Hanel's book examines a young woman's confounding story
BY AMANDA DYSLIN ’03, '14
Rachael Hanel at the St. Peter, Minn. gravesite of Camilla Hall, the subject of Hanel's upcoming book on the SLA fugitive killed in 1974.
The Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the George Floyd protests, a mass shooting at a Congressional Baseball Game practice. There’s not been a time in U.S. history devoid of politically motivated violence, and yet most of us sit back at a distance, unable to fathom what could lead someone to actually pick up that gun, break down that door, light that match.
Minnesota State University, Mankato creative writing professor Rachael Hanel has been examining these complexities of human nature for more than 20 years after first reading the name Camilla Hall. Hanel, of Madison Lake, Minn., was reading a StarTribune story in 1999 about the arrest of Sara Jane Olson for her criminal involvement in the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in the mid-1970s. A sidebar included a photo of Hall—an SLA member who died at age 29 in a shootout with police in Los Angeles in 1974—with a caption that noted she had grown up in St. Peter, Minn.
“I was working at The Free Press (as a reporter), and so I went to the office later that day and said, ‘Here’s a local connection, so let’s do something on this,’” said Hanel.
Research led Hanel to Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, where both Hall’s parents held academic positions until 1952. Her mother, Lorena Hall, helped found the art department. Her father, George Hall, who taught theology and was also a Lutheran minister, had left historical documentation at the college on his daughter’s short life, including numerous letters she wrote to her parents.
“He was always writing, and I think he just really had that mindset of preserving history and of documentation,” Hanel said.
The result of Hanel’s initial efforts was a historical article in The Free Press, but she knew immediately there was more there. The article scratched the surface of the who, what, when and how. But the “why” of a young, privileged, educated, small-town, Lutheran-born Midwesterner ending up dead in a hail of gunfire couldn’t be answered in a few hundred words.
Hanel, who was working on her master’s in history at the time at Minnesota State Mankato, expounded more on Hall as her thesis topic, finishing in 2004.
Hall is buried alongside three siblings who died in their childhood.
She returned again to Hall in 2013 to finally take a narrative lens, resulting in her forthcoming book, “Not the Camilla We Knew: One Woman's Life from Small-town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army,” to be published Dec. 13 by University of Minnesota Press.
The questions Hanel needed the book to answer are the ones we all have when we see ourselves in Hall’s upbringing and see so little of ourselves in her ending. What caused such a tremendous shift in nature? Are we all capable of that shift?
“Media like to reduce things to very simple terms, but I found the more that I dug into her life that she was a very complex individual with a lot of complex issues that would have factored into her ultimate decisions,” Hanel said.
Hanel’s research included use of recordings of interviews with the late George and Lorena Hall, as well as several of Hall’s friends (done by a Chicago-area psychology student, Harvey Honig, doing a dissertation in 1978); newspaper articles; and materials in the Gustavus archives. She also briefly interviewed Olson in prison, although she didn’t know Hall and would only speak in general terms about that time.
Hanel's book, to be published in December.
Still, Hanel was interested in drawing parallels to women who made similar decisions and how their lives led them down those paths. She was also interested in exploring the motivating power of grief. Hall had three siblings and all had died in childhood, leaving her family in mourning for years.
“I do bring that into the book—that grief, that unspoken grief that we tend not to really address as Midwesterners,” Hanel said. “With Camilla’s loss of her siblings, she gets to California, she gets this group of people, and she sees them as siblings. There’s definitely some parallels there.”
Watching the news, Hanel said she’s been struck by how timely the themes of the book and of Hall’s life continue to be. Mostly Hanel hopes the book helps to correct the historical record. Hall wasn’t just a “militant lesbian,” as she was painted to be. She wasn’t just a “violent extremist.” She wasn’t “just” anything. Because none of us are.
“She was really complex and human, like all of us,” Hanel said. “Everybody deserves to be looked at for their full humanity.”
Hanel is also the author of “We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger's Daughter,” published in 2013. For more about her new book, visit rachaelhanel.com.