Carolyn Chute

Carolyn Chute (born Carolyn Penny; June 14, 1947) is an American writer and populist political activist who is strongly identified with the culture of poor, rural western Maine. Rod Dreher, writing in The American Conservative, has referred to Chute as "a Maine novelist and gun enthusiast who, along with her husband, lives an aggressively unorthodox life in the Yankee backwoods." She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award.

Life and work
Chute's first, and best known, novel, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, was published in 1985 and made into a 1994 film of the same name, which was directed by Jennifer Warren. Chute's next two books, Letourneau's Used Auto Parts (1988) and Merry Men (1994), are also set in the town of Egypt, Maine, as are the books in the Heart's Content series (The School on Heart's Content Road [2008], Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves [2014], and The Recipe for Revolution [2020]).

Her 1999 novel Snow Man deals with the underground militia movement, something that Chute has devoted more of her time to in recent years. She was the leader of a group that was known as the Second Maine Militia and is a fierce defender of the Second Amendment, keeping an AK-47 and a small cannon at her home in Maine. Chute also speaks out publicly about class issues in the US and publishes "The Fringe," a monthly collection of in-depth political journalism, short stories, and intellectual commentary on current events. She once ran a satiric campaign for governor of Maine.

In 2008, she published The School on Heart's Content Road, which deals with a polygamist compound in Maine under scrutiny after an article on them goes national. The project was originally a novel of more than 2,000 pages that was broken up into a projected five-part cycle. This was followed up by Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves (2014) and The Recipe for Revolution (2020).

Her jobs have included waitress, chicken factory worker, hospital floor scrubber, shoe factory worker, potato farm worker, tutor, canvasser, teacher, social worker, and school bus driver, 1970s-1980s; part-time suburban correspondent, Portland Evening Express, Portland, Maine, 1976–81; instructor in creative writing, University of Southern Maine, Portland, 1985.

Chute is closely associated with the New England Literature Program, an alternative education program run by the University of Michigan's English department during the university's spring term. NELP students transcribed her 2008 novel The School on Heart's Content Road into an electronic format.

Chute was born in 1947 in Portland, Maine. She now lives in Parsonsfield, Maine, near the New Hampshire border, in a home with no telephone, no computer, and no fax machine, and an outhouse in lieu of a working bathroom. She is married to Michael Chute, a local handyman who never learned to read. She has a daughter from a previous marriage, Joannah; three grandchildren; and three dogs.

Use of politics in fiction
Chute's Recipe for Revolution might be her most "political novel." Her hero, Guillaume (“Gordon”) St. Onge, is a big, imposing man overburdened by compassion. Indeed, this may be his tragic flaw, in a book constructed in some respects like a Greek tragedy. His compassion fills him with rage and despair as a young man at the injustices of American society and the ever tightening grip of a corporate state on its citizens, a view gleaned from his incessant reading of American history and politics. It also leads him, upon inheriting his family place in rural Maine and some valuable stocks, to found a community called simply “the Settlement,” which he fills with everyone from poor Maine French Acadian relatives to cousins of his Passamaquoddy first wife to orphans of the drug wars. And to the embrace of many of the women among them, who become his “wives,” birth numerous children by him, and somehow live together in what has become a bustling, self-sufficient, happy rural enclave.

By the time of the story, some of these children have grown to teenagers. Led by precocious fifteen year old neighbor Bri, infatuated with Gordon, and author of the eponymous Recipe for Revolution, the teenagers, mostly the girls, form the True Maine Militia and playfully act out Gordon’s animus against the corporate lobbyists who dominate our politics. But Bri also attracts the attention of lefty anti-corporate activists from Boston, who see in Gordon a link to working class Americans. He reluctantly agrees to their efforts to feature him in rallies and seminars around the Northeast. But they insist he drop his ties to militias, which began with an old friendship with a Vietnam vet and neighbor and have continued out of his conviction that Americans have to be united against the common corporate foe.

The rallies sometimes prove riotous, as Gordon is a powerful and passionate speaker. And Gordon and his young followers continue to insist on the right of a free people to self-defense. But the new attention to “the Prophet” (soon to be “the mad Prophet”) on the part of the media, depicted with deep revulsion, leads to growing attention on the part of shadowy authorities; and some militarized agency or agencies of the government lay virtual siege to the Settlement, confirming Gordon’s view of the character of the American State and exposing what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls the “permanent state of exception” in which we all live.

Awards
First prize for fiction, Green Mountain Workshop, Johnson, Vermont, 1977.

She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Thornton Wilder Fellowship.