Writing Women and Maine: A Conversation with Caitlin Shetterly and Alice Elliot Dark

Description

Caitlin Shetterly’s powerful and beautifully written debut novel Pete and Alice in Maine intimately explores a fractured marriage and the struggles of modern parenthood, set against the backdrop of the chaotic spring of 2020. Reeling from a painful betrayal in her marriage as the Covid pandemic takes hold in New York City, Alice packs up her family and flees to their vacation home in Maine. She hopes to find sanctuary—from the uncertainties of the exploding pandemic and her faltering marriage.

Putting distance between herself and the stresses and troubles of the city, Alice begins to feel safe and relieved. But the locals are far from friendly. Trapped and forced into quarantine by hostile neighbors, Alice sees the imprisoning structure of her life in his new predicament. Stripped down to the bare essentials of survival and tending to the needs of her two children, she can no longer ignore all the ways in which she feels limited and lost—lost in the big city, lost as a wife, lost as a mother, lost as a daughter and lost as a person. As the world shifts around her and the balance in her marriage tilts, Alice and her husband, Pete, are left to consider if what keeps their family safe is the same thing as what keeps their family together.

Caitlin Shetterly is a Maine-based writer and theatre director whose works center on themes of the environment, food, America, family life, and motherhood. Her books include Pete and Alice in Maine (2023, Harper Collins); Modified: GMOs and the Threat to Our Food, Our Land, Our Future (2016); Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke, Finding Home[1] (2011); and the bestselling Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce (2001). In 2003, Shetterly founded the Winter Harbor Theatre Company. She was Artistic Director until the company's closure in 2011. Shetterly is the Editor-in-Chief of Frenchly.us, a French culture and lifestyle publication.

 Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In the Gloaming and Naked to the Waist.  Her work has appeared in, among others, The New Yorker, Harper's, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards, and has been translated into many languages. "In the Gloaming," a story, was chosen by John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of The Century and was made into films by HBO and Trinity Playhouse. Her non-fiction reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many anthologies. She is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Associate Professor at Rutgers-Newark in the English department and the MFA program.