FOR PEOPLE, ABOUT PEOPLE:

AN INTERVIEW WITH CAMY SORBELLO

by Larry Belle

Camy Sorbello was born and raised in the Finger Lakes region of Western New York where she runs a ninety-three-acre horticultural tree farm. She has published short fiction in Dusty Bohemia, Western Digest, has published articles in specialty publications such as Hard Hat News, Grower, and American Cemetery, and is a contributing journalist to the Courier-Journal. A published author of short stories, Camy recently completed a novel called Crossing Over, based on life in the Texas-Mexican border where she spends her winters, does Elder Hostel teaching, and works to help immigrants.

Camy teaches writing at Writers & Books and at the Community College of the Finger Lakes . She also teaches English to Spanish speakers, and Spanish to English speakers who are working with Spanish speaking migrant workers . She describes her ambitions as a writer as wanting “to record the struggles and experiences of our time, and in particular of those people whose voices haven't been heard as clearly as they've deserved”

For additional information about Camy Sorbello, you can visit her website at www.camysorbello.com or contact her directly at camy@camysorbello.com.

 

Larry Belle : How did you get your start as a writer

Camy Sorbello : My family came from Sicily as poverty-stricken immigrants. They came to do whatever. Some of my relatives ended up in tailor shops, factory work, and my mom's family ended up farming because her dad was still tied to the land. He always wanted a farm of his own, which he could not have in Sicily , and that is how we ended up in agriculture.

 

 

The Sorbellos are not people who do well working for others. Everybody in the family, regardless of what we get into, is self-employed, even the ones in other professions, working in things where you can take care of yourself and not really rely on others.

We've all continued with agriculture in one form or another, but more into the retail and landscaping end of the business. In 1950, “the year I was born,” my uncle likes to say, he thought his farming was going nowhere. He said that he “kept buying chickens and they kept dying,” that was kind of a dead end for everybody.

He started a very small retail stand with the shrubs. Then people said to him, “Would you plant them?” “Sure, why not, I got a shovel.” That's the way he got into the garden center and landscape business. He landscaped St. John Fisher College when it was built

As soon as I graduated from the University of Rochester with a bachelors degree in English Lit , I went into the family horticultural retail business which was a business my brother had started, like the one my uncle had owned. I went in as the manager of my brother's retail store: greenhouse work, managing the help, retail sales, exterior landscaping and, after several years, interior landscaping. It was quite a good business, supplying and taking care of plants for banks and offices.

After fourteen years in managing horticultural retail, I decided to get out of it. I was tired of it, and that's when my family bought this farm in Ontario County where we are right now. It is about ninety-three acres in landscape trees. Now I work here exclusively harvesting and maintaining the trees.

Maybe this makes me sound like a little more provincial than I really am. I've traveled in England , France, and Sicily, and spent two weeks on a Polish freighter. I've seen Germany , Switzerland , Holland and the Netherlands . I've also been to Central America, most recently visiting Guatemala to assist in an adoption. And of course I regularly visit Mexico, where for the last several years I have been spending the winters in the Texas out back working on a novel.

 

Larry : When did you start writing?

Camy: I did zero writing and almost no reading until the age of forty. When I would take a vacation, which was rare, I would read some books. I think the extent of my writing was a postcard home when I was on vacation and writing lists for my employees of what they had to do that day in the green house.

I did no writing and very little reading, it was just gone. Not part of my life. I had no use for it. No need for it. Maybe in the back of my mind I would think about it. I did write in school, of course. And I did enjoy reading, I would read when I could, but that was mostly in the winter when the nursery and landscaping business slowed down or on vacations. . I was working constantly, working, working, working…

 

 

Two things happened that got my writing started. My grandmother died. I was very close to her, and my mother said that we should really write her story and keep her story alive and her little tales.

At the same time, for some bizarre reason that I don't know, my cousin's wife, also a horticulturalist, was looking to get me a Christmas gift and she saw a very pretty journal. I never kept a journal, and journals were not yet the thing back then in 1990. But there were those empty pages beckoning. You know how that is. The combination of my grandmother's death and the journal came together and I started writing.

