Award-Winning Novelist

Lecture Theme: Editors, Agents & Critics: One Writer's Journey.

Cathie Pelletier is an award-winning novelist and song writer raised in the rural town of Allagash, Maine. Cathie Pelletier is the author of the novels The Funeral Makers, The Weight of Winter, A Marriage Made In Woodstock, Beaming Sonny Home.

She graduated high school at the young age of sixteen and recieved her B.A. at the University of Maine at Fort Kent in 1976. Cathie Pelletier now spends her time at her home in Nashville and occasionaly comes to Maine.

She recieved the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Paterson Prize in 2006.

She was selected last year as the first Waneta Blake Visiting Professor of Writing by UMFK's Arts and Humanities Division.

According to the author, "Many aspiring writers believe that talent and hard work are the necessary ingredients to become a published author. And that's certainly true. But, writing mostly in solitude for months, even years, most authors are oblivious to the inescapable business of book publishing, which includes agents who are sometimes not very industrious, editors who are overworked and critics who are downright vicious. This lecture will contain stories and insights from one writer whose journey into the world of books began at the end of the road in northern Maine, in the town of Allagash, and led her to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, then Nashville, Tennessee, then Toronto, then Nashville, with stops in between, to end up forty years later back at the end of the road in northern Maine."