The reading will feature Portland fiction writer and bass player for Dirty Projectors, Nat Baldwin, and acclaimed fiction writer and UMass Amherst professor, Noy Holland. The reading will take place on Friday, April 14 at 7 p.m. at 58 Main in downtown Bangor, and is free and open to the public.

The stories in Noy Holland’s most recent collection, “I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like: New and Selected Stories” (Counterpoint Press 2017), are “enigmatic, revealing themselves to the reader at unexpected times, sometimes long after the last word has been read,” according to NPR. “Holland's writing is by turns hallucinatory, bizarre, and maddening in the best possible way.”

The collection follows the publication of her critically acclaimed novel “Bird” and includes forty-four short stories and micro-fictions, fourteen from her previous collections and thirty never-before-published in book form.

“For those of us who haven’t heard of Holland before,” writes The New York Times, “these new and selected stories testify to the fact that there are still fine short story writers out there [...] Holland’s language is challenging, elliptical, bristling with sensation and resounding with the interior lives of complicated, recognizable people.”

Noy Holland is the author of four story collections “Swim for the Little One First,” “What Begins with Bird,” “The Spectacle of the Body” and “I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like: New and Selected Stories.” Her novel “Bird” was released in 2016. She teaches writing in the graduate program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

“Like his music, [Nat Baldwin’s] stories present a complicated world populated by conflicted people,” writes American Short Fiction. In addition to playing bass for Dirty Projectors and recording half a dozen solo records, Baldwin is also a fiction writer, publishing stories in PANK, Timber, Alice Blue and Sleepingfish, among other journals.

In his debut novel “The Red Barn” (Calamari Press 2017), Baldwin’s prose takes its cue from his musical sensibilities. According to Baldwin, the tone of “The Red Barn” is “established by the clipped, rhythmically repetitive sentences and the disorienting effect of the shifting narrators. [...] a core idea of the piece was to tell the same stories from multiple perspectives to show the psychological chaos borne through forced entrapment.”

About “The Red Barn,” novelist and National Poetry Series finalist Claire Donato writes: “Think: ambient horror, which describes reality. I admire how sense arises from sound in Nat’s work, and how this sense acts as both a noun (an intuitive awareness) and a verb (to perceive). In these stories, the abyss shines with dark light.” Nat Baldwin is a writer and musician living in Portland.

The Norumbega Collective is a group of poets, writers, teachers, and supporters of the literary arts in Bangor. Building on the connections of its members, readers have come from as far as Chicago and as close as Bangor. The collective was founded to promote the literary arts in Bangor and beyond.