Local Author Spotlight: Reading and Conversation with Kate Angevin
The Musée is delighted to welcome author, playwrite, and literary scholar Kate Angevin to its campus! Join us Saturday, October 24th, from 2 to 4 pm as Angevin offers a special reading of her latest novel, Beyond the Dry Stone Wall.
A work of literary fiction, Angevin’s novel explores the world of Kenan Trewellyn, a professor at Cambridge University, who travels to his family’s estate for a few days to escape the guilt in having acted unfairly toward a student. But while at home, Trewellyn encounters old family wounds that lead him down a road of existential questioning. Though Angevin expresses how the complex themes and deep characters explored in the novel closely mirrored her own experiences at Cambridge, the matters of educational injustice, hidden memory, and legacies of intergenerational troubles and disconnect profoundly resonate with the experiences historically of the Saint John Valley’s French families. Angevin informs that “in all of my writing, [my intention] is to find a pathway inside a character that leads to their inner truth and then to express that which has been kept hidden. Much like Angevin, it is too the work of the Musée to understand and reveal that which has been kept hidden or otherwise deeply embedded within the human fabric, particularly of the Saint John Valley – to appreciate and bring to the fore the stores and intimacies marked in the memory of Maine’s northern borderland.
A Q&A will follow Angevin’s reading, allowing the audience the opportunity to gain insight into her creative process, her inspirations, and to even chat with her on navigating the business of publishing. Come learn about a local author, purchase a signed copy of her book, and become inspired for your own writing journey!
Complimentary refreshments will be provided.
About the Author
Kate Angevin was born and raised in San Francisco, California, and relocated to Caribou in Northern Maine a year prior to the Covid-19 Pandemic. Angevin is a well-established scholar and writer in the discipline of Historical Linguistics, and boasts an impressive academic background. She first earned her B.A. in Cinema Production at the University of Southern California Film School, during which she understood the lack of Indy film distributors, incentivizing her to specialize in playwriting more so than screenwriting. She wrote and directed a short film which won the Special Judges Award at the San Francisco State College International Poetry/Film Festival. She also had 22 short stories published in the U.S. and U.K., four of which were nominated for the Pushcart Prize for Fiction. She also wrote five plays which were all performed and read across both the U.S. as well as South Africa. Stemming from these experiences, Angevin went on to earn her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College in New York.
Eventually, Angevin became inclined to pursue her special interests in the Bronze Age, particularly those that concerned the decipherment of the Minoan Bronze Age writing system of Crete, coined as Linear A, a subject of which remained a compelling interest of hers since childhood. Following her acceptance into the Historical Linguistics program at Cambridge University, Angevin was invited to work and study with leading figures on the subject at both Cambridge and Oxford. Angevin remained at Cambridge for four years working on Linear A and studying for a 3-part customized B.A. in Archaeology, Ancient History, and Historical Linguistics, particularly in Vedic and Classical Sanskrit.
Angevin was subsequently accepted to the University of Pennsylvania where she earned her M.A. from a joint collaboration between the departments of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Archaeology. Like her B.A. from Cambridge, her M.A. was a 3-part customized tract, with a particular focus in the Archeology of South Asia, Ancient History of South Asia, and Ancient Indo-Iranian Linguistics. At UPenn, Angevin was asked to apply her Linear A expertise on the undeciphered script from South Asia, the Indus Valley Script. She was then accepted into an advanced research institute at the Sorbonne in Paris, l’École Pratique des Hautes Ètudes (LEPHE), where she worked toward a PhD on the Indus Valley Script, producing a 1900-page dissertation and from which she published several articles across various journals.
Writing novels has been a recent endeavor of Angevin. Following Beyond the Dry Stone Wall, Angevin’s The Art of Loneliness has also now available for online purchase on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Soon, her Seas of the Moon will too be made available.
Admission is free and/or by donation.
Your donation helps support the arts within Northern Maine, and contributes to the Musée’s mission of restoring and caring for a nationally significant heritage site, ensuring the longevity of its exceptional collection, the execution of its brilliant exhibitions, and the development of educational and community programs that aim to foster and safeguard Acadian culture of the Saint John Valley.