Organic Matter

by E.N. Couturier

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.

Genres: Nonfiction

174 pages, Paperback

Published June 24, 2025

Reviews

[Regan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this memoir: soft, slow, diaristic, grounded. And didn't expect to feel so moved by the author's meditations on faith. I will be keeping my eye on Autofocus Books!

"I don't know what to say about myself. My dimensions have already disappeared because I am so tired and focused on the immediate. All these ideas about my inner life are coming up short, which I knew they would, and which I wanted to be wise enough not to worry about."

"It seems shameful to strive to be different than you are, like you're condemning others by changing yourself. Such is Midwestern psychology."

"I waited on the steps for him this morning and got nervous, a first day of school anxiety. The changes to the schedule reminded me that this season is going to end and things will have to be different again (and again and again!). I keep trying to remember this when I'm exhausted or miserable–how much I'll miss it one day, how it'll look so much better when it becomes a memory."

"While harvesting kale alone at sunrise, I felt happier than I ever had in my life.

It came out of nowhere, pushing up to my sternum; I wasn't afraid of it leaving, but I wondered what would make it go. I stood there watching the pink sky rip itself into orange, my legs already wet with cold dew, and observed the feeling.

I rarely experience active happiness or any other extreme, just this general level of being that drifts in one direction or the other. No switch has flipped. Still, there are two worlds now, the one I live in and the one I think about. Maybe the first one is getting stronger."

"Funny also how the car itself makes me feel like someone different, like the type of person who would have an old pea-green sedan, whatever that means. There are so many people to be and so many of them take shape around the boundaries of physical things, this car or that haircut."

[nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Earnest and hilarious! Satiates those ‘what ifs’ of a path in life that i was not brave enough to take.

[Katie Boord · Rating 5 out of 5]

E. N. Couturier writes about everyday life with rare honesty. There were parts of this book that felt ripped from my own brain. I had an eerily similar experience working with the land right out of college, feeling lost, trying desperately to feel connected to anything and anyone. Couturier’s attention to detail and almost painful self-awareness puts it all in a new light that I’m not sure anyone else can do. She makes farming seem like a religious experience, and maybe it is, in a way.

[indie:3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great little book that reads a lot like a diary entry or a long voice message from an old friend. Recommended.

[Kira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, quiet little book. So glad I read it!