Augusten Burroughs (left) and Tegan Quin (right) at HousingWorks Bookstore in SoHo.

WHAT HAPPENS when you mix different types of artists together, throw them on a stage, and sell tickets? No one was quite sure until last Thursday evening when HousingWorks, a cozy charity bookstore in SoHo, decided to try just that.

Sponsored by the online edition of Spin, the event was designed to illustrate the interplay between literature and music—simply put, how music inspires writers and writing inspire musicians. Had the personalities on the lineup not blended into such excellent on-stage, collaborative chemistry, it could have easily been another over-conceptualized, pseudo-creative gimmick. But with the outsize characters that shared the platform—New York memoirist Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors) and Canadian singer-songwriter Tegan Quin (Tegan & Sara)—the format not only took flight, but explored some obscure crannies of the age-old conversations about life and art.

Stephen Christian of Anberlin reads from The Orphaned Anything’s (click to enlarge).

Colin Frangicetto, guitarist for indie post-hardcore band Circa Survive, jutted more awkwardly from the lineup; his combination of poetry (which included Leonard Cohen lyrics read by a friend) and cover songs had difficulty escaping an overall sense of disjointedness. Had Stephen Christian had both time slots, he could likely have fleshed out the deep thematic connections between his novel and Anberlin’s lyrics—not to mention both read and sung himself, which would have nicely encapsulated the evening’s vision.

But while the expectant audience did their best to enjoy the guests—a better effort than I’ve witnessed in a good while—Augusten Burroughs was clearly the magnetic force that packed the small, two-story bookstore. And thanks to endearing motor-mouth Tegan Quin’s penetrating questions, the audience got more of an intimate living-room conversation than a fiction reading.

Augusten Burroughs reads from his latest memoir, entitled A Wolf at the Table (click to enlarge).

They took the stage together, and, after some deliberation on who would “go first,” he began. His selection from A Wolf at the Table involved a year of his life from ages seven to eight, a period during which he stuffed some of his father’s old clothing to create a substitute he could hug and otherwise pretend to love. Burroughs read in an affected, oddly-enunciated cadence, and his story careened between chilling and awkwardly humorous, like something from a Noah Baumbach film—innocent in context, horrifying in implication. It was spellbinding and, when it had ended, felt cruelly brief. But with its conclusion came a sense of relief, as if we had stopped short of plumbing the dark story’s much more tragic, murky depths.

It seems, though, that becoming a critic-approved, cult-followed writer and recovering from near-fatal alcoholism has given Burroughs a lot to be cheerful about. His shadowy prose did not so much as threaten to dampen the evening’s spirits—spirits that were propped and carried by the petite, vivacious Tegan Quin.

Tegan Quin of Tegan & Sara. (click to enlarge).

From there, it was difficult to tell if her rapid-fire dialogue with Burroughs was inspired by anxiety or absolute comfort onstage. It took an almost stand-up quality, though her perfectly timed quips were often not intended to be a joke (“Can I watch?” she asked, as Burroughs prepared to read. “Or do I need to, kind of, you know, look the other way?”) Burroughs’ input on her music was exactly like her blabbering interest in his writing—as heartfelt as it was artless. “I love how you did that with you voice. That quivery thing,” he mused as she finished a song. Quin deadpanned: “Oh that? That’s fear.”

Burroughs never took his second turn. The rest of the night was an extended conversation—interspersed with Quin’s hushed songs—that contextualized both author and songwriter as artists. In between their jokes and biographical sketches, the two clung to a theme of childhood dysfunction: him, a bright but abused child, her an unsupervised, tomboyish identical twin. In “His Love,” Quin asked, “Augusten, are you just like me? Does your hurt fade as you write out your history?” Later, she mentioned the fact that her artistry is self-absorbed (“I can’t imagine not singing about myself. I’m narcissist.”) Happy as they seem to be, it becomes clear that Burroughs and Quin have transcended their dysfunction to the precise extent they desire—somewhat, but not too much. For to be “normal,” to be well-adjusted, would remove the premise for their creativity altogether. (As U2 puts it: “Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief/All kill their inspiration and sing about the grief.”)

From Stephen Christian’s opening selection to the engrossing, unusual conversation between Burroughs and Quin, we got a crystal clear of who these artist people are, anyway. It’s difficult to imagine anyone in the white-collar, high-stress professional world knowing their own psyche so intimately, and coming so completely to terms with themselves that they can openly discuss their feelings before an audience. In the artist world, dysfunction is a resume enhancement—or at least the ability to talk about it. While the Jack Donaghys of the world suppress their unhappy childhoods and perfect their facades, artists are the world’s open books. The ones who inflict upon themselves enough perpetual self-examination to make up for the masses who never give their own souls an undivided thought.

Chapter two of Christian’s The Orphaned Anything’s is beautifully, aptly entitled: “Overanalyzing is the wine in which dreamers are drunk.” Watching them read, play, and converse, there’s no doubt he’s right. And though their self-absorption sadly sometimes prevents them from escaping the histories they lead us in weeping over, we wouldn’t be completely human without them.