The new book by novel author Ron Currie awakens a female Franco Crime boss in Waterville

Ron Currie says that his memories of the French-American community in Waterville, where he grew up, are so far away that he no longer trusted them.

The 49 -year -old Currie was born at a time when people still spoke French when the workers flow into the mills every day and filled the churches in French Catholic families on Sunday.

Now that these things are not as true as before, Currie decided that he wanted to concentrate a story about Waterville and his French heritage, both as a writer and as a native of Franco American. The result is his latest novel “The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne”. The book focused on a hard but beloved French-American woman who operates illegal drug operation. He was accepted on March 25 and attracted national attention, including the NPR and Wall Street Journal.

“I think most of the novel authors, their instinct (when memories are distanced) is to write their version of it to bring them down before they have completely disappeared,” said Currie, who lives in Portland. “I circled about writing something about the world in which I grew up for a long time.

He found the character of Babs Dionne, partly in his memories of his own grandmother, who was not a crime boss. She was, says Currie, “a fascinating mix of toughness and love” and had a “kind of violent, slow love, which in my experience was unique”. This contrast became the basis for Bab's Dionne, who both loved and feared what she does and how she does.

This month, Currie will talk about his book at two events in Maine, and others later this summer. On May 17th and May 29th, he will be released at 1 p.m. in the Waterville Public Library and in the Raymond Village Library.

Contemporary Franco stories

The story, which plays a decade ago, introduces Dionne as a proud Franco American, a Posple grandmother, a widow and a malignant criminal boss. She controls the city's drug business in the city of Little Canada District with the help of other women who has known it since childhood.

But drug sales have dropped and a higher drug manager sends an executor in Dionne's territory to examine. At about the same time, Dionne's youngest daughter is found dead, and Dionne reacts with the violent anger for which she is known.

The book deals with the idea of ​​cultural and national identities, as Dionne has a more like a Franco as an American who leads her French-American enclave, as she sees it right. It also deals with the language, with Dionne and her colleagues continue to speak French and want to pass on the language to younger generations. Currie notes that many French have been put under pressure to assimilate and that French were once prohibited in Maine Public Schools.

Author Ron Currie in his house in Portland. Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald

Although French-Canadian immigrants crucial for the construction of so many mill cities of Maine-Darunter Waterville, Lewiston and Biddeford, there are not many contemporary novels in a municipality of Maine Franco, Anna Faherty, Archivist at the Franco-American Collection at the University of Southern Maine in Lewiston.

“I think it is unusual. More of the work we see is usually located in historical periods,” said Faherty. “But there are some other writers, with Ron who try to take the different types of Franco Americans and their different circumstances, good and bad.”

The author of Maine, Monica Wood, said she was glad that Currie's book concentrated on characters in a street city of Maine Mill, who are far less written than the population groups of Main's Islands and coastal villages. She grew up in the Twin Paper Mill Towns of Mexico and Rumford and considers it important for Maine's authors to show the rest of the country: “We are not just a holiday country”.

“What impressed me the most, and it is the same in all his books is that the beauty of his writing sometimes contradicts the darkness of history and that creates a dynamic experience for the reader,” said Wood.

Waterville born and grew up

Currie grew up in Waterville, where his father was a firefighter and paramedic and his mother worked several jobs as a waitress and school coil, including the Hathaway -Shirt factory, as a waitress and Schulluntzeigel. He said his childhood had spanned Waterville's transition from a mill city to a “dying mill city”, long before her recent comeback was fueled by art and cultural institutions.

The patrons of the Maine International Film Festival will come to Paul J. Schupf Art Center in Waterville in 2023. Michael G. Seamans/Morning Sentinel

He says that his interest in writing has started young after reading Maine Horror and tension master Stephen King and the science fiction of authors such as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. He said that the letter was forced, something he couldn't do.

Currie's first book “God is Dead” (2007) on God's descent to Earth and the subsequent death won the Young Lions Fiction Award of the New York Public Library. His 2010 novel “Everything counts!” won the Alex Award from the American Library Association. His 2017 novel “The One-Eyed Man” deals with the (then) new phenomenon to call things “wrong news”.

If Currie does not write, he teaches creative writing in the Stonecoast MFA program from USM. “The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne” is the first of a three-book series. He also works to adapt the book for television.

When someone who was born in Maine and who lived here most of his life here, Currie said that another topic of his latest book was what he sees as a “problem” of rootlessness. French-American communities were usually places where several generations lived near each other and helped each other. But nowadays it is much more likely that younger generations will remove as soon as possible, which undermines the local community and the feeling of the place.

“In the neighborhood and in the city in which I grew up in a central main, the greatest ambition was to get hell out as soon as possible,” said Currie. “But Babs represents the exact opposite impulse, namely when they leave the place they have always known, they undress them in a way.”

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