Interview: Cameron Alam
James interviews Cameron Alam, the author of Anangokaa
Cameron Alam was born in Buffalo, NY. She lives in Eastern Ontario along the St. Lawrence Seaway with her soldier husband, two children, playful dog and alpha cat. She kindly agreed to answer a few questions I emailed her.
JMF Tell us about your background, education, etc.
Growing up in Buffalo, New York, I was the only child of a social worker who steeped my childhood in literature. We had overfull bookcases and shelves devoted to books my great-grandmother brought to North America from Iceland as well as classics in English which she added to her collection in small-town North Dakota; some pages reveal my grandfather’s poetry penned between the lines, paper being so costly. We also had books belonging to their youngest daughter, my Amma- Little Women, Little Men, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Jane Eyre, and my teenage favourite, Wuthering Heights. My mom and I often shared our reads and discussed them over the kitchen table- biography and memoir, philosophy and psychology, pulp fiction and mystery, classic literature, self-help, cookbooks, holistic medicine journals, and anything of interest. Throughout my early years, mom would purchase one new section of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia from the grocery store on payday, until our library contained A to Z...oh, the book reports I wrote using entries among my sources!
I spent two indelible years at College of the Atlantic on the coast of Maine, taking courses in anthropology, ecology, literature, writing, photography, and sailing, and spent a summer on Little Cranberry Island as the live-in nanny for a lobsterman’s family. For anyone intrigued by such a unique place and livelihood, a young man named Trevor Corson was living on the island that summer and he went on to author a remarkable book highlighting the family I nannied for, called The Secret Life of Lobsters.
“I…spent twenty-plus years attempting to finish a novel amidst life, loss and love- even challenging myself during my first pregnancy that if I could grow an entire human being in 9 months, I could certainly pen 300 pages; I quickly realized my ignorance.”
Ultimately maxed out on student loans and unable to continue at COA, I returned to Buffalo, worked with inner-city youth, took classes in ethnography, anthropology, religious studies, theatre, philosophy and writing at the University and on a whim, joined a band of retired teachers heading to Romania for a summer, where we taught English to students from across Eastern Europe. When I returned to the States, I earned my BFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Southern Vermont College and spent twenty-plus years attempting to finish a novel amidst life, loss and love- even challenging myself during my first pregnancy that if I could grow an entire human being in 9 months, I could certainly pen 300 pages; I quickly realized my ignorance.
JMF Tell us about some of the books or authors that influenced you...do you have a favourite book?
So many favourite books, books which changed- and continue to change- the way I experience the world, books I reread and treasure like an old friendship and books I read for the first time and feel like I’ve fallen head over heels in love. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford...Millay’s poetry found me at an impressionable age; The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey which I reread every few years; Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah who I had the honour to see speak at University; Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, which helped me process my mother’s death before I even knew I would lose her, and again in the beginning stages of losing her; Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls...I reread it when I need to feel inspired by the undeniably kick-ass woman who was the author’s forbear; When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams because she illuminates forgotten places in a woman’s soul; Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, one of my earliest life-changing reads; Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, need I say more; Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy, along with other powerful books on social justice; everything by historian Charlotte Gray...I could go on and on. And I have had a subscription to National Geographic since I was a kid and cannot imagine life without an open copy on my breakfast table, transporting me into every corner of our world.
“I have had a subscription to National Geographic since I was a kid and cannot imagine life without an open copy on my breakfast table, transporting me into every corner of our world.”
One of my fondest book-related memories is from my first year of college when I lived in this old mansion-turned-dorm called Seafox; I was reading Pearl Buck's Imperial Woman. Buck's artful and austere manifestations of beauty and pain informed my relationship with writing. I did not want the book to end. I implored my friends to help me find the most fitting corner of campus where I might savour the last pages of this novel. I ended up climbing onto a sprawling limb of an ancient tree on the eastern lawn behind our house- the limb arched over the rocky shore- and I read in the afternoon sunlight, the ocean sizzling over the stones below, leaf shadows dappling my face, as I read and wept through the last chapter. One of my best friends brought my copy with her on a Semester at Sea, and returned with the cover curled from the salt-damp air- she'd read the novel on deck as she sailed the world. I have that faded and precious copy on the bookshelf beside me now as I write.