I started with an essay about my grandmother called The Dandelion is My Madeline -- pretty neat, eh? --combining my Sicilian grandmother with Proust. Don't ask me how I did it, but I had it published in the Italian Americana at the University of Rhode Island, a journal with a very prestigious editorial board. I was very pleased. I seemed to bring together a lot of aspects of my life in that one essay and it gave me a jump start.

I began writing while I was farming the trees. I would get off the tractor and run in from the fields and change my clothes and run out to cover a story for the local paper, or write an essay, or whatever.

I combined the horticultural tree growing and writing for quite a while. I started sending in a few other things and got some published in the local paper and other places. The local paper is a great place to start. I had a wonderful editor that let me write pretty much whatever I wanted to.

Then I tried branching out to some freelancing and started to do a little bit of fiction, somehow fiction jumped in there for some reason. Got a couple of little stories published here and there.

I took a few classes at Writers & Books and they were excellent and next thing I knew I ended up being an instructor there. In the meantime, I kept farming and landscaping and started writing my novel.

We started employing an increasingly Hispanic labor force and, lo and behold, my fluency in Spanish became a marketable skill on many levels. I would go out on the landscape jobs, not to do the physical work which I was no longer capable of doing, but to get the Mexican fellas started and clarify things with them. Then I would have some time to sit in my truck and work on my novel in between getting the job set up.

All those years before when I was managing my brother's business, I was working with the guys. We were out hauling dirt, loading trucks, unloading trucks, watering plants, loading hay. I loved it. I would probably still be doing it if my body had not given out with age, my wrist, and my elbows. Just couldn't do it anymore.

I did not tell anybody I was writing. If anybody came in the house and I was writing, I would tell them that I was doing lists of trees for the nursery. When the articles I wrote started to come out in the local paper my neighbors were shocked. I was known as “the tree lady”. I was always out on the tractor. I was always out with a crew of guys, planting, hauling, and digging.

They would ask, “Did you write that article? How did you do that?” I would say, “Well, I use to write years ago when I was in school.”

 

Larry : Do you think your family background or your education had anything to do with you starting to write?

Camy : In my family we don't need anybody's support or approval. We just do it. I was the first woman in either family to go to college. Just going to high school was considered an accomplishment. But the fact I had gone to college was not a big deal to anybody , including me, It was more of a big deal that we got the farm started, the business going, the trees planted. That was more of a big deal and accomplishment.

The writing was just sort of laying their latent, waiting for the right time, sort of like the seeds -- if you want to make an analogy to horticulture -- that have to wait twenty years until the conditions are just right, the moisture, the heat, and so forth, before they sprout.

I had all the good background, I had excellent high school and college education, but it had to go to sleep till the right time.

 

Larry : How do you feel about all those years you were working but could have been writing?

Camy : People say too bad you didn't get an MFA or something. No! I write short stories and novels and people say, “Wow, where to did you come up with this fantastic character? How did you do that?” I say “I worked with him a few years ago.” What the heck, all I did was change his name.

These are people I know. My hero is Steinbeck. I reread him all the time. They use to say to him where did you get this? Where did you get that? He would say, “Oh, I was bucking hay up in Salinas … there was a guy like that.” I would like to think of myself as a sort of female Steinbeck.

Your average university graduate doesn't know people like that, the people I worked with over the years, truck drivers, migrant workers… I was the only woman in a male oriented field. This is in the 70's. I would be the only woman on job sites, at meetings, I would go out in the trees with local guys and they weren't exactly the cream of society, you know. My neighbors use to worry whether I would come out alive.

I did, of course. People who know me, like my brother, when they read my stuff, say, “Oh, that's so and so, he ended up in jail.” I say, “Yah, that's the one.” Those years of living, for lack of a better word, gave me what I have to work with now that I'm writing.

 

Larry : How do you manage to tree farm, teach at Writers and Books, teach Spanish, and to write?

Camy : Lists. I make a lot of lists. Compartmentalize. A lot of it has to do with the seasons, the academic and the natural seasons. You have to prioritize what has to be done, when it has to be done.

