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Cathie Pelletier is a writer with many roots, but the deepest ones always bring her back home. The youngest of six children, she was born in Allagash in the house her dad built and still lives in. Her playground was the banks of the river that runs through the tiny northern Maine town that even today is home to only 275 people.
On sheets of paper cut from a giant roll her father brought home from a local paper mill he worked in briefly, Pelletier wrote Nancy Drew-like mysteries and made them into books with titles like Mystery of the Potato House. When Kennedy was assassinated, she began filling that paper with descriptions of John-John’s salute and Jackie’s veil, certain that no one was preserving it, this first time our country went to a funeral together. She was 11.
Since her early beginnings as a writer, Pelletier has never strayed from her belief in the power of words: as novelist, as songwriter, as literary agent for Tanya Tucker and Larry Gatlin, among others. The Washington Post has called her “an ambitious, fearless novelist,” drawing praise from the likes of writers like Stephen King, Fannie Flagg, Richard Russo, Jane Smiley, and Wally Lamb. Her most recent novel, Running the Bulls, received the 2006 Paterson Prize for Fiction, won the previous year by John Updike and Philip Roth.
Although she has traveled all over the world and lived in many places, from Tennessee to Ontario, her heart continues to be in the County. Over a decade ago, she was the driving force behind a writers’ conference at the University of Maine in Presque Isle that brought in nationally known writers from all over the country. Recently she was the university’s first writer-in-residence, again opening up the world of writing to students and the community. Her latest local project is raising money to make a “small, scary” movie she has written. It’s the only way, she says, people will see northern Maine as a viable location for filmmaking.
She’s written the screenplay for her first novel, The Funeral Makers, which Doug Liman (Bourne Identity, Jumper) will begin filming this fall if everything comes together as planned. A major Hollywood actor is interested in funding one of her original screenplays. Although two of her novels, Dancing at the Harvest Moon and Candles on Bay Street, both written under the pseudonym K. C. McKinnon, were made into movies, she did not write those scripts.
As she completes the final book in her Mattagash series—what she claims is her last novel—and a biography she wrote with renowned Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw, Pelletier stands on the brink of launching a new career as a screenwriter. She may just have to pull out the other seven screenplays waiting in the drawer.
What was the catalyst for your becoming a writer?
Well, I’m pretty sure that if Mr. Woodruff hadn’t stopped in my dooryard and asked for directions—it was potato harvest, 1964—I probably wouldn’t have skipped from the fifth grade to the seventh. He was the new principal. Whatever I said impressed him. He changed my life, that short little man who looked like the Wizard of Oz with snow white hair and a lot of dandruff on the shoulders of his suit.
How did that make you a writer?
I left my baseball-playing, recess-going friends and entered the world of girls wearing bras and straight skirts and makeup. Nobody ever said a word about adjusting. We didn’t have that kind of social equipment in place back then. I was suddenly so isolated and I never quite fit in again. I think that’s what turned me into a novelist. If you’re not fitting in your own skin, you come out of yourself and
look around.
You not only looked around, you’ve been around.
I went to the university at Fort Kent when I was 16, hitchhiked across the country when I was 17. And let me say, I was about as prepared for hitchhiking as a nun. I’ve been fortunate to travel all over the world. I needed to get out of here, but now I’m ready to come home. Some people leave a small, isolated area and never want to come back. I found I was just the
opposite.
Richard Russo has said that no writer “walks the knife edge of hilarity and heartbreak more confidently than [you do].” Where does that come from?
It’s the Celtic part of my ancestry and this town. Nobody does the black humor like the Irish. And so I grew up in a town of very, very funny people with terrific storytelling. I grew up knowing that good humor must have a sad underbelly. If it doesn’t, it’s just a slip on the banana peel; it’s slapstick. I want to have a deeper relationship with my characters.
Speaking of your characters, you’ve said that the novel you’ve just completed is your last. Really?
