An astonishing narrative poem using the colorful and daring characters of the Globe Theatre during the life of Shakespeare to create the incredible voices of its actors, bit players, poets, stage managers and lovelorn ladies of his day. Shakespeare, his wife, his Dark Lady and his poor dead boy all spring from the pages with fact and fiction intertwined into a virtuoso book that will redefine the classroom's experience of Elizabethan studies. A new and provocative approach to a beloved subject.
At the age of 12, Michelle Cameron's father told her she would never become a writer. She believed him.
But Michelle kept writing anyway. When her family moved to Israel when she was 15, and Michelle spent three weeks in a bomb shelter (it was 1973 and her boarding school was close to the Syrian border), she wrote about the fires on the hills and the ground shaking above her head.
Completing her high school education in Israel, she attended Tel Aviv University, graduating with a degree in English Literature and then spent two years in the Israeli army. When she was ready to find her first job, she thought it would be temporary - just until she sold her first novel.
The demands of work and family made Michelle put her literary ambitions aside. As part of her technical writing career, she began working in the interactive arena, moving to companies that specialized in Internet creation. She is now Creative Director at a digital agency, working for varied past and present clients including New York City Ballet, the Juilliard School, Rutgers University, C.R. Bard, Inc., and many others.
Among the influences that brought Michelle back to writing was a six-year old muse - her son, Alex - whose early stories, poems, and cartoons made her remember why she wanted to write in the first place. She began to take her laptop with her in the car, writing in the karate dojo and in the bleachers of the ball field.
For a while, poetry came quicker than prose and Michelle began to submit and publish her work. The idea of writing a series of poems about William Shakespeare - whom Michelle had researched for one of her early novels - flowered into a verse novel, In the Shadow of the Globe, published in 2003 by Lit Pot Press. The book became the 2003-4 Winter Book Selection by the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey and has been performed in many venues, including the Stella Adler Studio of Acting.
When Michelle cast about for her next writing topic, she began exploring her family tree for a possible plot line. It was then that she discovered the truth of her mother's claim that her side of the family could trace their roots back to the 1200s. Intrigued, Michelle began to research her ancestor, Meir of Rothenberg, becoming convinced that his amazing story needed to be told. The result is The Fruit of Her Hands.
To complete the novel, Michelle needed more time than she could find in the normal course of the day as she was juggling the day job, growing boys, and a part-time teaching position. Her solution? She now sets her alarm for 4:30 AM every morning.
