Talk of the Towns 9/9/20 The Exiles: A Conversation with Christina Baker Kline about her novel

Producer/Host: Ron Beard

The Exiles: A Conversation with Christina Baker Kline about her novel, published in by William Morrow, August, 2020

-Who are the major characters in The Exiles, and how do their lives intertwine?
-What in your own background or previous writing/research intrigued you about aboriginal peoples and the notion that they have often been made exiles of their own land, displaced?
-Speak briefly about the three strands that prepared you, unknowingly, for writing this novel (your own time in Australia, interviewing mothers and daughters, and teaching women in prison)
-In the light of the decolonization movement and Black Lives Matter, their act of “adoption” is revealed as part of the enormous underlying racism that we confront today… and which you confronted in your earlier novel, Orphan Train.
-Talk about your research to prepare you to write The Exiles

About the host:
Ron Beard is producer and host of Talk of the Towns, which first aired on WERU in 1993 as part of his community building work as an Extension professor with University of Maine Cooperative Extension and Sea Grant. He took all the journalism courses he could fit in while an undergraduate student in wildlife management and served as an intern with Maine Public Television nightly newscast in the early 1970s. Ron is an adjunct faculty member at College of the Atlantic, teaching courses on community development. Ron served on the Bar Harbor Town Council for six years and is currently board chair for the Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor, where he has lived since 1975. Look for him on the Allagash River in June, and whenever he can get away, in the highlands of Scotland where he was fortunate to spend two sabbaticals.