Éireann Lorsung, Nina MacLaughlin & Matthew Houston – Works and Days

In Works and Days, writers Éireann Lorsung and Nina MacLaughlin and musician Matthew Houston put selections of their work in conversation with each other, exploring natural rhythms, transformation, boundaries dissolving, one season giving way to the next, one word giving way to the next.

Lorsung, author of the collection The Century (winner of the Maine Book Award) will draw from new work; Nina MacLaughlin will pull from her books Winter Solstice and Summer Solstice; and Houston’s atmospheric in-the-moment music will thread through. It’s not quite a reading, and not quite a concert, but an experiment in response.

Co-presented by Print: A Bookstore.

Éireann Lorsung (pronounced “Erin”) is a writer, teacher, and maker of things, currently living between Maine and Dublin, Ireland. Her first book, Music for Landing Planes By, was named a ‘new and noteworthy’ book by Poets & Writers. Her second, Her book (a poem from it can be found at the Poetry Society of America), came out from Milkweed in 2013 and was beautifully reviewed in Zzyzzyva; a chapbook, Sweetbriar, came out the same year. Her third book, The Century, which LitHub named as one of their “most anticipated” 2020 titles, came out in October 2020 and has been reviewed in Ploughshares, the Portland Press Herald, the Boston Globe, and Publishers Weekly, among other places. The Century also won the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. Éireann was a 2016 NEA Fellow in creative writing (prose). 

Nina MacLaughlin is the author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung (FSG/FSG Originals), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, as well as Winter Solstice and Summer Solstice (Black Sparrow). Her first book was the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the New England Book Award. Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she worked for nine years as a carpenter, and is now a books columnist for the Boston Globe.Her work has appeared on or in The Paris Review Daily, The Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Agni, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Meatpaper, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Matthew Houston plays the six-string guitar and sings songs that he wrote. Recently he has been playing loud, noisy, and weird music in Portland-based bands like Family Planning and Wizard Party. His solo work draws from the ‘70s albums of singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Judee Sill, as well as the fingerstyle guitar work found in the Takoma Records catalog.