As she did in When We Were Strangers, Pamela Schoenewaldt once again does a beautiful job of writing strong female characters in her latest book Swimming in the Moon (on sale now!). She stopped by to share her thoughts with us on her writing, influences and inspiration.
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What was your inspiration for writing Swimming in the Moon?
I was intrigued by the dark history of the Palazzo Donn’Anna in the 10 years I lived near Naples. I’m active in worker rights today and thus inspired by the great strikes of the early 20th Century. Watching friends and colleagues live with mentally ill family members gave urgency to the Lucia-Teresa trials. Vaudeville is just plain fascinating. The setting in Cleveland was born when I presented When We Were Strangers at the Western Reserve Historical Society and explored its archives on Italian immigrant communities and garment workers’ lives. Once I’d settled the story in Cleveland, I was curious about Lula, who figures in the 1880’s setting of my first novel, and decided to link her journey with Lucia’s.
What was the most challenging aspect of writing your story?
I have rough deadlines and word counts to hit in my day job, but they were new for me in novel writing. Aside from these process challenges, Lucia’s character arc tracks the dramatic events of the 1911 Cleveland Garment Workers Strike; it was challenging to be faithful to history while developing the novel’s true center: Lucia’s journey. Most of us have had or will face the daily, difficult task of balancing our own dreams and choices with the pressing needs of a loved one. It was often emotionally difficult for me to “live” Lucia’s complex rapport with her talented, adored, but rapidly unraveling mother, Teresa.
How did you go about researching your book? Did libraries play a role?
Internet resources are vast, but not sufficient. My local public library and interlibrary loans were invaluable. I used several archive collections and an online encyclopedia of Cleveland history. Labor and immigration historians generously lent their expertise. Through friends and friends of friends, I interviewed opera singers and historians, physicians, women’s health professionals, a specialist in the history of psychiatry, and therapists dealing with complex emotional disturbances such as Teresa’s. Social justice work led me to an expert in labor movement songs. And so forth. My experience is that the research process parallels the writing process: you begin with general reading, but each chapter presents new points to clarify and angles to explore. The challenge is to really enjoy, not just slog through, the research while remembering that however fascinating a factoid might be, however hard you worked to get it, you aren’t writing history but creating characters whose world is shaped by their utterly unique experience.
What books/authors most influence your writing?
I love the wealth and precision of Charles Dickens, Kent Haruf’s elegant and heart-rending seeming simplicity. Anne Proulx’s The Shipping News was huge for me. Richard Bausch and Thirty Umrigar’s The Space Between Us. I’ll never forget the marvel of Margaret George’s The Autobiography of Henry VIII, a masterpiece of historical fiction.
Your novels focus on the immigrant experience. What draws you to this subject, and how do you so accurately capture the voices and settings of the time?
Immigration is a fundamental to our national experience—and to our species. It’s in the news and hard to avoid. But from a novelist’s point of view, “immigration” means being a stranger in a strange land. Who hasn’t had that experience, literally or figuratively, and been profoundly changed by it? On a literal level, I was an immigrant in Southern Italy for 10 years. I was fluent, working, engaged, with friends and a rich life. But I was an outsider, needing to keep learning, looking, interpreting: good practice for a novelist. As for accurate representation of “voices and settings,” I think the process holds true in any historical novel: finding an emotional, dramatic center and journey with which you can deeply identify and then—there’s no way out of this—doing your homework until your characters’ world is as real as your own.
How has the experience of publishing your second book differed from your first?
Before writing When We Were Strangers, I’d published short stories but had no agent, no certainty that I could finish a novel, let alone see it come to light. I did have the support and wisdom of a writing group within the Knoxville Writers Guild. When the whole process seemed impossible, I knew this: chapter X was due on Wednesday. When I was ready, the process of connecting with my agent, Courtney Miller-Callihan, and through her Amanda Bergeron at HarperCollins, was not that difficult or time-consuming. It’s a good thing, perhaps, that I didn’t know how much work comes after the writing process in preparing and promoting the book. Fascinating work, but a lot of it. For Swimming in the Moon, I had a team behind me, expectations to fulfill, a real deadline and a word count. Deadlines have their benefits: they wash away self-indulgent writer’s blocks and since writing is really an art of compression, having a word count (in my case 100,000) keeping you pushing for the best way to make each moment, each scene, each sentence the best that you can.
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Thank you so much for sharing, Pamela! Readers, be sure to snag a copy for yourselves!
- Annie
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