Shaye Callanan ‘26
News Editor
Distinguished author Kerri Arsenault gave a fascinating craft talk this past Thursday in Smith 201. Arsenault provided information about her background growing up in a small paper mill town in Maine, which inspired the title of her popularly celebrated novel, Mill Town. The pollution caused by the deterioration of the trees and natural landscape of her town created a devastatingly common pattern of cancer, and it is from this circumstance where she draws most of her inspiration.
The author provided an in-depth, unique perspective on the aspects of storytelling that make readers engaged. She explored ideas of space, place, environment, and landscape, which are complex to define. She said that she is interested in these words because they “are so familiar that they lose meaning”. She understands space as a “continuous area of expanse”, whereas place is a more geographic location. She emphasized how to write a good story “you have to invest a space with human capacity to make it a place, adding meaning”. Place can be the main character, as it can serve as one’s way of understanding the world. I had never thought this deeply into establishing a setting by infusing human capacity before, and found this close examination compelling. She grounded this idea with an example of a dorm room that is empty before a student moves in, which is the space, but then once it is filled with the students’ possessions, it becomes a place. She said that spaces can be invested with three different things: living beings, non-living beings, and more ethereal concepts. She then explained that a landscape is the bigger observation of all of the relationships in the space, including the interaction of the living and non-living elements. One student attending the talk commented on what she took from the presentation: “She [the author] really made me consider what it means to craft a good story. I hadn’t thought about how much setting really matters when you are developing characters’ relationships between one another and their environment.” Arsenault finished by powerfully quoting author Barry Lopez, who argued that there are two landscapes with which the storyteller contends: one outside and one within. The purpose of stories is to find harmony between these. In this craft talk, Arsenault provided a deep-dive into the foundations of stories, and how thinking critically about the foundational aspects makes building an interesting story possible.
Featured image courtesy of Montana Public Radio
Copy Edited by Annamaria DeCamp ’27
Web Edited by Zexuan Qu ’28
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