In partnership with the University of New England’s Maine Women Writers Collection (MWWC), the University of Maine at Augusta (UMA) will bring together a distinguished panel of professors to discuss three mid-20th century Maine women writers during this period in history and the significance of their work.
Event Details: Mid-Century Maine Women Writers Panel Nov. 6, 5 p.m. via webinar
Contact Cathleen Miller, curator, Maine Women Writers Collection, 207-221-4334 or visit Maine Women Writers Collection
This event is open to the public, however, an RSVP is required.
Participating in the panel will be Ellen Taylor, professor of English (UMA); Lisa Botshon, professor of English (UMA); and Joseph Conforti, distinguished professor emeritus (USM). Jennifer S. Tuttle, professor of English at UNE and the director of the MWWC, will facilitate the panel discussion. Program note: Susan Tomlinson, associate professor of English (UMass Boston) was originally scheduled to participate and discuss writer Ruth Moore, but she is unexpectedly unable to attend.
The three writers from the MWWC archives who will be highlighted in this program are Elizabeth Coatsworth, Katharine Butler Hathaway, and Mary Ellen Chase.
Coatsworth, who called Chimney Farm in Damariscotta her home for most of her adult life, was a best-selling children’s book writer, poet, novelist, and essayist on rural Maine living. Very popular during her lifetime, she won the Newbery award for her children’s book The Cat Who Went to Heaven (1930) and wrote over ninety books between 1910 and 1976. Taylor will discuss her MWWC archival findings as they relate to Coatsworth’s travels in the Far East and their influence in writing her celebrated children’s book.
Botshon will give a talk entitled “Katharine Butler Hathaway: The Queer Modernism of The Little Locksmith.” The first excerpt of Katharine Butler Hathaway’s enduring 1943 memoir The Little Locksmith was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1942. The account of the ways in which this diminutive woman, who had been indelibly marked by spinal tuberculosis as a child, was able to liberate herself from conservative ideas about female autonomy, sexuality, and art through the purchase of a house in Castine, Maine, resonated with readers worldwide. This talk will consider how her memoir demonstrates that radical modernist ideas can be created in the rural reaches of Maine through, in part, building upon earlier iterations of queer New England women’s culture.
Conforti will discuss Mary Ellen Chase, who was born and raised in Maine. The author of over thirty books, she wrote a great deal of Maine-based fiction, including the bestselling novel Windswept (1941). In a 1936 interview in the Portland Sunday Telegram, Chase declared that she wrote “largely because I want to acquaint others with the background of Maine life, with the splendid character of Maine people, and with the unsurpassed loveliness of Maine fields, shores, and sea.”
This event is part of University of Maine at Augusta’s bicentennial events exploring the artists, writers, and innovators who shaped and chronicled Maine’s mid-century cultural evolution. Maine’s Mid-Century Moment has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
For more information about National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor* please visit: http://www.neh.gov/
*Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in these programs, resources, and related websites, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.