The difference is that when I was managing my brother's business I had one thing to do, every day, seven days a week, with three days off a year. The same thing here on the farm, when we started planting tress, ninety-three acres, you have to get the trees in when the conditions are right. I would go for days and days without leaving this property.

Work in the field, come into the house to sleep, and then back into the field. It was pretty much a one-dimensional situation.

When I started branching out more and more into other things, I slowly got away from the landscaping and farming and more and more into the teaching and writing, I found myself changing clothes from field clothes to city clothes, driving back and forth from the country and city. A much more scattered existence. Harder to keep balanced.

I do a lot of work here at the kitchen table. If the crew is out there working, I need to be accessible to them when they have questions. I will even sit outside and write or sit in the truck and write if we are on a job site. I wrote some of my first novel sitting in the truck between laying out shrubs and putting down mulch because that was where I was.

I work where I can, when I can. My family has done it that way their whole life. Like most immigrants and people during the Depression, they had a rough life. They lived where they could. They worked when they could. If it was nice work, that was good.

But you did what you had to do. You had to be extremely adaptable. Our family still lives by doing what needs to be done, when it needs to be done.

I have family responsibilities that come up unexpectedly. My brother drops the kids off, my uncle needs a ride to the doctor. I take the writing I am working on to the doctor's office and work on it while I'm waiting with him.

There is just too much in our lives that has never been scheduled or sedate and there never will be. You either have to sink or swim with it. I have grown up with mayhem. My life is still mayhem. But you function in it. I can write eight hours a day and really crank it out and then, maybe, there will be three days of family responsibility and I don't pick up a pen. But I've never missed a deadline for an article

You don't have routine or regularity with animals or plants, when you have green houses freezing in the middle of the night, or live-stock that get out in the dark. When the cows get out, you don't say you'll get them in the morning.

This is the way our lives have always been. This is why we can as a family be self-employed and self-starters, because we don't require schedules and structure. It's always a twenty-four hour day whirlwind for us. I can't say when the crew comes in and says the tractor broke down. I can't say, "I'm doing my two hours of writing now. Go sit there with the clock running doing nothing, I'll get to the tractor laterwhen I'm done."

 

LB: What writers and what kind of writing do you like

CS: Steinbeck is the ultimate. All my favorite writers are dead white males. Go figure. I like Shakespeare and Chaucer, of course. I like Twain, Louie Lamour. I think Lamour gets way short-changed. He is way more talented than people realize. There's an author I met in west Texas, Elmer Kelton, a excellent western writer and historian. He is a live dead white male.

My thing about writing is to write about real people. I know there are larger esoteric topics that can be part of literature. But I like to write for the people about the people. The earthier sort of things. Not in a vulgar sort of way, but I mean it doesn't have to be about rich people or educated people, it can be about anybody. That's what I like to read and that's what I like to write.

I have an almost reportorial style that I got from starting journalism. I like to think that if you didn't know the writer when you read my stuff, you wouldn't know whether it was written by a man or a woman. It isn't flowery. Not to the point of being Hemingwayesque, more along the lines of Steinbeck. It can be descriptive, but not so convoluted as to be overdone. No unnecessary adverbs.

I think when you come to an emotional situation -- and I do write about women -- less is more. The more you try to write flamboyantly about emotions or the traumas of life, the more it falls flat. I think it works best when you present something directly and honestly to your reader.

Think about Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men with Lenny there at the very end. It isn't flowery. It isn't sappy. But it certainly is moving. That's what you want to do with your writing.

I always use the example of the very dramatic scene in the Bible where its says, “Jesus wept.” Only two words, no adverb, no clause. It says so much. Just those two words.

That's what I want. To be direct and real.

 

The End

Additional information about Camy Sorbello is available online at her website at www.camysorbello.com. Interested readers may also email her directly at camy@camysorbello.com

Larry Belle is a Professor Emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he taught and served as dean of the College of Continuing Education. He currently teaches courses in history, ethics, and comparative health systems at RIT and Roberts Wesleyan College. His travel writing has appeared elsewhere in Unreal City, and he is currently at work on his memoirs. He may be reached at lwbcad@rit.edu.