Flight of Imagination
Pama Mitchell doesn’t like to sit still. From daily walks in her Clifton neighborhood to taking an African safari, her curiosity and energy define her personality.
Full disclosure, I have known her for more than 20 years, fittingly enough brought together by writing, with a friendship maintained through a mutual appreciation for good food, travel, and each other.
After retiring from University of Cincinnati in 2020 and looking for a way to stay busy during the early days of the COVID pandemic, Mitchell embarked on a next chapter (pun most definitely intended) of a her lift.
When she needed a new project, a friend suggested she write a novel
“I had no ambition whatsoever to write a novel. I’ve been a writer all my life, but only journalism and academic writing,” says Mitchell. “On the other hand, I majored in literature and must have read a thousand novels over my lifetime. “
Faced with both the time and the opportunity to write her own novel, Mitchell found she didn’t have an idea.
But that soon changed.
“I remembered some of the stories my late mother told me about her childhood and young adulthood during the Depression and World War II,” says Mitchell. “She was the eldest daughter of a large farming family in rural Georgia, where some of the old folks still remembered General Sherman’s Union Army marauding through the land on his way to capture Savannah. Her family couldn’t sustain the farm through the Depression, and she and a couple of siblings moved to Savannah to find work. The U.S. entered the war, and her life changed radically.”
For Mitchell, that seemed like a good place to start a work of imagination.
“I started from scratch as a fiction writer,” says Mitchell. “The first thing I did was take a course at UC in creative writing—me and the undergrads. It was helpful but truly was just a start.”
Later Mitchell joined the Cincinnati Fiction Writers group, where she submitted early chapters for review and discussion by more experienced writers.
“Again, it was helpful,” she says, “but also daunting. I sure had a lot to learn.”
A breakthrough came when the person leading that group, Wendy Vogel, took Mitchell on as a mentee. “Wendy read many of my chapters and taught me the difference between a family memoir and a polished work of fiction,” says Mitchell. “She told me ‘You have to learn to think like a novelist,’ which meant adding complexity to the characters and their relationships along with inventing much more dramatic events than happened in my mother’s life.”
The term “plucky heroine” gets used a lot, but that’s the perfect way to describe Ginny Neely, Mitchell’s protagonist. Through the Great Depression and WWII, Ginny faces the loss of everything she holds dear, falls in love (more than once!), and has her world change in ways she never could have imagined. Though set in the 1930s and ‘40s, those themes resonate just as much today and Mitchell’s fast-paced writing keeps you turning the page to see what happens next.
Influenced by stories from her mother and other relatives she met as part of her research on the era, Mitchell has crafted a historical novel that is heartfelt and compelling, that offers insight into issues we’re still facing in today’s world.
– Tricia Suit