Interview with Author Pamela Schoenewaldt

Pamela Schoenewaldt lived for ten years in a small town outside Naples, Italy. Her short stories have appeared in literary magazines in England, France, Italy and the United States. Her play, “Espresso con mia madre” (Espresso with my mother) was performed at Teatro Cilea in Naples. She taught writing for the University of Maryland, European Division and the University of Tennessee and now lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with her husband, Maurizio Conti, a medical physicist, and their dog Jesse, a philosopher.




Welcome to PASTimes, Pamela! Thanks for joining us and sharing a bit about your writing world. Tell us about your latest book.

“If you leave Opi, you’ll die with strangers,” Irma Vitale’s mother always warned. But Irma is too poor and too plain to marry and can’t find honest work in her tiny mountain village in Southern Italy. Barely twenty, she must leave home bearing only native wit and astonishing skill with a needle. Risking rough passage across the Atlantic, a single woman in a strange land, Irma seeks a new life sewing dresses for gentlewomen.
Swept up in the crowded streets of nineteenth-century America, Irma finds workshop servitude and miserable wages, but also seeds of friendship in the raw immigrant quarters. When her determination leads at last to Chicago, Irma blossoms under the hand of an austere Alsatian dressmaker, sewing fabrics and patterns more beautiful than she’d ever imagined. Then this tenuous peace is shattered. From the rubble, confronting human cruelty and kindness, suffering and hope, a new Irma emerges, nurturing a talent she’d never imagined and an unlikely family, patched together by the common threads that unite us all.


It’s been said that setting can act as a character in a novel. Is that true in your novel?


Irma’s world, first in an isolated mountain village, and then in the immigrant quarters of American cities, defines her choices, risks and opportunities. I think it’s crucial to portray settings as the character sees them at that moment in the character’s journey. The scenes they observe, the smells, sights, tastes, textures that define experience are unique for each person. So when Irma is on the immigrant ship, for example, the claustrophobia, heat, noise and uncertainty press in on her. When you are describing a scene you are also describing the character who sees that scene. At another point in the story, your character would experience that scene in a wholly different way.

Have you ever bent a historical fact to fit your story?

One scene takes place in the charred remains of a house burned in the Great Chicago Fire, which was actually about 13 years before the action of the story. I imagine that most of the fire-damaged neighborhoods had been cleared by then, but I only need a couple and statistically, probably there were a few properties that for some reason hadn’t been renovated.

The novel features both a rape and an abortion. Did you receive any negative feedback from readers over those depictions? Cindy's note: I've read the novel and I thought it was handled well and  likely with historical accuracy. Some readers might find this disturbing, but for me it was part of the story. I'm not condoning abortion by any means, just acknowledging that it was a part of many women's lives in that time period, which is what I think the author is doing as well.

I feared more negative feedback than I actually received, to the point of discussing the option of a pseudonym early on in discussions with my agent. But in fact, there has been little pushback, even from some Christian fiction sites which reviewed When We Were Strangers. Like most women who choose to abort, this was not an easy option for Irma, even as a rape survivor, and I worked hard to show this. The rape scene, of course, was difficult to write, since in fiction, I believe, you must emotionally go to the places you take your character. It was hard, maybe harder, in a later scene to put myself in the place of the perpetrator. That’s an even darker place.

In researching 19th contraception I discovered many things. First, that abortion was simply not a public policy issue. Managing fertility was a women’s issue and women tried desperately, with limited medical technology, to do this. Many, many died. I’ve read that having 10-12 abortions in one’s fertile years was not uncommon. The possibility of dying in childbirth was also very real and many mothers with children chose not to continue with an additional pregnancy because they feared leaving their living children motherless. Choosing adoption or orphanages often mean giving the child up to servitude or an early death.

My experience of most readers is that whatever their political or religious position in the current debate, they can enter into the options available and coherent with a character they care about.

How did the germ of the idea for your latest book develop?

Join us tomorrow for the answer and part two of the interview with novelist Pamela Schoenewaldt. Answer the following question in a comment (along with your email ID) to be entered into a drawing to win a copy of When We Were Strangers. (US and Canadian residents only.) Answer this question: What did immigrants mean when they said, “Once you’ve crossed the ocean, you’re always on the wrong side”?  You must leave your comment no later than this Friday, 8AM EST.