Well, I think so. [Poet] Wesley McNair accuses me of saying this every time I write a novel and he may be right, but my thoughts are really in screenplays now. I think I’ve mined my emotional past for the last time. This will be my eighth novel under my own name. I’m so obsessed with films now.
What’s the difference for you?
A novelist is everything that’s in a film—the director, the casting director, director of photography. We design the set. We do it with words, describe what the house looks like, the room, the town. We choose the actors. We tell them how to talk. We dress them. The novelist does everything the film does. We do it all by ourselves, on paper, quietly. And we take on the pain and the heartbreak and the challenges of every scene. But now as a screenwriter, I write above the pain. Someone else will figure out how to play it.
You mentioned “mining your emotional past” as part of your novel writing process. How grounded are your fictional Mattagash characters in your Allagash reality?
Much as people may have thought so, they aren’t. Other than I’m an Allagasher with an Allagasher sensibility. My characters have the same characteristics I have. It’s what I can deliver as a writer. I’ve never gone in with a character in my mind. I sit down and this magical thing happens. Those people come from somewhere off the page. I have no knowledge of them. I think they would be insulted if they thought I got their lives from someone else’s life just as you and I would be.
What prompted you to return to Mattagash for another novel?
It was the year of the big flood when the bridges went out. I was in Nashville. It was about 3 a.m. and all of a sudden there’s a one-way bridge on TV. It’s wavering like that aluminum foil inside a gum wrapper and then it just breaks and goes. I wondered who the hell filmed that! The words came up on the screen: filmed by Louis Pelletier III, newshound, Allagash, Maine. It was my nephew. And it started me thinking about one-way bridges and their social implications, and what happens if one day it doesn’t work out so politely and enemies hit each end of the bridge at the same time.
You’re known as a writer who is very generous of spirit.
I hope that’s true. I don’t think about it. What I do think about is how generous of spirit [novelist] Lee Smith was to me. She was the first real writer I’d met, someone who had written a lot of books. She read a really bad short story I’d written and told me to write a novel, and when I wrote The Funeral Makers, I called her and she read it and then told me to send it to her agent. That’s how I got my agent. When I thanked her, she said, “Don’t thank me. Pass it on.” I hope that’s what I’m doing, passing it on.n
On sheets of paper cut from a giant roll her father brought home from a local paper mill he worked in briefly, Pelletier wrote Nancy Drew-like mysteries and made them into books with titles like Mystery of the Potato House. When Kennedy was assassinated, she began filling that paper with descriptions of John-John’s salute and Jackie’s veil, certain that no one was preserving it, this first time our country went to a funeral together. She was 11.
Since her early beginnings as a writer, Pelletier has never strayed from her belief in the power of words: as novelist, as songwriter, as literary agent for Tanya Tucker and Larry Gatlin, among others. The Washington Post has called her “an ambitious, fearless novelist,” drawing praise from the likes of writers like Stephen King, Fannie Flagg, Richard Russo, Jane Smiley, and Wally Lamb. Her most recent novel, Running the Bulls, received the 2006 Paterson Prize for Fiction, won the previous year by John Updike and Philip Roth.
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Although she has traveled all over the world and lived in many places, from Tennessee to Ontario, her heart continues to be in the County. Over a decade ago, she was the driving force behind a writers’ conference at the University of Maine in Presque Isle that brought in nationally known writers from all over the country. Recently she was the university’s first writer-in-residence, again opening up the world of writing to students and the community. Her latest local project is raising money to make a “small, scary” movie she has written. It’s the only way, she says, people will see northern Maine as a viable location for filmmaking.
She’s written the screenplay for her first novel, The Funeral Makers, which Doug Liman (Bourne Identity, Jumper) will begin filming this fall if everything comes together as planned. A major Hollywood actor is interested in funding one of her original screenplays. Although two of her novels, Dancing at the Harvest Moon and Candles on Bay Street, both written under the pseudonym K. C. McKinnon, were made into movies, she did not write those scripts.
As she completes the final book in her Mattagash series—what she claims is her last novel—and a biography she wrote with renowned Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw, Pelletier stands on the brink of launching a new career as a screenwriter. She may just have to pull out the other seven screenplays waiting in the drawer.
