FARMINGTON — Margaret “Peggy” Yocom, teacher, scholar, poet and story-teller, will speak on “Incest, Fur, and Hidden Bodies: The ‘Cinderella’ No One Knows,” at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 10, in the North Dining Hall at the Olsen Student Center at the University of Maine at Farmington on 111 South St.

The talk, presented by the Shiretown Bookers, will be free and open to the public, according to a news release from Shiretown Bookers.

Margaret ‘Peggy’ Yocom Photo courtesy of Shiretown Bookers

Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm published some frightening stories for children and the home: tales of stepmothers who eat their stepsons, parents who abandon their children in the nighttime woods, and fathers who cut off the hands of their daughters in exchange for the Devil’s gold. Yocum will talk about 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.

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 doctorate 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.

For more information, contact Reid Byers at reidbyers@gmail.com or 609-306-1002, or visit shiretownbookers.org.