Listen to one of two clips. (.mov files, one is 5 MB, the other is 21 MB)

Project: Article about Carolyn Chute and the Second Maine/"Wicked Good" Militia

Circa: September 2001

Background: With some projects, I sort of marvel at what I got out of them even though I didn't finish them. When I found out that Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine had a militia of sorts, I wanted to find out more. Much to my surprise, Carolyn responded to my first letter to her -- it arrived September 10, 2001 -- and welcomed me to an upcoming militia meeting. I persuaded James, who's game for just about anything, and Jen, who's game for anything that will get her out of a bad job, to drive up there with me.

Sordid details: It was not what I expected -- the left-wing and right-wing elements of the militia don't really show up for the same meetings, which was what had interested me-- but it was still a hell of a trip. It's been a while now, and I have a hard time summoning exactly what it was about the experience that struck me so... I recall that Carolyn, who was considering a mock-run for governor on a secessionist platform (which would include New Hampshire and Vermont), was fond of spitting venom about the power of "mammon"... remember grizzled lefties from as far away as Boston sitting in the rockers and talking about the causes of terrorism... an arrogant twenty-five-year-old organizer from Bangor monopolizing the discussion... an anecdote about a protest where the city of Augusta demanded that Carolyn and her friends move to another location, and Carolyn remarking that if the police could have, they would have put them "in the (capitol) museum, with the bayahs (bears)..." militia members trying to feel out my politics -- and whether I was a narc -- as I shoved a tape recorder in their faces... guns in the corner and hundreds of pictures of loved people and dogs all over the walls... one of the resident Scottish terriers angrily wetting on the braided rug after being cooped up away from the guests all day.
     I also remember spending a long time talking to Carolyn's husband, a remarkable man named Michael. Michael is the keeper of the town cemetary. He has a chest-length beard and a deep Maine accent, and is I believe about ten years Carolyn's junior. Like Carolyn, he is passionate about the reduction of "corp'rit powah" and the increase of governmental social supports. Health care was a particular grievance; he had lost a child when a hospital refused admittance to his pregnant ex-wife. While passion takes one a long way, the depth of his understanding of these issues might be surprising to some, in light of the fact that Michael doesn't know how to read.
     That an author would marry an illiterate has baffled series of interviewers of the sort who tend to wallow in the romance of letters and words. What you need to understand about Carolyn, though, is that her work -- from the militia newsletter she xeroxes en masse even when her funds are low enough to worry her about keeping her home, to her the several-hundred-page books she writes about hardscrabble Maine life -- comes from her love of and fascination with people, impulses which put her in conflict with the usual word-loving elitism of the literary world. (If you inquire about her history, you learn that her training was in sociology, not literature. Even that is probably not as not as causative of her writing as the compass in her heart; a sense of alienation from school because it is so much less nurturing than the home, comes up repeatedly in her interviews and writing.) Her Snow Man, about a militia member with a swastika tattoo who murders a senator and then shacks up with his wife and daughter, garnered a number of angry and baffled reviews from people who thought she approved of Nazism.
     Frankly, I feel like nobody should have been surprised that she took off in a less-"acceptable" direction after The Beans... most literati may have thrilled to another book about incest, but if you were reading more closely than that, you know that populism was more the point of The Beans than incest. But that's not my point, either: Carolyn Chute loves people, good people, outside people, ordinary extraordinary people. And the extraordinary thing for me was getting to spend time in the presence of such a ferocious love.

Why was it left unfinished?:  I don't know when I'm going to learn to stop confusing the impulse to find out more (or, for that matter, my fascination with a celebrity) with the impulse to write an article. I don't know what the hell I wanted to say about the Second Maine Militia, aside from "this is cool!" On top of it all, it was just after September 11th and I was still trying to sort out what I thought was the best activist path to take in its wake. I made a disorganized pitch to This American Life, and never heard anything back.

What I learned: Guns are really freakin' loud.

Prognosis: Worst-case scenario: The interview moulders in my archives. Middle-case scenario: perhaps at some point if I'm laid up in bed sick for a long time, I will put the interviews up on IMC. Best-case scenario: this could still turn into something.
     The clips above, I guess, are "something," though it's a limited and rough thing. They were chosen for their ability to convey some of the major themes I heard from Carolyn at her house and later at an anarchist bookfair at Hampshire. They're roughly edited, more because HyperEngine was giving me trouble than anything else. I took out some pauses and one or two times when I said something really stupid. This was not an attempt to make Carolyn look stupider (or more "folksy") than me; I'm just direly embarassed about some of the things I do to try to bring people out while I'm interviewing them. It sounds like I'm agreeing with her in a number of places, but on her analysis of feminism, in particular, I really don't. She makes some assumptions about the former state of American family life which I know to be false. I wish I'd confronted her about it, because the interview might be more interesting if I had, but I have a hard time turning around the flow of an interview if -- ok, let's face it -- I like the person I'm interviewing. And I'm out to get a point of view rather than facts. It's easy to be a dick to PR flacks or government functionaries; I'm generally out to wrestle a fact or two from their jaws. With Carolyn, I was just trying to bring her line of reasoning into the light. I'd like to think it's an important one. I'd like to think it could tell us about our fellow citizens.