Here is an image of Opi much as we saw it on our first visit for cross-country skiing. I’m not much of a skier, but walking in the late afternoon in those quiet streets that so quickly become mountain trails, talking to the people and wondering how it would be to live here a century ago, to have no prospects and yet have no other experience of the world, I first began to have an image of Irma and by the time we returned home to Fusaro, near Naples, I knew she was named Irma and began to make the notes that would become first a short story and then When We Were Strangers.
[Image used by permission of http://www.ViaggioinAbruzzo.it]
Pamela Schoenewaldt, historical novels of immigration and the search for self in new worlds: WHEN WE WERE STRANGERS, SWIMMING IN THE MOON, and UNDER THE SAME BLUE SKY (all HarperCollins).
pamelaschoenewaldt.com 
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