Nancy Jensen Interview, plus links to author biography, book summaries, excerpts and reviews

An interview with Nancy Jensen

BookBrowsers had the chance to chat with Nancy Jensen on our community forum. Below we've formatted the conversation in Q&A style, if you'd like to view the full discussion, you can do so here.

BookBrowse: Where did the idea for In Our Midst come from? What made you decide to write about German individuals' experiences in America during WWII?

Nancy Jensen: When I was working on my first novel The Sisters, I briefly thought about weaving an experience of the anti-German hysteria of WWI into one of my characters' backstories, so I did a quick internet search to remind myself of what I thought I knew. One of the links that came up was for The Freedom of Information Times website (www.foitimes.com). As soon as I started reading it, I realized that the site was describing experiences from WW II–not WW I–and I was surprised, but when I realized that the main subject of the site was the internment of German-Americans in the United States, I was stunned. I'd never heard of this before. Ultimately I decided to go another way with my character in The Sisters, and I went on with writing the book, but this little nugget of information stayed in my mind.

Years later, when I started gravitating toward writing another novel with a focus on the WW II American home front, I remembered that website and looked it up again. The main characters for the new novel were very different at the beginning–early versions of the characters who would ultimately become Iris Sloan and Everett Beale–and I began to think that a family of German-Americans might be minor characters in their orbit. After a while, I found the beginnings of my characters Hugh and Bess, and, thinking of a story of German-American brothers who were arrested and interned as teenagers, I started fleshing out a pair of brothers who were friends with Hugh and Bess–thinking all the time of these brothers as secondary characters. I worked in this direction for a little while, but I kept being drawn back to the Freedom of Information Times website and the site for the German American Internee Coalition. Then, suddenly, Nina emerged. She wouldn't leave me alone. I even started dreaming about her. I couldn't make any progress at all on the original idea. I must have scrapped from five to thirty pages six or seven times. Finally, I realized it was the story of the Austs (who by then had a name and a family structure formed) that demanded to be told. As soon as I admitted that to myself, the first chapter poured out quickly.

BB: How fascinating! You're not the first author I've heard say that a character wouldn't leave them alone. Did you have a similar experience with the characters in The Sisters, or was this a first for you?

NJ: I had a very similar experience when writing The Sisters. My first idea of the character who became Mabel, one of the original pair of sisters in the novel, was shockingly different from the woman Mabel ultimately became. At one point, I was trying to finish a scene, but I simply couldn't make Mabel say or do what I had in mind, and it suddenly felt like she was inside my head screaming, "That is not who I am!" So I stepped away from my computer, made a cup of tea, sat down with a notebook and said, "Okay, tell me who you are."

BB: What was the process you used to research the topic? Did you uncover anything surprising?

NJ: Really, everything was surprising, as I hadn't known anything at all about the internment of German-Americans until I stumbled across the information while looking for something else. Once I did fix on the true subject of the novel, I read the few scholarly historical works available at the time, and then I read the memoirs of survivors who were interned as children with their families. Any interview or narrative from survivors I could find published or recorded anywhere, I read. After writing the first chapter quickly, I didn't write much more for over a year, as I was spending all my free time in research. Once the story started to develop and I was writing again, I often paused to research something else as new characters and situations emerged–things like the Good Shepherd Sisters, German Lieder and German opera, woodworking, the Merchant Marine, and many other things.

BB: When I think about the research that goes into historical fiction I never in a million years would have considered all the minor things you need to learn about to make your story authentic - like woodworking, the Merchant Marines, Lieder, etc. When you first started writing did you expect to have to invest so much time researching this sort of thing as well as the time period in general, or was that a surprise to you?

NJ: My experience of writing The Sisters prepared me for some of what I think of as "sidebar research"–those unexpected things that I discover along the way I need to know. The need to do this did surprise me while working The Sisters, which (it's okay to laugh) I never thought of as an historical novel, despite its opening in 1927, but once I realized, for instance, that I needed to know exactly what a new Burger Chef sign looked like at night in 1957, I greatly enjoyed the search, which always led to new discoveries that helped further develop my characters.

As I worked on In Our Midst, I found I looked forward to these sidebar needs. Not only was the search always interesting, it was something I could do during the school year when I was teaching full time. This kept my characters and the story alive for me for those ten months a year with almost no writing-time. I had to learn to be careful, too, because that kind of research is so interesting I'm prone to keep on with it to avoid actual writing. It's easy to justify the time as work toward the writing–but after a point, it's just another psychological trick writers play on themselves, like, in the old days, needing to make sure all the pencils were sharpened perfectly before starting work.

