E. N. Couturier: Organic Matter

About the Book: E.N. Couturier has decided, against the wishes of everyone in her life, to work on a vegetable farm after her college graduation instead of going to grad school. In a series of diaristic entries, Organic Matter documents Couturier’s experience in the fields and hoop houses over the course of one growing season as she labors alongside an eccentric cast of characters. The work is mundane, brutal, and often absurd. Pea plants slip free of their twine, diamond squash bugs munch the blighted cucumbers, and Couturier’s joints grow stiff and swollen as her alienation from the urban world beyond the farm grows. With incisiveness and wry humor, Couturier grapples with her uncertain future and the uncertain future of the land that sustains us. Organic Matter paints a luminous portrait of the rural ecosystem that feeds the city and explores one perceptive young woman’s relationship with faith, labor, love, family, the body, and the ground.

About the Author: E.N. Couturier is an award-winning journalist and recreational farmer. Organic Matter is her first book. Her work has appeared in numerous Maine news outlets, on local radio and in publications including New World Writing, Peripheries, Eclectica Magazine, FRiGG, and jmww, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She never did go to graduate school.

About the Conversation Partner: Kyoko Mori is the author of 3 nonfiction books (The Dream of Water; Polite Lies; Yarn) and 4 novels (Shizuko’s Daughter; One Bird; Stone Field, True Arrow; Barn Cat). Her 4th book of nonfiction, Cat and Bird: a memoir, will be published by Belt Publishing in March 2024. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Best American Essays, Harvard Review, The American Scholar, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, and others. She teaches nonfiction-writing in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at George Mason University and the Low-Residency MFA Program at Lesley University. Kyoko lives in Washington, DC with her cats, Miles and Jackson.

About the Conversation Partner's Book: From the critically acclaimed author of Shizuko’s Daughter (a New York Times Notable Book) and Yarn, comes a fascinating new memoir about animals, loss, and finding a home in the world. Cat and Bird, a “memoir in animals,” is anchored around Kyoko Mori’s relationship with the six house cats who defined the major eras of her life as a writer: Dorian, Oscar, Ernest, Algernon, Miles, and Jackson. As she details the rhythms and routines of their days together, she weaves a narrative tapestry out of her past: the deep family tragedy and resilience that marked her childhood in Japan, her move to the American Midwest as a young adult, her experiences as a bird rehabilitator in Wisconsin and cat trainer, her marriage and divorce, and the joys and profound heartbreaks that come with pet ownership. Full of razorsharp observations and generous prose, Cat and Bird whirls into a moving meditation about grief, writing, the imagination, the solitary life, and the wonders of companionship with creatures both domestic and wild.