Theresa Kaminski

Theresa Kaminski holds a PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of a trilogy of nonfiction history books on American women in the Philippine Islands during World War II, the most recent of which is Angels of the Underground. Theresa’s biography, Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War, is forthcoming from Lyons Press, and she is currently completing the first full-length biography of America’s favorite cowgirl, Dale Evans.

Twitter: @KaminskiTheresa

Instagram: @Hers_torian

Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?

This doesn't technically qualify as a film, but it's a mini series based on a movie, based on a novel. I was fascinated by A Town Like Alice, which ran on Masterpiece Theatre in the early 1980s. (There was a 1950s film version made of Nevil Shute's novel of the same name, which I've also since seen.) It's a fictionalized account of a group of mostly English women and children taken prisoner in Malaya by the Japanese during World War II. I started reading as much as I could find about internment in the Pacific theater and ended up writing my first book, Prisoners in Paradise.

Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?

I usually don't listen to music while I write, even during my current project, a biography of the popular 20th-century singer/actress Dale Evans. The exception to this came when I was writing my second book, Citizen of Empire. For some reason, I couldn't get enough of Paul Simon's Graceland, and I had it on constant repeat.

Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?

All the time, through every book and every book talk event. (How long did it take me to submit these answers?) I'm always so awed at the books other people write that I think of my own as some kind of separate species.

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?

I'm usually a couple of chapters in before I decide to bail on a book. And I really do believe that it's because I don't connect with it, not that it's a "bad" book. Also, after I read the first couple of chapters, I always read the last chapter or two. That's how I decide if I want to commit to the whole thing. I know a lot of people will gasp at this, but I think it's because I'm a historian. I'm accustomed to already knowing how things turn out; more intriguing is why they turn out that way. That's the good stuff in the middle of every book's story.

What piece of clothing tells the most interesting story about your life?

In the mid-1970s I brought a brown suede fringed jacket during a day trip to Mexico. I wore it a lot in the 70s, but since then it's only been used as a costume item. It's the one fashion relic I've never been able to part with, though I'm not exactly sure what kind of story that tells about my life. I'm better at writing about other people's lives.