On Tuesday, September 1 at 7 pm, please join MWPA and PRINT: A Bookstore in welcoming Kerri Arsenault to launch her debut nonfiction book, MIll Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Arsenault will be joined in conversation by writer Kate Christensen, who writes, “This book is full of love and sadness. It’s also breathtakingly well-researched, wide-ranging, cogently angry, brilliantly written, harrowing, heartbreaking, urgent, and timely. Everyone should read it. I can’t forget it.” Of Mill Town, Arsenault writes, “I grew up in the rural town of Mexico, Maine, where for over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that provided jobs for most residents, including three generations of my family. I had a happy childhood, but years after I moved away, I realized the price I paid for that childhood. The price we all paid. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town’s economic, physical, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe, earning the area the nickname ‘Cancer Valley.’”
To RSVP and receive the Zoom link for this online conversation and to order a copy of Mill Town, please visit PRINT: A Bookstore.
Kerri Arsenault is a book critic, book editor at Orion magazine, and a contributing editor at The Literary Hub. I am also a mentor for PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program, graduated with an MFA from the New School, and studied in the Master Programme in communication for development at Malmö University, Sweden. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, The Literary Hub, Air Mail, Freeman’s, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Orion.
Kate Christensen has published seven novels, including The Great Man, which won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, and The Last Cruise, published in paperback from Vintage Anchor in June 2019. She has also published two food-centric memoirs, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, which won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Her shorter pieces appear in places like Tin House, the Baffler, Down East, Portland Magazine, Vogue, Elle, Bookforum, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Food and Wine, as well as a lot of anthologies, most recently Why I Like This Story, edited by Jackson Bryer, and The Bitch is Back, edited by Cathi Hanauer. She lives in Portland, Maine and the White Mountains of New Hampshire with her husband and their two dogs, and she is currently working on a new novel, working title The Infernal World.