In August, Suzanne Uttaro Samuels brings her process for crafting historical fiction to The Sparkle. “Storylines & Bloodlines: Writing the Hidden Family Narrative,” funded by Poets & Writers through a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, will incorporate a reading and interactive writing workshop exploring family stories, hidden histories, and the narratives we inherit—and reshape. Suzanne chatted with us about her holistic process for researching historical fiction. Her novel Seeds of the Pomegranate is out now from Sibylline Press.
Donna:
You write historical fiction; your Substack describes your work as “stories of people who defy the odds and rise above adversity.” How does Seeds of the Pomegranate relate to that theme?
Suzanne:
At its heart, Seeds of the Pomegranate is about survival—not only physical survival, but the quieter, more complicated work of holding onto yourself when the world keeps asking you to become someone else. Mimi Inglese leaves Sicily believing America will offer freedom and reinvention, only to discover that reinvention often comes at a cost.
I’ve always been drawn to people living at the edges of power—especially women whose labor, sacrifices, and compromises rarely made it into the historical record. Mimi survives not because she is heroic in any conventional sense, but because she is observant, resilient, and willing to navigate uncertainty when certainty is no longer available to her.
That idea shapes much of my writing, including my Substack, Persephone's Story. Again and again, I find myself returning to hidden histories, family silences, immigration stories, and the moral gray areas people enter when systems fail them. I’m interested in the tension between survival and self-invention—in what people conceal, what they carry forward, and what it costs to begin again.
Donna:
Mimi, your main character, is based on a family member (whose image graces the cover of your novel) and her struggles. What strikes you most about the records you unearthed, and what stands out to you as the biggest gap you had to fill with fiction?
Suzanne:
What struck me most was how incomplete the record always is. You find manifests, addresses, marriage certificates, census records—small official traces of a life—but the emotional reality is missing. The documents tell you that someone arrived somewhere, married someone, had a child, or changed an address. They rarely tell you what frightened them, what they regretted, or what they had to give up to survive.
I was fascinated by the instability of identity within immigrant life. Names shifted. Ages changed. Stories were adjusted depending on the circumstances. Even the official records often contradicted one another. That felt deeply human to me. Immigration is so often an act of translation, not only across language but across class, culture, and selfhood.
The largest gap fiction had to fill was Mimi’s interior life: her loneliness, ambition, anger, desire, and divided loyalties. The woman who inspired the novel left behind a photograph and fragments of a paper trail. Fiction allowed me to imagine the emotional texture beneath those fragments—the private negotiations and compromises history rarely records, especially for women.
In many ways, the novel emerged from those silences. I wasn’t trying to reconstruct history perfectly. I was trying to listen for what had been left out.
Donna:
What’s next for you? What are you building your days around, in your work and in your life?
Suzanne:
Right now I’m at work on a new historical novel, The Orphans’ Wheel, set in nineteenth-century Sicily during the years surrounding Italian unification. The novel centers on a foundling wheel—a place where infants could be anonymously abandoned—and explores questions of identity, motherhood, secrecy, class, and belonging. Like Seeds of the Pomegranate, it’s deeply concerned with the lives history tends to overlook or flatten.
This summer I’ll be traveling to Sicily for research, spending time in Palermo and western Sicily, walking through archives and churches and small towns connected to the novel. Research, for me, is never only intellectual. Place matters. Light matters. Dialect, food, processions, streets, the shape of a harbor—all of it enters the work eventually.
More broadly, I’m building my days around the conversation between history and storytelling: teaching workshops, speaking with readers, writing essays for Persephone’s Story, and continuing to think about how fiction can give shape to experiences that were never fully recorded.
And increasingly, I’m trying to leave room for slowness—for long walks in the Adirondacks where I live, time with family, and the ordinary observations that so often become the emotional center of a story later on.