On Wednesday, Staff Writer Erika Avallone attended a talk where Kerri Arsenault, literary critic and author, discussed her best-selling work “Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains,” as part of Columbia University’s Nonfiction Dialogues series.

On Wednesday evening, Columbia’s School of the Arts hosted Kerri Arsenault, a literary critic, author, and editor, to discuss her most recent work, Mill Town, as a part of the Nonfiction Dialogues series. The Nonfiction Dialogues is an ongoing series led by Professor Lis Harris, the Writing Program Chair at CU School of the Arts, to highlight recently noteworthy and novel nonfiction works and creative processes. Featured in this week’s panel, Kerri Arsenault discussed the unexpected creative process behind Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, her novel that tackles environmental trauma and cross-generational narratives. (Before delving into the intriguing content of the evening, a crucial note should be given to the fact that pizza was offered during the event!) 

Mill Town is a literary combination of historical investigation, environmental criticism, and social—specifically class— justice, in an attempt to understand the rural Maine town in which the author grew up. The narrative investigates the complexities of the town’s central mill, which both shaped the society and contributed to its collapse. Her environmental memoir recounts the struggle between what is left behind and who tells its story, as well as why the disguise and impact of toxicity is exclusionary.

After a brief reading from chapter one, “What Goes Around, Comes Around,” Arsenault explained her nonlinear vision for the narrative, which began with a deep hatred for her hometown and ended with catharsis. Once Arsenault identified and confronted her hatred for the town where she grew up, she felt compelled to understand truly what it was about the place that made her feel so strongly. Throughout this journey, and through her observations, she found that her hatred was primarily based on a teenage principality that she no longer held; she did not necessarily have bad memories of her hometown; its mere rurality was enough for her to resent it.

In an effort to find out why so many people still lived in this town, Arsenault realized her own fondness. She remarked that people are the reason to love a place, and their dedication to creating a grounding atmosphere was admirable enough to foster her own connection to the town. The driving force of her book is about showing how people change in relation to home, not because their home itself changes, but because we can adopt new perspectives towards our home’s internal structures. 

When Arsenault started Mill Town, she focused on genealogical research. However, she realized she could not write about the people in her hometown, or even her family, without knowing why they moved from Canada to the United States. This realization led her to the town’s Mills Archives, where she hoped to find documentation on ordinary people and why they actively chose to make this place, which she so resented, into a hometown. With no success in the archives, Arsenault began directly conversing with townspeople, inquiring about their relationship with Mills and how their respective families had come to settle in rural Maine. She described her search process as a constant tension between intimacy and distance, struggling to decide which viewpoint offers the most information. 

While the novel can be taken as environmental criticism and a call to action, it is also an homage to the complexities of home and a reckoning of how something can cause harm, yet also bring so much joy. Arsenault revealed to the audience that halfway through writing her book, her father fell ill and passed away. The cause of his illness was related to the mill industry, the topic which also shapes her book, and this connection became the center of the narrative. She paraphrases him confessing that he never thought the mill did any harm, reinforcing the novel’s concept that the things we find familiarity in are often the things that slowly harm us.

Arsenault refers to the novel as a narrative about lineage and about the question of what we owe the people to whom we belong or once did belong. She wants to show the horror that the mill created and also why people loved to live there; for those who call this rural space home, the dangers of the mill were worth the joy that surrounded it. 

While Arsenault does not consider herself an environmental writer, she knows that she deeply cares about environmental sustainability and justice. Simply by having such a deep passion for this activist work, she seamlessly merges personal stories with global causes. Environmental literature needs to be restructured as more digestible and entertaining, so that it is not daunting to non-academic audiences. When asked about her writing process, Arsenault led with her belief that effective writing does not answer questions but explores them. She utilizes an emotional and/or personal connection to drive her writing, and therefore the story is an exploration of why she feels so fervently about a topic. Arsenault’s relationship to storytelling offers a model for emerging writers—writing is not about finding the answer; it is a process that involves emotional rawness, internal patience, and embracing questions. 

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