PARSONSFIELD, Me. — The novelist Carolyn Chute doesn’t have a working phone, a fax or a computer. She writes on a washtub-size electric typewriter that was probably state of the art in the ’70s. Ms. Chute (pronounced CHOOT) and her husband, Michael, live in a small compound at the end of an unpaved road in this rural Maine village near the New Hampshire border. There are stacks of old tires in the yard, a rusted bedstead, a pen full of Scottish terriers and an assortment of well-used vehicles. A bumper sticker on Mr. Chute’s pickup reads, “School Takes 13 Years Because That’s How Long It Takes to Break a Child’s Spirit.”
Mr. Chute, who looks like a 19th-century hunting guide, spends most of his time drawing and making sculptures in an unfinished, uninsulated building he calls the security office. He has a beard of ZZ Top proportions, wears checked shirts and round felt hats, and in Down East fashion frequently uses “wicked” as an adverb.
Ms. Chute, 61, a wry, direct and earthy woman who favors bandannas, peasant skirts and stout hiking boots, works in their home, which is guarded by a sign that reads: “Woa. Visitors Turn Back.” Neither building is heated, except by wood stove, or has hot water. The compound’s sole toilet is a tin-roofed outhouse.
The Chute home does have an industrial-size copying machine, however, and nearby she keeps her AK-47 rifle, which she likes because it has a gas piston that dampens recoil. “It’s very gentle, very soft,” she said. Ms. Chute, whose fourth novel, “The School on Heart’s Content Road,” comes out on Friday, had a surprise hit in the mid-’80s with her first book, “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” about a hard-luck, occasionally incestuous clan that some critics compared to Faulkner’s Snopeses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/books/04chut.html?th&emc=th
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