Page turners

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This article was published 30/03/2019 (2676 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Scott Poworoznyk was at the barbershop getting a trim when the woman cutting his hair asked if he had any plans for the weekend.

As a matter of fact he did, he told her, disclosing his men’s book club was scheduled to get together the following evening.

“Men’s book club?” she guffawed. “What kind of books do you read? No, let me guess: 50 Shades of Grey?”

“It is amusing how many people make jokes or don’t believe we’re legit,” says James Bolton, like Poworoznyk, a charter member of the Brass Eagles, a six-member group of guys, age 38 to 44, that hooks up on a monthly basis to dissect their latest page-turner over dinner and drinks. (To answer Poworoznyk’s stylist’s question, their reading list to date has included topical fare such as Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, classic works of fiction such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as well as Oprah-approved picks such as Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.)

“When we were just starting out and I’d mention our club to friends or co-workers, a lot were like, ‘Yeah, right; that’s just an excuse to go to a buddy’s place to watch hockey and drink beer, isn’t it?’” Bolton, a psychiatrist, continues, seated inside Osborne Village’s Cornerstone Bar & Restaurant, where he and his cohorts have gathered to discuss When Breath Becomes Air, a posthumously-published memoir about Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s personal battle against stage IV metastatic lung cancer. “I’d tell them, no, we actually do read books. And we actually do enjoy spending time together, talking about what we’ve read. Is beer involved? Sure. But that’s a small part of what this is all about.”

Mark Gilchrist smiles and says, “Yeah, you’re probably right,” when a scribe surmises if he had pitched the idea of a feature story about an all-ladies’ book club to his editor, the response would probably have been something along the lines of, “Thanks, but no thanks.” But because the Brass Eagles are a guys-only entity, there’s a novelty factor involved, he agrees.

Gilchrist, a school teacher, began thinking about forming a men’s book club about five years ago. He says whenever it was his wife’s turn to host her monthly book club, he found it difficult not to eavesdrop on their entertaining and animated conversations and think, “I like to read, I have friends who enjoy reading; why don’t we get together to eat, drink and talk about books, the same way my wife and her friends do?”

The first person he bounced the idea off was his neighbour Chad Isbister. Isbister, a sales representative, was immediately interested, particularly because it reminded him of something his father once did.

“When I was growing up, we lived on a bay that was part of a new development where the original occupants all moved in around the same time,” he says. “In order to build a sense of community, my dad helped organize what he and the other men on the street called ‘garbage nights,’ the idea being the night before garbage day, they would take turns hosting guys-only parties in one another’s garage to get to know each other better. I’d mentioned that to Mark a couple times — how great it would be to do something similar — so when he asked me about joining a book club, I was all over it.”

Finding others who were as enthusiastic about starting a men’s book club was easier said than done, Isbister admits. The first few buddies he approached turned him down flat, stating they didn’t have the time or energy to commit to reading a book every month, never mind sitting around talking about it for a couple hours. So when Bolton, another of his pals, told him he was in, Isbister was ecstatic, figuring they were halfway there.

“So what you’re saying is James was actually your fourth or fifth pick? Nice,” Gilchrist says with a wink.

Poworoznyk and Adam Hildebrandt, who used to teach at the same school as Gilchrist, were next to join. In October 2015, the five men met at Carlos & Murphy’s in Osborne Village; not to discuss a book — as a group, they hadn’t read one yet — but rather to establish a few ground rules: how often they should meet, what types of subject matter everybody was interested in, that sort of thing. (Winnipeg’s hospitality biz will be pleased to learn the group’s chief tenet is that meetings can only be held in a locally-owned restaurant or bar — “It saves on having to clean the house,” Hildebrandt says — and that it’s the responsibility of the person whose turn it is to pick a book to also make dinner reservations.)

“Even though I wasn’t at that first meeting, I definitely consider myself a founding member,” says Chris Laing, an airline pilot who, at the urging of his brother-in-law Poworoznyk, joined the gang at Bailey’s six weeks later for the Brass Eagles’ inaugural get-together.

Not that they were called that yet, Laing points out.

“During the evening our server asked what our name was. We were all like, ‘We need a name? Nobody told us that,’” Laing says. “Anyways, from where I was sitting, I could see this cappuccino maker behind the bar with a big, brass eagle on top of it. So I said, ‘What about the Brass Eagles?’”

Although fewer and farther between than their female counterparts, there are a number of long-running, men’s book clubs out there. In 2016, the New York Times profiled the Man Book Club, a collection of New York City lawyers and engineers that professes to “never read chick-lit.” In that same article, the author also interviewed members of the International Ultra-Manly Book Club, based in Kansas City, and the Houston Men’s Book Club. Closer to home, the Free Press’s own Doug Speirs belongs to the 13-member Dylan Thomas Memorial Book Club, recently renamed the Aaron Berg Memorial Book Club in honour of its founder, who died in 2017.

“I always assumed we were a voice in the wilderness — the only, all-guy book club in the province — so it’s nice to know we’re not alone,” Speirs says, after learning about the Brass Eagles.

Speirs, the Free Press’ humour columnist, says the “cool thing” about his well-read troupe is that it’s about “friendship first, the book second.”

“There are times when, on the day we are going to meet, I will seclude myself to read enough of the book so I can pretend, in a fairly reasonable and believable manner, that I have read the whole thing. But no one really cares,” he explains. “Our typical meeting involves: pouring shots of scotch or wine, 24 per cent; expressing outrage over Donald Trump, 38 per cent; debating the issues of the day, 44 per cent; talking about the book, maybe five per cent. Being guys, we don’t debate the subtleties of the novel. It’s more, ‘This book was stupid, I hated it,’ and ‘No, YOU’RE stupid!’”

“I can’t speak for the other five guys, but for me, when we first started the club, I didn’t really have any expectations outside of having the opportunity to read books that, from time to time, were probably going to take me outside my wheelhouse,” Isbister says. “What I’ve discovered, however, is that there has been a degree of self-improvement involved; not necessarily with reading, but more from interacting with new people, building new relationships and trying new places I may never have gone to, if it wasn’t for this club.” (Hildebrandt keeps a list on his phone of all the spots the Brass Eagles have convened at thus far, a who’s who of Winnipeg restaurants that includes Chew, 529 Wellington, the Yellow Dog Tavern and Rae and Jerry’s.)

“I totally agree,” says Gilchrist. “As teachers, we read and talk about books a lot and I guess part of me wanted to talk about books with somebody who wasn’t a teacher. So it’s been nice these last four years to get the perspective of a business person like Chad, a psychiatrist like James, or a pilot, like our friend, Maverick, over there.”

Interestingly, when asked about any noteworthy book club meet-ups to date, all six agree the most memorable one didn’t revolve around a biography or bestseller, at all. After four years of going home and telling their wives what occurred at book club, the Brass Eagles decided it was high time their better halves met one another. Three days before Christmas 2018, they booked a table for 12 at Passero, at The Forks.

“It was funny because about a week later, I bumped into our server from that night who said it was so cool to wait on such a tight-knit group of people,” Isbister says, mentioning the guys are planning something big — perhaps a trip to San Francisco or New York — for their fast-approaching fifth anniversary.

“I told him it’s funny he should say that, considering half the people at the table, meaning our wives, were meeting each other for the first time. But perhaps that’s a testament to the group; maybe because the six guys get along so well, it naturally spilled over to our loved ones, too.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca