Please join us for our monthly local author event! This month we will be hosting Nina Lichtenstein who will be speaking about her memoir-in-essays, Body: My Life in Parts  and Gary Chapin who will be performing parts of The Last Accordion He'll Ever Buy. 

Learn more about the works and authors below:

Body: My Life in Parts is the memoir of an ex-pat Norwegian Lutheran turned American Viking Jewess who is on a quest. This front-end Gen X’er wonders “How the hell did I end up here, now, like this?” The author uses her body to find her answers. In stand-alone but interconnected chapters (“Eyes,” “Belly,” “Breasts,” “Hands,” etc.; 16 chapters in all), body parts serve as portals toward remembrances grounded in the physical body while linking to other forms of experience, with one goal: making sense of a life that she realizes— only through writing it— has been full of reactivity and agency, despite her rarely noticing it in the moment. A quiet, grounding book in turbulent, uncertain times, Body: My Life in Parts, shows the reader how the treasure chest that is her own body can be a source of meaningful discovery, and recovery, of meaning. This book celebrates the body as witness and recordkeeper; a most dependable collaborator in “keeping the score” and in living a more examined life. 

Nina is a native of Oslo, Norway. She holds a PhD in French literature from UCONN, and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Southern Maine. She has blogged as The Viking Jewess since 2014, and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, HuffPost, AARP, Brevity Blog, Lilith and Tablet magazines, among other places. Her work has been anthologized and her book, Sephardic Women's Voices: Out of North Africa was published in 2017. Her memoir-in-essays, Body: My Life in Parts, was published by Vine Leaves Press in 2025. Nina is also the founder and director of Maine Writers Studio, and the co-founder and co-editor of In a Flash Literary Magazine.  Body: My Life in Parts can be preordered at https://www.ninalichtenstein.com/  purchased at Gulf of Maine Books and Bookshop.org, as well as on Amazon

This collection of poems by Gary Chapin reflects on life from childhood to the last accordion he'll ever buy.

Gary Chapin lives in Maine and began writing and performing poetry in New Brunswick, NJ, in the late ‘80s. Over the last five years—during the COVID times—he's published in online journals, including The Ekphrastic Review, Scrittura, Catness, MuddyUm, Interstitial, Dead or Alive, and Contemplate., and appeared in a few anthologies, including Wouldn't You Rather Be Laughing and I Am From. A high point in his career was reading at the Knitting Factory, NYC, back when it was found on Houston St. He plays accordion. He has five cats. Ursula is the favorite of his cats. Here's where you can get the book.