John Cameron

John Cameron is an historian who writes about the American Civil War and 18th century France. Cameron’s nonfiction book, Tar Heels in Gray, was published in 2021. His first historical novel, The Roads of War, was published in 2022. Cameron grew up in the Sand Hills of North Carolina, where many generations of his Scottish-American ancestors lived. He spent every summer working in tobacco fields until he went away to college. At Davidson College, he studied history, and attended graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill, specializing in 18th century France and the Revolution. He is based in Norfolk, Virginia.

Twitter: @johnbcameron1

Facebook: @JohnCameronWriter 

Do you collect anything? If so, what, why, and for how long?
Like most authors, I collect books. No particular genre, just whatever I might want to read. This includes both fiction and many varieties of non-fiction. 
Since I was about eight years old I’ve collected postage stamps.  A neighbor lived in my village who corresponded often with family in Australia.  I happened to see the stamps and was intrigued with the exotic animals. I asked if he would give them to me.  After a short time, I expanded to other countries.  French colonial stamps proved to be as interesting as those from Australia.  I soon realized you could view a country’s history in stamps (at least since the 1850s).  Especially interesting for me are countries that no longer exist.  The country might have been incorporated into another as was Piedmont.  Or they were artificial countries created by temporary conquest, for example, Moravia or Manchukuo.

Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance?
Before Covid-19 I was a passionate dancer.  Nothing got my endorphins going like dancing.  In the lowest points of my life dancing was the only thing that would give me joy and temporary relief from grief.  All social dancing is good, but I especially like Blues, Zydeco and Cajun.  Just put me on a dance floor with great music and I’m in heaven.  The cessation of social dancing is one of the infrequently discussed terrible results of Covid-19.  I fear it may never return.

Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?
If I find anything I like in the first twenty pages, I’ll persevere for another twenty or thirty. A book doesn’t have to be perfect for me to read to the end. It must have an interesting plot and some characters I care about on some level.  I expect a book to leave me with a sense of completion or satisfaction. The ending doesn’t have to be happy.  Indeed, many good books end on a decidedly unhappy note. But I don’t like feeling the author stopped writing too soon.  I also don’t want to leave the book feeling that life is meaningless.  To avoid that I keep a short list of authors whose books I will not read.

What period of history do you wish you knew more about?
I would love to know more about the pre-Greek societies that lived along the northern rim of the Mediterranean.  We know little about them.  Their languages have vanished. Greek mythology as well as Aristotle and Xenophon give us tantalizing clues. These black-haired people were still present in Aristotle’s time living alongside the Greeks.  Unfortunately, however, he did not think them worth describing. The black-aired people seem to have been far less patriarchal than their conquers.  Could they have been matriarchal?  Perhaps, but we’ll never know.  I keep hoping for the discovery of a musty manuscript of an unknown book of Aristotle or Xenophon on the Black-haired people.  Alas, the odds are doubtless very low.

Is your go to comfort food sweet or savory? Is it something you make yourself? Does food inspire your writing?
My comfort foods are definitely savory.  A bowl of Cajun gumbo, a slice of fried country ham in a homemade biscuit, and some mac and cheese brings joy to my soul.
I use food a lot in my novels.  To know what food people ate and how it was prepared tells us much about them.   In The Roads of War I wanted readers to know that in 1860 North Carolina cooking was still done in fireplaces and that people ate a great deal of pork and molasses.
In my forthcoming novel The Price of Freedom (TouchPoint Press, March 2023) James Hemings, in Paris with Thomas Jefferson, studies the new bourgeois style of cooking.  He becomes a master of the new French cooking techniques. Several recipes are described in the novel.  Later, back in the United States, Hemings finds to his irritation that many people prefer plain country food rather than fancy French food.