Healing through writing leads to acclaim, a center

 Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno tapped out the words to a poem about light while sitting in the darkness of 3 a.m.

Her 21-year-old daughter had been murdered four days earlier, and Bonanno, of Oreland, felt compelled to write about it.

She calls it a moment of truth-telling at a time when daughter Leidy's death had sent her reeling. Bonanno didn't foresee that that night in July 2003 would lead to an award-winning poetry book and a soon-to-open literary center for writers in Chestnut Hill.

Bonanno is preparing for the  planned Sept. 10  opening of Musehouse: A Center for the Literary Arts. The writers' retreat will host workshops, lectures, classes, and readings for writers and aspiring writers. It is a long-held dream of the former English teacher, who retired from Cheltenham High School in  June. 

"I've been talking about Musehouse for years," said Bonanno, 56. "Leidy's death reminded me that time is short, and I'm in love with the idea of offering the same kinds of courses or events that I want as a writer to others."

In May, Bonanno won a $50,000 matching grant to fund Musehouse from the Knight Foundation. She was one of 36 winners of a grant that is part of the charity's Knight Arts Challenge Philadelphia initiative, a three-year, $9 million program aimed at supporting innovative ideas in arts programming. A total of 1,752 people applied for the program, which began four years ago in Miami.

"Kathleen's idea was a great one," said Dennis Scholl, vice president/arts for the Knight Foundation. "The idea of doing a literary house was something we hadn't seen before."

For years, Bonanno's dreams of starting a literary center remained in the background as the then-schoolteacher and her husband, David, an editor at the American Poetry Review, raised Leidy (pronounced "Lady") and Luis.

The Bonannos had adopted the brother and sister from Chile in 1986.

Leidy, whom her mother described as "gregarious, smiling, and social," attended Bishop McDevitt High School in Wyncote and graduated from the nursing program at the Reading Hospital School of Health Sciences in  June 2003 . Days before she was to start her first job, Leidy told her mother that an ex-boyfriend had stolen her credit-card identity. Leidy had broken up with him, but she didn't tell her mother that he had also threatened her.