JMF Tell us about your characters. Your characters are Scottish and Danish in Anangokaa and your recently published short story “Twin Fires” (Prairie Fire Vol. 45, No. 1). Do these cultures come from your background?
Commendable guess on Danish characters! My Prairie Fire short story, “Twin Flames”, takes place in Iceland. After a summer spent in Iceland with family friends when I was a girl, I often turn to her evocative landscape to illuminate a tale I wish to tell. I wrote “Twin Flames” over twenty years ago, but never attempted publication. Encouraged recently by fellow writers in the Canada Writes group to send out stories to find new readers and with any fortune, representation, I dusted off the story and was delighted when Prairie Fire accepted it. The piece feels slightly foreign to me now, as my writing has evolved over the intervening years, and yet it also feels lovely to witness my first published short story paying homage to my younger writer self. She waited a long time for this.
Anangokaa, my novel, was inspired by Highland ancestors on my dad's side who fled the Clearances to settle in a remote corner of Upper Canada. Flora, the young woman who became my protagonist, was only fourteen years old when she arrived in North America, losing her mother, father, and a sister to malarial fever within the first few weeks. Flora began as just a name on a ship's manifest when I was tracing my family line years ago, long before I considered authoring a story influenced by her life. I love reading historical fiction, but a genre with such scope was not something I had previously considered. Somewhere along the line, I was infected with a homesickness that seemed to belong to Flora, and before long I was dovetailing her hopes, sorrows and longings with a place, a time and individuals rooted in history.
As a child, my mom spoke so often of our departed loved ones and ancestors, sharing family lore, old photos, book inscriptions, letters... in this way, ancestors have always been a part of my journey and it felt quite natural for me to embrace newly discovered ancestors such as Flora in the same way...invite them to share lost stories, and ask them to allow me to reimagine stories from silence. There is a modern-day philosopher I admire, Bayo Akomolafe, who says it so beautifully: "Your life's work is an intergenerational project, an ancestral conspiracy, a continuous meeting of bodies, a queering of temporality. Your life is not yours to resolve, yours to complete, or yours to contain. It is necessarily the life of the many. Be thankful for the threadbare places of your life, for it gives the many who are yet to come something to stitch theirs with."
JMF Anangokaa was released in 2023, and I chose it as one of my best reads of 2023. It was a strong debut novel. Are there more novels or short stories to come, I hope?
I am honoured that you chose Anangokaa as one of your best reads of 2023. Indeed, there are more stories and novels to come! The Antigonish Review is publishing a short story of mine, Bound, in their upcoming issue. It is a story taken from the novel I am currently working on, a continuation of Flora's story as her character is forged by myriad experiences during the War of 1812.
I am halfway through writing Anangokaa’s sequel. I also dabble in scenes for a novel set in Romania, which is loosely based on a few days I spent in the Carpathian Mountains. I thought I would finish my Romanian novel long before Anangokaa, but Flora had other plans for me.
JMF What books have caught your eye recently?
I have had my eye on Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Falling Leaves after enjoying his debut Moon of the Crusted Snow; and Heidi Reimer's debut, The Mother Act. Heidi’s daughter is a dear friend of my daughter, and we find it serendipitous that our debut novels were published a year apart.
I am currently savouring The Tale of Murasaki by Liza Dalby, Charlotte Gray's Flint and Feather, the Life of E. Pauline Johnson, and I just finished Erik Larson's Thunderstruck. All highly recommended.
JMF If you could give one piece of advice to an unpublished author, what would it be?
Know that you are a perfect conduit for stories the universe longs to tell.
About the Interviewer
James M. Fisher is the Editor-in-Chief of The Seaboard Review. He lives in Miramichi New Brunswick with his wife Diane, their Tabby cat Eddie and Buster the Border Collie. James works as an MRI Technologist at the Miramichi Hospital.