A conversation with Maggie O’Brien and Bernie Rhie to celebrate and discuss the launch of Two Birds One Stone, O’Brien’s debut memoir that breaks industry convention and questions the fabric of reality. 

Carrying on a 19th-century tradition of serializing literature, Two Birds One Stone will be published as twelve slim volumes over the course of one year. As both book artist and author, O’Brien designed and hand-bound a cover to hold all twelve sections, each of which will be released monthly from September 2026 to August 2027 by Planetarium Press. 

This memoir, written in lyric essay, documents a series of possessions: a brain tumor, the killing of a namesake bird, Lyme disease, environmental sensitivities, ruminations, obsessions, concussions, dreams, visions, queer love, quantum physics, Virginia Woolf, and a violent visitation by a very real ghost. Together these vignettes coalesce a reality where there is no division between the body and mind, the spiritual and material — it is only perception that insists on separateness. Whether the ghosts are in our house or in our heads — in Two Birds One Stone, O’Brien asks us to consider: what if art is an experiment to study the divine?

About the Author

Maggie O’Brien is a writer, artist, and educator based in North Adams, MA. Her work has been recognized or otherwise appeared in the Indiana Review, American Short Fiction, Leviathan Magazine, and others. Two Birds One Stone is her debut book-length publication.

Bernie Rhie leads the Williamstown Zen Group and is Associate Professor of English and Faculty Affiliate in Religion at Williams College.