Author Helen Peppe

Author Helen Peppe June 26

Author Helen Peppe will relate her hilarious account of childhood on a farm in Maine with a large and dysfunctional family during a visit to the Camden Public Library on Thursday, June 26, at 7:00 pm. “My mother was determined and desperate to raise good children. However, just like those people who buy sweet baby chimpanzees and are surprised when they grow into adolescents who bite them repeatedly before one day escaping in a flurry of hoots and hollers, my mother lost control. Lacking the teeth and strength of apes, my siblings used cigarettes, alcohol, and sex to rebel,” says Peppe in Pigs Can’t Swim: A Memoir.

As the youngest of nine children growing up on a farm in rural Maine, Helen Peppe never seemed to fit in with the rest of her family. While her sisters focused on boys, cigarettes, and alcohol, Peppe preferred to curl up with a book. Once she learned the animals on the farm were raised to be eaten, she became the family’s only vegetarian. And no matter how many times her parents and siblings berated her for talking too much, Peppe could not stop asking questions about the world around her.

Pigs Can’t Swim tells the story of Peppe’s childhood as the odd one out in her chaotic family, describing her encounters with issues of race, class, animal rights, molestation, teen pregnancy, and more coming-of-age confusion than anyone should endure. Unable to feel a sense of belonging in her tumultuous household, Peppe formed strong friendships with the family’s animals and buried herself in the work of James Herriot and Steven King as she made her way through sixteen years of family conflict.

Helen Peppe, writer and photographer, lives near Portland, Maine, with her two children, four dogs, eight rescued rabbits, four guinea pigs, and two destructive kittens. She promises to have vegan treats to share with the audience.

Peppe is a professional writer and photographer. The former editor of Eastern Equerry and Wordplay Magazine, her short stories, articles, and photographs are in a myriad of anthologies, books, and magazines, including Practical Horseman, Equus, American Trakehner, Arabian Horse Times, Dog Fancy, Dog World, Equine Journal, The Horse, Lynx Eye, Mused Literary Review, Cats Magazine, and The Good Men Project. She has been on a variety of radio and talk shows, including the Marilu Henner Show, Live with Vickie St. Clair, and Good Day Maine. Her images, mainly horses, appear on book and magazine covers, in editorials, calendars, and on hundreds of web sites and Facebook pages. Several of her short stories and photographs appear in text books and educational media.

Helen’s photography and written work have received numerous awards and recognition, including placing first in the 2009 Word Worth Essay and Fiction Contest, and The Starving Writer Literary contest twice. She was one of seven finalists for the 2011 Annie Dillard Creative Nonfiction Award, as well as a Maine Literary Award repeat finalist. She has an MFA. in creative writing from the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine where she returns as an alumna to teach and photograph. Helen’s debut memoir, Pigs Can’t Swim, published by Da Capo Press, is a 2014 Indie Introduce and Indie Next Title. She is currently working on a YA novel, I Name You Rockstar, and a sequel to her first memoir.

Though she spares their names as she lovingly recounts their stories, readers will find Peppe’s siblings familiar: there’s the blustery-and-favored- brother, the hair-twirling-pretty sister, and who could forget the sister-who-holds-grudges-longer-than-God.

Throughout her outrageous exploits—including an exploding pressure cooker, a runaway horse, and encounters with Margaret, the family ghost—Peppe maintains an insatiable curiosity, a voracious appetite for books, and an unconditional love for animals of every shape and size.