MDI Historical: Ruth Moore's Microcosm: Narratives that Deconstruct Notions of Inside and Outside In-Person / Online

Join Ella Kotsen for a discussion of her research and inspiration for her 2024 Chebacco article Ruth Moore’s Microcosm: Narratives that Deconstruct Notions of Inside and Outside.

Gott’s Island/Tremont author Ruth Moore wrote narratives that told local working-class stories while also exploring the unique perspective offered by being “from away.” She challenged the binary thinking that there is only an inside and an outside when it comes to close-knit rural communities by creating heroic protagonists who live on the inside yet are oftentimes “outsiders” to their neighbors. Moore, who left the island for high school and then Maine to pursue her career, was unafraid to use her unique perspective to tell the hard, ugly truths about small towns, yet she was invested in showing that radical acceptance can happen even in remote, insular communities. Her stories of Maine island people and events, while surrounded by blue water, green firs, and granite cliffs, were universal--a “microcosm of anywhere else.”

Ella Kotsen graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a degree in Literatures in English in May of 2023. She is currently a board member of the Tremont Historical Society where she served as an intern for two years prior. At Bryn Mawr, she received the Hanna Holborn Gray Fellowship where she did ethnographic research in Tremont and produced a report, “Ruth Moore’s Quietside and the Power of Island Voices,” which she presented at the Bass Harbor Memorial Library and her college. She also received the Sheelah Kilroy Memorial Scholarship in English and the Seymour Adelman Book Collector's 1st Prize for, a collection that she dubbed “Female Writers from Maine.” Her senior thesis was entitled, “The Invisible Spinster and Region: Peripheral Space of Social and Geographical Narratives in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs.”

This program is brought to you by a collaboration of the MDI Historical Society and the Northeast Harbor Library.