Rod Dreher, writing in The American Conservative, has referred to Chute as "a Maine novelist and gun enthusiast who, along with her husband, lives an aggressively unorthodox life in the Yankee backwoods.
[2] Chute also speaks out publicly about class issues in the US and publishes "The Fringe," a monthly collection of in-depth political journalism, short stories, and intellectual commentary on current events.
In 2008, she published The School on Heart's Content Road, which deals with a polygamist compound in Maine under scrutiny after an article on them goes national.
[3] She now lives in Parsonsfield, Maine, near the New Hampshire border, in a home with no telephone, no computer, and no fax machine, and an outhouse in lieu of a working bathroom.
And to the embrace of many of the women among them, who become his “wives,” birth numerous children by him, and somehow live together in what has become a bustling, self-sufficient, happy rural enclave.
But they insist he drop his ties to militias, which began with an old friendship with a Vietnam vet and neighbor and have continued out of his conviction that Americans have to be united against the common corporate foe.
But the new attention to “the Prophet” (soon to be “the mad Prophet”) on the part of the media, depicted with deep revulsion, leads to growing attention on the part of shadowy authorities; and some militarized agency or agencies of the government lay virtual siege to the Settlement, confirming Gordon’s view of the character of the American State and exposing what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls the “permanent state of exception” in which we all live.