“Not the Camilla We Knew,” a blend of biography and narrative nonfiction, follows Camilla Hall’s journey from small-town Minnesota girl to gun-wielding member of the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army — which made its mark on the U.S. in the 1970s by kidnapping and radicalizing publishing empire heiress Patty Hearst.
The book was published late in 2022 by the University of Minnesota Press and was written by local author and professor Rachael Hanel. A Waseca native with a passion for history, Hanel analyzes Hall’s confusing transition with an in-depth look at her early life and the circumstances that led to her actions and her death — in a dramatic Los Angeles shootout.
Hanel breathes new life and understanding into Hall, who was often ridiculed in mainstream media, and invites readers to understand one woman’s story through a lens less viewed.
Sarah James: You write as though you have a deep connection with Camilla Hall. It’s almost spiritual at times. When did this start?
Rachael Hanel: I came across Camilla’s story in 1999, or I came across her picture, and I would say right away I was fascinated. I was fascinated with the little information that went along with her picture — it was in the newspaper. It was just a little bit about how Camilla was from St. Peter and that she had become wrapped up in the SLA, and I just felt like I wanted to know more. We were both from small-town Minnesota, so I felt just a geographical kinship with her, right from the beginning.
SJ: “Not the Camilla We Knew” does not follow a strict chronological narrative structure. What were you trying to get across with this approach?
RH: I have the book divided into three parts. I wanted to spend the first part of the book setting up her life, her background. The second part goes into her life in California, becoming wrapped up in the SLA. Then the third part is a psychological look into her life. Now we know the facts and the events, but why might this have happened?
SJ: It would have been easy to turn Camilla into a caricature. How did you make her so human, so multidimensional?
RH: Once I started to dig more into her life and found she had these tragedies, her siblings preceding her in death, and once I learned her first jobs were in social work, that she had this penchant for helping people, that is what I wanted people to know about her, that she had these great qualities people loved about her. When people do outlandish, radical things, often what we hear about is that very moment. We don’t take a look into why they might have done that. I wanted to get across to the reader that she had this very complex life — she wasn’t just this one last thing.
SJ: How does your role as a journalist impact your research and writing process?
RH: I did start my career as a journalist. I also have a degree in history, so I love research. I write nonfiction and I teach nonfiction, and when I’m teaching, one thing I like to talk about is the truth spectrum. There’s a lot of leeway we have as creative nonfiction writers to do a little more than you could writing a journalistic report. It’s important to me to let the reader know that any speculation is grounded in research. I’m not going to start assuming crazy things about people I am writing about. I want to get to know them first; then I’m more comfortable saying to the reader, “Oh, I’m speculating here.” Being grounded in research is really important to me.
SJ: Do you believe the repeated losses in Camilla’s life drove her into the SLA, or was it more an act of political defiance?
RH: I think we’ll never know for sure, but I can’t imagine that much loss in your life, (the loss) of your siblings, not having an impact on the choices that you make. The SLA was a small group who were Camilla’s peers. She was one of the oldest, but I don’t think it’s a leap to imagine she could have seen them as a family, as stand-ins for siblings. But also, she was definitely politically motivated. She was frustrated. She spent many years trying to change the system, trying to help people, and was met with roadblocks at every turn. She was complex — all her life experiences likely fed into those final choices that she made.
SJ: You’re from Waseca, can you tell me a little bit about your early life growing up there?
RH: I very much enjoyed growing up in Waseca. It’s a small town, but not too small. I knew everyone in my high school and had a great group of friends. I was surrounded by a lot of love in my immediate family and extended family. I grew up around my cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents, and I cherish those memories. I feel incredibly lucky to have had such a wonderful childhood.
SJ: When did you begin writing and what was it that inspired you?
RH: I was a voracious reader, reading anything and everything. I was reading before I went to kindergarten, and my interest in writing came out of that. I was surrounded by a lot of news growing up — television, newspapers and radio — and the drama of real life fascinated me. I never wanted to make up stories; I only wanted to report on things that happened. The first thing I remember writing was a biography of my dad when I was about in third grade.
SJ: What first fostered your interest and love for history?
RH: I can trace my love of history directly to spending a lot of time in cemeteries. My dad was a gravedigger and he and my mom mowed and maintained cemeteries, and I went to work with them a lot. I would walk around the cemeteries reading gravestones and wondering about the people who died. From a young age I knew there were people who had lived before me who had stories of love and loss and tragedy. I wanted to find out more about this place I came from so I remember researching a lot about Waseca’s history while I was still a young child.
SJ: Do you think there are lessons for us that can be learned through studying history?”
RH: Oh my, yes! I end up saying a version of this several times a week: “We’ve been here before.” Our world is crazy right now, no doubt about it. But I think some of the panic and anxiety can be lessened if we look to history and figure out how people before us handled similar situations. They may not have handled things well, but we can learn from that, too, and resolve to do things differently.
SJ: Tell us about your writing process.
RH: The beginning involves a lot of thinking, rumination, research and reading. I tend to spend a lot of time just mulling things over, turning them around in my head. Then I will open a Word document and start to jot some things down. This stage is really messy and usually pretty terrible. Then I just cycle around, going back to the thinking, rumination, research, reading, mulling, then write, and so on. Even with short essays I tend to do four or five full revisions before I’m even comfortable sending it to my writing group for feedback. Only after more revisions and more feedback will I feel comfortable sending it out for publication.
SJ: Have you learned anything from your first book, “We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter,” that you applied to this one?
RH: In terms of writing, the two books are very different, even though they are both nonfiction. In the memoir I was writing about myself, and with my new book I’m writing about someone else. The process of getting my books published was the same, though. Even though I had a lot of rejections for the Camilla book, I had more confidence that it would find a home because my first book found a home.
Sarah James is a recent graduate of the creative writing program at Minnesota State University. She is a keen fiction writer originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland.