaign, which was launched in response to the growing trend of book bands. It feels so crucial to protect diverse stories and diverse perspectives. What do you think the consequence is of book banning.

It's a penalty, I think primarily for children who don't have the resources, the economic resources to buy books, because the public library has always been for everybody, and school libraries have always been for everybody in that school population. When you have people saying these books, I don't want my children to possibly run across these books, and then in the process deny other people's children of access to those books, it's anti democratic. I think it's the opposite of what this country is about. We're about freedom. If you don't want your child to read a book, don't let the child read the book, but don't take it out of the library, because if your child. Most of the time, these book bans are happening in suburban school systems where people are prosperous, but not every member of that community is prosperous. So in some families, if the book is not available in the library, they'll go buy it, but many families can't afford to buy it, and it has the way of stifling individuality, stifling freedom, stifling truth. I believe because the truth of America is the truth of diversity of many many different points of view, many many different human experiences, all coming together to believe in this idea of freedom.

Well, we're going to get to hear your point of view. In your own voice right now, because we would love for you to read for us from the comfort of crows. This passage is from the Fall Week one chapter. It's called the Season of Making Ready.

The season of making ready Fall week one. Fall is hurricane season, and whenever the Gulf Coast takes a wallop, the rains barreling north usher in a few blessedly cool days in the midst of our usual heat and haze. I wouldn't wish a hurricane on anyone, but I admit to feeling grateful for the rain. One September I drove home to Alabama while a gray mist turned the Appalachian foothills into a landscape of enchantment. Fog gathered in the valleys and edged the fields. Shreds of clouds clung to the trees like a shroud. Solitude and silence made it easy to forget the existence of anything else. What is an automobile? What is an interstate? When all the world is folded into mist? I have to work to love September, that in between time, when the heavy heat lingers, but the maple leaves have already started to turn. Everyone is making ready, preparing in this time of plenty for the days of want ahead. In the garden, only the xenias are still blooming, and even they are shabby and dusted with mildew. The gleaming crows cling to the power lines panting. The indefatible bees and butterflies aren't troubled by the xenia's curling leaves or the gray powder that coats them. Our resident hummingbirds are gone now, but weary migrants keep arriving to visit the fresh blooms. As much as hurricane rains in the Gulf can bring relief to us here in Tennessee. It's wrong to hope for rain while butterflies and hummingbirds are on the wing for travel. The journey is long for residents. The preparation is hard for all of us. Winter is coming.

Where were you mentally when you wrote that chapter.

I had just made that drive when I wrote the first draft of it, and when I came back to it to work on whether it could work in this book, I could go right back. I could remember that exact thing, the mists clinging to the tops of the trees alongside the interstate, where it felt like I was in a magical landscape, and I wasn't in a car, and there were no other cars, and there was no interstate. It was just me and the mist and my thoughts.

There were so many engaged readers who had questions for you, and so we're going to answer some listener questions.

If you're up for it. Oh, I can't wait, Okay.

So first step, we have Lisa, who has a special connection to you.

Hi, Margaret.

Like Greece, I was fortunate to have you as my high school English teacher. Much to my dismay at the time. You refuse to allow me to hide in the back of your class and write notes to my friends. You challenged me to overcome my shyness, and you empowered me with your feedback about my writing and interpretation of poems. I gained so much confidence in myself in your class because of how you saw me. It changed how I saw myself. I use those skills every day as a psychologist, and I don't believe I would have had the confidence to pursue my doctorate in psychology had I not had you as my teacher. Your book The Comfort of Crows just deep in my appreciation and awareness of the natural world through your beautiful descriptive imagery. To me, your writing about this topic feels like an exercise of mindfulness and how to hold grief and enjoy simultaneously. There was so much gratitude and wonder about the beauty of this world in your essays, alongside sadness and despair. What's the biggest life lesson you're hoping people will take away from your words?

Gosh?

Well, First of all, as I said to Es, I will also say to you, Lisa, I did not teach you those things. They were already in you, and they were already visible to me. I think all I had to do was work a little bit to make you see that they were there too. So I think you would have found that courage to get that PhD and change other people's lives no matter what. But I'm really grateful that you think I had even a small hand in it. As for what I hope people will take from the comfort of Crosey, I think you pretty much nailed it. I want people to read this book and fall in love with the natural world, and I want them to do that for two reasons.

I think that.

People who are in love will fight furiously and indefatigably to save what they love. And the world is in trouble, and I think we all need to be for just warriors to save what we can while we still can, because it isn't too late. But I also want people to fall in love with the natural world because I think it's the antidote to the age we live in. We weren't created and didn't evolve to live at the speed of the Internet, and it's making us all nuts. And so if everybody falls in love with the natural world, they might set their phone down, they might step away from their screens and feel better. And I think we just all need a way to feel better right now.

Okay, Margaret, Up next we have Melissa, who's got a question about what you would like your readers to come back to in the Comfort of Crows.

I first heard about your book The Comfort of Crows last year and chose to listen to your audio version of it, which was wonderful. It felt like a guided meditation as I was walking my dog every day through December. But since I kind of i flew through it in one go, I've often thought of how this will be lovely to return to through the years, specifically when I know that I have my kind of cyclical low points and hearing that you are a rereader, do you feel like this book is especially meant as one to re encounter as our own seasons change. Was that purposeful or maybe did you have a specific overarching idea that you would love for us as rereaders to hold on to with this book.

I'm a big believer in rereading. When I was a school teacher, I reread every book I taught every year for ten years. And the more you reread a book, the more you see what you missed the first time, or you come to it almost with a new self because the world has turned, your life has changed, you've changed, and so you experienced the text in a different way, but with the comfort of crows. I think one it feels strange to say I think people should read it twice, because there's so many wonderful books out there, and I don't want to hug all the reading time. But if you read it in one go the first time, it might be nice to read it week by week, which to every day of the week you think you might most need a dose of a reminder to slow down, to listen, to give yourself permission to participate in the eternal of the natural world. If you just pick that one day, whether it's Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon, and just read the chapter that corresponds to that week of the year. In a way, you will carry that message with you. It'll be something you can ponder and it'll last a little longer.

Margaret, thank you so much for joining us on the bright Side today. This is a really special episode for us.

Thank you so much.

It is such a special interview for me. It's so wonderful to be with you all, and to be with the Reese's book Club community. I'm just still dumbfounded that this even happened. I truly have enjoyed speaking with y'all. You This was a such interesting questions and such interesting things to think about.

Margaret Wrinkle is the author of The Comfort of Crows, a Backyard Year, the one hundredth book selection of Reese's Book Club. You can find it wherever you get your books. That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, Baby it's you yep.

Singer songwriter Jojo is bringing her light to the bright Side to talk all about her new memoir Over the Influence.

Join the conversation using hashtag the bright Side and connect with us on social media at Hello Sunshine on Instagram and at The bright Side Pod on TikTok oh, and feel free to tag us at simone Voice and at Danielle Robe.

Listen and follow The bright Side on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

See you tomorrow, folks, keep looking on the bright side.

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