What was the catalyst for your becoming a writer?
Well, I’m pretty sure that if Mr. Woodruff hadn’t stopped in my dooryard and asked for directions—it was potato harvest, 1964—I probably wouldn’t have skipped from the fifth grade to the seventh. He was the new principal. Whatever I said impressed him. He changed my life, that short little man who looked like the Wizard of Oz with snow white hair and a lot of dandruff on the shoulders of his suit.
How did that make you a writer?
I left my baseball-playing, recess-going friends and entered the world of girls wearing bras and straight skirts and makeup. Nobody ever said a word about adjusting. We didn’t have that kind of social equipment in place back then. I was suddenly so isolated and I never quite fit in again. I think that’s what turned me into a novelist. If you’re not fitting in your own skin, you come out of yourself and
look around.
You not only looked around, you’ve been around.
I went to the university at Fort Kent when I was 16, hitchhiked across the country when I was 17. And let me say, I was about as prepared for hitchhiking as a nun. I’ve been fortunate to travel all over the world. I needed to get out of here, but now I’m ready to come home. Some people leave a small, isolated area and never want to come back. I found I was just the
opposite.
Richard Russo has said that no writer “walks the knife edge of hilarity and heartbreak more confidently than [you do].” Where does that come from?
It’s the Celtic part of my ancestry and this town. Nobody does the black humor like the Irish. And so I grew up in a town of very, very funny people with terrific storytelling. I grew up knowing that good humor must have a sad underbelly. If it doesn’t, it’s just a slip on the banana peel; it’s slapstick. I want to have a deeper relationship with my characters.
Speaking of your characters, you’ve said that the novel you’ve just completed is your last. Really?
Well, I think so. [Poet] Wesley McNair accuses me of saying this every time I write a novel and he may be right, but my thoughts are really in screenplays now. I think I’ve mined my emotional past for the last time. This will be my eighth novel under my own name. I’m so obsessed with films now.
What’s the difference for you?
A novelist is everything that’s in a film—the director, the casting director, director of photography. We design the set. We do it with words, describe what the house looks like, the room, the town. We choose the actors. We tell them how to talk. We dress them. The novelist does everything the film does. We do it all by ourselves, on paper, quietly. And we take on the pain and the heartbreak and the challenges of every scene. But now as a screenwriter, I write above the pain. Someone else will figure out how to play it.
You mentioned “mining your emotional past” as part of your novel writing process. How grounded are your fictional Mattagash characters in your Allagash reality?
Much as people may have thought so, they aren’t. Other than I’m an Allagasher with an Allagasher sensibility. My characters have the same characteristics I have. It’s what I can deliver as a writer. I’ve never gone in with a character in my mind. I sit down and this magical thing happens. Those people come from somewhere off the page. I have no knowledge of them. I think they would be insulted if they thought I got their lives from someone else’s life just as you and I would be.
What prompted you to return to Mattagash for another novel?
It was the year of the big flood when the bridges went out. I was in Nashville. It was about 3 a.m. and all of a sudden there’s a one-way bridge on TV. It’s wavering like that aluminum foil inside a gum wrapper and then it just breaks and goes. I wondered who the hell filmed that! The words came up on the screen: filmed by Louis Pelletier III, newshound, Allagash, Maine. It was my nephew. And it started me thinking about one-way bridges and their social implications, and what happens if one day it doesn’t work out so politely and enemies hit each end of the bridge at the same time.
You’re known as a writer who is very generous of spirit.
I hope that’s true. I don’t think about it. What I do think about is how generous of spirit [novelist] Lee Smith was to me. She was the first real writer I’d met, someone who had written a lot of books. She read a really bad short story I’d written and told me to write a novel, and when I wrote The Funeral Makers, I called her and she read it and then told me to send it to her agent. That’s how I got my agent. When I thanked her, she said, “Don’t thank me. Pass it on.” I hope that’s what I’m doing, passing it on.n
