Gretchen Cherington is guest of the Finding Our Voices Book Club in Portland
PORTLAND — Acclaimed author Gretchen Cherington will discuss her memoir “Poetic License” with Finding Our Voices CEO and founder Patrisha McLean on Wednesday April 9 at PRINT: A Bookstore, in Portland.
The 6:30-8 p.m. Finding Our Voices Book Club event is free and open to the public, and refreshments will be on hand.
Cherington’s award-winning memoir “Poetic License” chronicles abuse by her father, the Pulitzer Prize winning and U.S. Poet Laureate, Richard Eberhart. Their complicated relationship is set amidst the swirl of her parents’ close friendships with literary luminaries including Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Sexton.
Cherington kept silent for decades about abuse by her father that profoundly impacted her relationships with everyone in her family as well as her early loves and career.
In “Poetic License” she digs deep to understand her own past as an adoring child of her father, while, as a woman, circling questions about our collective reverence for heroes, the mythology of powerful men and speaking her truth to power. She confronts the question: Should we protect our family’s or our community’s myths while continuing to silence our own voices?
Cherington, who divides her time between Portland and Brooksville, will also speak about her second memoir, winner of the 2024 Maine Literary Award, “The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy”. This book takes her back further to her father’s parents in Minnesota and early seeds of familial secreting and questionable relationships.
This will be the first in-person meeting of the Finding Our Voices Book Club. For three years, McLean has discussed memoir and fiction through the lens of domestic abuse with such authors as Sarah Perry and Andre Dubus lll.
“I am beyond thrilled,” said McLean of Finding Our Voices, “to be able to converse in public with one of my favorite writers about being under the sway of powerful narcissists, breaking the silence and inter-generational cycle of abuse, and writing and living in Maine.”
There will be an opportunity to talk with Finding Our Voices survivors and Cherington after the discussion. Both of Cherington’s books will be available for purchase and signing. Finding Our Voices is the grassroots nonprofit breaking the silence and stigma of domestic abuse and providing peer support and meaningful resources to Maine women survivors.
To sign up for the Finding Our Voices online book club visit https://bookclubs.com/finding-our-voices/join/. For more information about Finding Our Voices visit https://findingourvoices.net/.
