If you embrace the shorter days and chilly temperatures, if Winter is a season that you cherish for its memories and traditions, if you love writing that takes your breath away with lyrical leaps across time and space, you’ll want to join us for a celebration of the season and an engaging discussion of MacLaughlin’s beautiful book-length essay.
Winter begins with the shortest day of the year before nightfall. Meditating on both the dark and the light and what this season means in our lives, Nina MacLaughlin explores all aspects of Winter, from the meteorological to the mythological, in this masterful book.
“Winter tells us more than petaled spring, or hot-grassed summer, or fall with its yellow leaves, that we are mortal. In the frankness of its cold, in the mystery of its deep-blue dark, the place in us that knows of death is tickled, focused, stoked. The angels sing on the doorknobs and others sing from the abyss. The sun has been in retreat since June, and the heat inside glows brighter in proportion to its absence. We make up for the lost light in the spark that burns inside us.”
The discussion will be followed by a book signing. Books will be available for purchase through Susie’s Stories.
This program is sponsored by the Mass Book Awards Speakers Bureau and is presented in collaboration with the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
Nina MacLaughlin is the winner of the 2024 Massachusetts Book Award for Winter Solstice, which was a Boston Globe and LA Times Bestseller. She is also the author of Wake, Siren, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and Summer Solstice. Her first book was the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter. Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she worked for nine years as a carpenter, and now writes the New England Literary News column for the Boston Globe.
John R. Nelson is the author of Flight Calls: Exploring Massachusetts through Birds and Cultivating Judgment, on teaching critical thinking. His essay “Funny Bird Sex,” from The Antioch Review was awarded a 2018 Pushcart Prize, and his narrative “Coming of Old Age in Samoa,” from The Missouri Review, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. John is a professor emeriti at North Shore Community College and the founder and chair of the Association of Massachusetts Bird Clubs.