Writers meet at Camden festival

“Peyton Place,” the 1956 novel that helped spark the sexual revolution, a wave of feminism and the demand for reproductive rights, has been overlooked and undervalued.

Speaking Sunday in the town where “Peyton Place” was filmed, University of Southern Maine professor Ardis Cameron singled out the book that sold 12 million copies and inspired the movie and television soap opera series. Cameron, who teaches American and New England Studies, spoke during the first Maine Author Series and Literary Festival held Nov. 3-5 at the Camden Opera House.

“People have forgotten how well written ‘Peyton Place’ was,” Cameron said. “Read it again.”

Cameron, an authority on “Peyton Place” and its author, Grace Metalious, related how Metalious could never adjust to the criticism and fame and was unable to pen a sequel. She lamented how Metalious, a working-class mother from New Hampshire, drank herself to death, dying at age 39 in 1964. The book was discovered by a woman agent, purchased by a woman editor and published by a woman, decades before “chick lit” became popular, Cameron added.

Because “Peyton Place” was filmed in Camden, Cameron said, many readers have come to think of the famed book as being Maine fiction.

What defines a “Maine author”? Clearly, it’s not just Stephen King and Carolyn Chute any longer. Wesley McNair, Cathie Pelletier, Lewis Robinson, Monica Wood and Bill Roorbach were among the diverse Maine writers featured at “Celebrating the Spirit of Place: The Maine Literary Tradition” sponsored by the midcoast branch of the American Association of University Women.

There is a “renaissance in Maine fiction,” Farmington poet, anthologist and teacher Wesley McNair reported during the three-day festival, which drew more than 300 people from across the country. “Maine literature has never been as rich and diverse as it is now.”

Maine writers, panelists agreed, must have been born in the Pine Tree State, have moved here, or left the state to find their muse.

Cathie Pelletier left Maine only to rediscover and write about her Allagash Village roots, a profitable exercise. She landed a million-dollar advance for “Candles on Bay Street,” which has been optioned for a movie by Hallmark Productions. She has published seven novels, many located in Allagash Village, under her own name and two more under the pseudonym K.C. McKinnon. A movie based on her novel “Dancing at the Harvest Moon” will be aired on CBS later this month.

Pelletier’s roots run deep in Allagash, where her French Canadian ancestors founded the town. She remembered making trips to the “big city” of Fort Kent, to look in the hardware store bins for the latest record releases.

She admitted that “I don’t like writing. It’s too painful.” When she finishes her current novel, she may switch to other projects, she said.

“You said that two books ago,” moderator McNair reminded Pelletier.

Authors such as Monica Wood, born and bred in Maine, have rejected the “Golden Pond” image of the state in favor of gritty novels around paper mill strikes. She has written “Any Better Thing,” “My Only Story” and “Secret Language.” She was raised in Mexico, Maine, and moved all the way to Portland. She laughed when her publisher put a “post card scene” of a pristine Maine lake on the book cover instead of a paper mill and the polluted Androscoggin River, which would have illustrated better the novel’s theme.

Wood writes to “discover the blind joy of discovery.”

Roorbach hiked up Camden’s Mount Battie on Saturday to discover a vandalized plaque commemorating Camden’s Edna St. Vincent Millay, who, like himself, had to leave home to find success.

Roorbach called himself an “outsider” who came from out of state to Farmington to teach. His new book, “Temple Stream,” won the Maine Literary Prize. His short stories have appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine.

He, too, testified to the pain of writing, multiplied by the recent death of his mother. “I can’t be bothered with writing,” he said. The pleasure of writing is the creation of the work, followed unfortunately by the “narcissism” of publishing and book signings, he said.

The panel contrarian argued that Maine has “not that much special that you couldn’t find anywhere else.”

Portland author Lewis Robinson disagreed.

Robinson is the author of “Officer Friendly and other Stories,” winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and a teacher at the University of Southern Maine. He argued that “Maine has a mystique … that excites my imagination where others don’t. It is different from elsewhere and symbolizes something special to people.”

Emmet Meara can be reached at emmetmeara@msn.com.