Author: Kerri Arsenault

Kerri Arsenault works across memoir, environmental writing, and investigative nonfiction. Mill Town begins with her family's long connection to Mexico, Maine, where several generations depended on a paper mill that shaped employment, local identity, and the surrounding landscape. Following her father's death, Arsenault returned to questions about industrial pollution and community health that had shadowed the town for years. The 2020 St. Martin's Press edition bears the full title Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Its structure combines family history, interviews, archival research, and reporting, allowing Arsenault to examine why loyalty to a place can coexist with anger about its costs. The book does not treat the town only as a case study; relatives, workers, neighbors, and regional history drive the inquiry alongside public records. Mill Town consequently moves between intimate remembrance and public evidence, asking what responsibility looks like when an industry's benefits and damage have become inseparable from home.