Portland, Maine - Meg Wilson speaks about her book, Mourning Dove, at the Friday Local Author Series at noon in Meeting Room #5 on January 10th. It was November 15th, 1988 when Karen Wood stepped into her backyard in central Maine and signaled to a deer hunter that he’d ventured too close to her property adjacent to the woods. Don Rogerson, who mistook Wood’s white mittens for a deer’s white flag, shot her dead. She left twin baby daughters and her husband Kevin, a child psychiatrist who had once enjoyed hunting. In this highly publicized case, a grand jury chose not to indict Rogerson, leading to nationwide debate and a new target-identification law in Maine.
In another new subdivision just down the road from where Karen Wood had lived and died, another young mother struggled to accept the outcome of the “white mitten” tragedy. Meg Wilson eventually wrote Mourning Dove as a cathartic measure. “It could have been me, just as easily, mistaken for a deer behind my house near the woods. Mourning Dove was my attempt to find peace and move on. It finished in the top 50 of 5,000 novels in last year’s worldwide ABNA competition. It worked for me.”
In Wilson’s fictional account, the shooting victim is six-year-old Mikey Young who has set a white swing into motion in his wooded backyard. The acquitted hunter, Norton Coster, leaves Maine in disgrace with his wife and young son, Evan. When Norton returns fourteen years later and opens a restaurant called Mourning Dove (to symbolize his grief and quest for peace) neither family is equipped to handle what transpires between Evan and Mikey’s grown sister, Gracie.
Meg Wilson grew up in Yarmouth, Maine and moved back to that area in 1992. Her second husband Jim is a registered Maine Guide and an avid hunter. Meg is also author of the young-adult novel, Crappy New Year. Currently, she is writing Wander Women, an adventure travelogue that chronicles the adventures and misadventures of ten women who thru-hiked the 2,184-mile long Appalachian Trail.
No comments:
Post a Comment