Lorna Stuber

If a friendship lasts longer than fifteen years, you're no longer friends. You're family.Since childhood, Lorna has been curious about Germany and her ancestral roots there. She was fourteen when her great-grandfather died, a man who was born in what is now part of Ukraine but who was a self-proclaimed, proud German.Having grown up during the Cold War, Lorna had always viewed the former East and West Germany as being starkly different until 1999, when she met Christine, a woman from the former East Germany who became one of Lorna's closest lifetime friends.Over twenty-five years, Lorna made several trips to Germany in search of the world's largest cuckoo clock, a hotel in Berlin where guests can sleep in a coffin or prison cell, another hotel along the Rhein River that is owned by a family who may or may not be Lorna's distant relatives, sausage that meets the Nuremberg Sausage Protection Association's standards, and the best view of Neuschwanstein Castle.In her most recent memoir, travel and humour writer Lorna Stuber tells of her adventures in Germany while she reconnects with and learns more about her familial ties to Europe.

"Do you remember the time Lorna tried to make ground beef with her car?" For almost forty years, Lorna Stuber's high school classmates have teased her mercilessly about the time she crashed her car into a steer, leaving the car with tufts of bovine hair stuck in cracks in the hood. The car has since been known as "Lorna's Cowfur Mobile". Filled with relatable yet unique stories of sibling rivalry, community, and coming-of-age lessons, Nut Bags and Num-Nums tells the story of a girl growing up on a Canadian cattle ranch in the 1970s and 1980s. With a mix of humour and poignancy, the author enlightens readers on how to dispatch a gopher, gut a chicken, and clean and cook prairie oysters. The book also pays homage to teachers and to Alberta's farmers and ranchers."I've lived in in the jungles of Peru and the suburbs of Tokyo. I've been to Easter Island, Australia, Egypt, the Caribbean, and Europe. But regardless of where I travel, no matter where I live, my feet are grounded in Canadian soil under the expansive Alberta sky. I value the rural lifestyle and the people I've known since childhood who still shape the person I continue to become."

"I wanna become a teacher and then teach in another country," an eight-year-old Canadian girl decided.By the age of twenty-five, she had checked this-her main goal in life-off her bucket list. In March 1992, Lorna Stuber stepped off an Air Canada plane in Tokyo, and embarked on a three-year adventure in a country she had never even thought about visiting until six months prior. Teaching ESL in a suburb of Tokyo-sometimes charging her way ahead, at other times stepping meekly forward-she fumbled through linguistic and cultural hiccups such as eating sushi so fresh it was still twitching and getting attacked by a high-tech toilet.While battling intense homesickness, adjusting to Japanese culture, and exploring Japan's beautiful mountains and coasts, Lorna learned to laugh at herself and open her mind to other cultures. Japan set her forth on a path that has continued to lead to opportunities she otherwise would have never known existed. "Everyone should live in another culture for at least a year. Not only do you learn about the world that is bigger than your own culture, but you learn aspects about yourself than you never would otherwise."