Author of “The Beans of Egypt, Maine”, “Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts”, “Merry Men”, “Snow Man”, and “The School on Heart’s Content Road”
Do you ever feel amazed when people tell it’s not as bad here as in other countries? You want to ask: Where have they been? Certainly not in Maine.
Carolyn Chute’s most famous book is The Beans of Egypt, Maine. Its popularity was probably boosted at least a little bit by Kurt Cobain (the dead guy from Nirvana) naming it as his favorite book. Beans was the first book Chute ever published, and it’s the only one I have read. I would guess that it may less political than the others, at least one of which draws heavily from her experiences as the leader of an underground militia, but I’m not certain. The political slant, or rather, apolitical considering her “No-Wing” movement, is likely tertiary in most of her settings, all of them far more influenced by Chute spending her whole life surrounded by rural/small-town poverty.
Chute dropped out of high school, 16 and pregnant. She eventually completed her courses at night school, around age thirty, and went on to get a degree at the University of Southern Maine. In the long years before she would become a published author, she toiled in waitressing, factory work at a chicken processing plant, floor scrubbing at a hospital, assembly lining at a shoe factory, potato-picking, tutoring, canvassing, social working, and the driving of school buses. After finishing off her high school diploma, she got her first writing job doing part-time correspondence with a small newspaper in Portland. She published Beans in 1985, the same year that she was invited into the dusty world of academia to teach creative writing. Not too shabby for a drop-out.
From there, she neither shuffled through various regional universities nor hunkered down with distant hopes of tenure. Instead, she became involved with the New England Literature Program (NELP). Though the program is founded and funded by the University of Michigan, the seven-week course is hosted at a summer camp in Maine. There the Michigan undergrads immerse themselves in writing and peer-instruction along with canoeing, camping, sketching, and staring off into the wild blue yonder. Phones, computers, cameras, and all forms of recorded music are forbidden. The students read a fuckton of Transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau, etc.) along with stuff from other quintessential New England writers, like Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and of course, Carolyn Chute.
Nerd world wouldn’t prove strong enough to turn Chute into some cozy cosmopolitan. To this day (July 2025) that weird woman still lives and hunts out in isolated, highly unemployed, logging country of rural Maine with her illiterate handyman husband, her arsenal and small cannon, and a pack of dogs. Her house has no phone, fax, or computer, and she opts for an outhouse in place of indoor plumbing.
[The gun enthusiasm] keeps away the same old tired bohemian intelligentsia types… Up here, the disenfranchised are generally the people with guns.
So how does a lady of letters end up the leader of a militia? A non-partisan, pro-gun, anti-big business militia. AKA the Second Maine Militia, AKA the Wicked Good Militia. Beyond the general hick reasons for organizing a militia (some of them are like social clubs) Chute describes herself as a populist of the lets-band-together variety, believing not in Left vs. Right but Down vs. Up, Local vs. Corporate.
She leads her militia meetings with casual, off-the-cuff speeches that go from bitching about how cheap and breakable common household products have become to quoting Milton Friedman on ethics (or lack of) in corporations. The militia’s official “first document” lists off their objectives:
- Extending the rights of free speech and assembly to work sites and retail establishments.
- Banning lobbyists from the political process.
- Banning paid political ads in favor of requiring media to devote air time to all candidates.
- Limiting campaign contributions to $100 per citizen.
- Limiting the number of newspapers and magazines that can be owned by any single person or entity to one.
- A big rant against a Supreme Court case from 1886 (Santa Clara), that ruled corporations could be granted the same rights that citizens have, like free speech protections.
[Corporations] now dominate the public and private life of our society, defining the economic, cultural, and political agenda for humans and all other living things.
Chute herself often describes her fictions as “political”, though it wouldn’t be the first or tenth term I’d use to describe what I’ve read of hers. Probably a sign of the times. The ideals of her militia seem so simple, so 2005, a time when private lives were inherently more private. Not like now, when “Resist” is a cheap tattoo you get on your wrist and “dissident whatever” is the social scene you get drunk with. The very word “militia” contains all sorts of sordid implications depending on the stances of its listener.
But Chute, whether aware of these changes of the brave new world or not, doesn’t have to care about the trends of politics. Our era’s silly terms, already growing stale, “MAGA” and “woke” are likely no more than babble to someone like her, someone so completely Not Online. It’s likely for the best. Chute once told an interviewer from the New York Times that her aversion to keeping a phone in her house is that she wouldn’t get anything done. A self admitted rambler, she worried she’d spend all hours gabbing away with anyone who called. “Know Thyself” is one of the great and timeless maxims for good reason, and Chute’s sharp sense-of-self comes through in her writing. Her characters may not be optimistic, but they aren’t fatalists either. They’ve been given shitty lemons, but they do their best to make a palatable lemonade.
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