In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Michelle Cameron, a historical novelist, who sees the gift of discovering story in research.
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
“Something about numbers mesmerized her, made the world fade away. The bustle of the ketubah workshop, the messiness of the artists’ desks, the fanciful decoration and sketch work she had no gift for were replaced by a world that seemed logical and fixed, firm around the edges.“
This passage is from Beyond the Ghetto Gates where my heroine, Mirelle, contemplates her love of numbers, a love she employs daily to help manage her father’s ketubah (Jewish marriage certificate) workshop.
It’s ironic that I chose mathematics for Mirelle to excel in, considering my own lack of skill. I constantly mess up dates and the simplest of calculations eludes me. But I was able to imagine how someone could love them because of how writing captures me. So let me apply that first sentence to my own passion: Something about writing mesmerizes me, makes the world fade away.
When I’m in the zone, one world truly does fade away – our mundane present day – and is replaced by the world of my imaginings and the characters who speak to me, often taking the action in unanticipated directions. In Beyond the Ghetto Gates, I was transported to Italy during the period of the French Revolution. I loved bringing the harbor city of Ancona to life:
“The walk to the cathedral was steep; it made Francesca, burdened by her pregnancy, gasp for air. The women rounded a bend in the road and paused, looking over the panorama spread before them. The red, white, and pink stone buildings with their red-tiled roofs were bathed in a golden glow. In the harbor, multi-masted cargo ships with furled canvases were anchored in the bay. “
In The Fruit of Her Hands, my previous historical novel, I entered medieval Europe and lived the lives of a Jewish family coping with mounting antisemitism; in my first published work, In the Shadow of the Globe, I stood backstage at the Globe theatre, watching my literary love, William Shakespeare, as he embraced a full-blooded Elizabethan life – all the while writing the masterpieces we still marvel at today.
As a historical novelist, I love delving into these different periods, figuring out what people ate, how they dressed, what they did to survive. Honestly, there can be a bit of terror associated with this, especially in the newest novel, where I describe Napoleon’s military battles. I know that someone, somewhere, will point out what I got wrong. But I reassure myself by recalling that I’m a novelist, not a historian. It’s the story that’s important.
But when I discover in the research ways to shape the plot, it can be an astounding gift. The ketubah workshop, for instance? That arose from a discovery that Ancona, Italy – the harbor city where Napoleon first demolished the ghetto gates – was also the world center of ketubah making. In fact, it was where artisans and scribes first illuminated these documents.
And as I learned more about the city, a strange tale came to light. It seemed – based on Vatican documents – that a portrait of the Virgin Mary in Ancona’s cathedral turned her head and wept. The devout took this miracle to mean that the Madonna would protect them from the French invaders. There was a particularly juicy anecdote that Napoleon himself, while looting the cathedral, faced down the portrait and was unnerved by it. How could any novelist resist such a story? Resist using it fictionally to inform her plot?
So why do I write? Well, any day when I don’t, I’m unsettled and deeply unhappy. Something drives me to the page, where I bring life to distant worlds and hear a chorus of invented people clamoring to be heard. Like my heroine above, I’m as consumed by words as she is by numbers.
MICHELLE CAMERON is a director of The Writers Circle, an NJ-based organization that offers creative writing programs to children, teens, and adults, and the author of works of historical fiction and poetry: Beyond the Ghetto Gates (She Writes Press, 2020), The Fruit of Her Hands: The Story of Shira of Ashkenaz (Pocket, 2009), and In the Shadow of the Globe (Lit Pot Press, 2003).
She lived in Israel for fifteen years (including three weeks in a bomb shelter during the Yom Kippur War) and served as an officer in the Israeli army teaching air force cadets technical English. Michelle lives in New Jersey with her husband and has two grown sons of whom she is inordinately proud. Visit her website for more information.
You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can purchase a copy of Beyond the Ghetto Gates from IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, Indigo, and Amazon on Kindle or in paperback.