Peggy Yocom Submitted photo

FARMINGTON — On Sunday, November 10, Peggy Yocom, teacher, scholar, poet, and story-teller, will speak on “Incest, Fur, and Hidden Bodies: The ‘Cinderella’ No One Knows”. The talk, presented by the Shiretown Bookers, will be at 1:30 p.m. in the North Dining Hall at UMF in Farmington. It will be free and open to the public.

Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm published some frightening stories for children and the home: tales of step-mothers who eat their step-sons, parents who abandon their children in the night-time woods, and fathers who cut off the hands of their daughters in exchange for the Devil’s gold. Peggy Yocom will lead us through this world of the Brothers Grimm, using “Allerleirauh” (“All Kinds of Fur”) as an example. In this complex, controversial, never-anthologized version of “Cinderella,” a widowed King tells his daughter they are about to be married. The story reveals how she—and all of us—may survive betrayal and abuse. The public is welcome to bring in books that contain tales of the Brothers Grimm for display and discussion.

Margaret “Peggy” Yocom grew up in the Pennsylvania German farmland listening to her grandparents’ stories. Her book ALL KINDS OF FUR: Erasure Poems & New Translation of a Tale from the Brothers Grimm was published by Deerbrook Editions in 2018. Her poetry has also appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, The Beltway Poetry Journal, the anthology The Folklore Muse: Poetry, Fiction, and Other Reflections by Folklorists, and elsewhere. She founded the Folklore Studies Program of George Mason University, where she taught for 36 years and was awarded the Kenneth Goldstein Award for Lifetime Academic Leadership by the American Folklore Society. She has published on the Brothers Grimm, the folk arts of political protest, Inuit storytelling in northwest Alaska, family folklore, and the folk arts of Maine logging communities. Museum curator and editor, and co-founder of the American Folklore Society’s Creative Writing and Storytelling Section, she holds a Ph.D. in English and folklore from Amherst. She makes her home with her geologist husband, John Slack, in Farmington and Rangeley.

This lecture is the first of the 2019-20 series by the Shiretown Bookers, the Community Friends of Mantor Library. The website can be found at www.shiretownbookers.org. North Dining Hall is located in the Olsen Student Center, at 111 South Street in Farmington.