The one time I was really daunted by the weight of research was just after I read Wolf Hall. I had begun my preliminary research for In Our Midst a few months before, but after reading Mantel's novel and feeling such admiration for that immersive experience, I became a little depressed, feeling like I'd never be able to do anything close to that. I almost gave up before I started because the task seemed too great.

BB: Has anyone ever questioned you on a historical point?

NJ: A few people have questioned me on an historical point, but the challenges tend to come from what they've heard rather than from what they've studied or experienced. I don't have all the sources for either of my novels instantly at my fingertips all the time, but I do have the sources for everything documented in my notes.

The best compliment I have ever received relative to the historical immersion, and probably will ever receive, came from Art Jacobs, who is the author of the Freedom of Information Times website (www.foitimes.com) Though I didn't know it until after In Our Midst had been acquired by Dzanc Books, all the scholarship on the German-American Internment was initially founded on material Art discovered and brought to light. He self-published a memoir about his family's internment: The Prison Called Hohenasperg: An American boy betrayed by his government in WW II. Though that was among the first books I read in my research, it wasn't until I came to know Art via email that I realized that, without his lifelong effort, this part of American history might truly have been lost forever.

When I contacted the German American Internee Coalition (https://gaic.info/) to let them know my book was coming out (and to express my appreciation for their helpful website), someone passed the info along to Art Jacobs. He emailed me immediately, and my publisher sent him an advance copy. He started reading as soon as it arrived, and suddenly my email was bursting with messages from him. Every few pages, he'd stop to send me a note to say how moved he was or how I'd gotten something exactly right. He told me that experiencing Nina's reaction to the hut assigned to the Austs felt like I was directly channeling his mother's memories.

My editor asked Art if he would offer a blurb for the hardcover, and he sent this–the best compliment ever: "The story is reported as if the author had lived through the immeasurable tragedy."

Art and I kept up an intense email friendship for a couple of years, until he became too ill to continue. Around that time, he decided he wanted to republish his memoir with some photographs, and he did me the enormous honor of asking me to help select, place, and caption them. His level of trust in me still brings me to tears. Art passed late in 2023, a few months before his 91st birthday. Though we never met–just lots of email and a couple of brief phone conversations–I miss him as I miss other dear friends.

BB: The amount of research that you had to do for your books quickly becomes obvious when reading them. How did you go about getting your information? Was your research all online, or at a library, or did you have to travel somewhere?

NJ: I did a lot online–thanks to the websites I've mentioned elsewhere–but most of the research was printed material. I bought a lot of books–many of them pretty obscure books, which I was able to find used through online sellers. I borrowed a lot of books, too, and relied heavily on inter-library loan at the university where I was teaching. That library had a number of books I used for broader research of the war years, but inter-library loan enabled me to get some rare books that were essential, some of which I borrowed more than once. One of these was a limited publication monograph by a veteran of the Merchant Marine who had put together complete data on all the American ships that were in the merchant service during WW II, including casualty data. Even though I never name the ship Hugh is on, I needed to know for myself exactly what ship that was so the timeline was right. As the book evolved, this changed several times, which is why I had to keep borrowing the monograph. I needed to find a different ship every time I revised.

BB: What did you learn about the internment of Italian Americans during WWII? Also, what did you find about the German POW camps here in the U.S.?

NJ: My earliest research did indeed include reading about the internment of Italian Americans. As my characters', their timelines, and circumstances began to take shape–especially with the focus on Otto and Kurt held at Fort Lincoln–the stories of the Italians receded, as there were few Italians held at Fort Lincoln and at Crystal City at the time my characters were there. I do make a few references in the novel to Italian men Otto and Kurt have encountered, as I wanted to remind readers that there was yet another targeted group, even though none emerged for me as full-blown characters. One of the earliest books I read in my research might interest you. The title is Una Storia Segreta. Here's a link where you can read more about that book: https://gaic.info/una-storia-segreta-the-secret-history-of-italian-american-evacuation-and-internment-during-world-war-ii/ I also did learn some about the German POW camps. I have found that when I first mention German-American internment, many people initially say, "I've heard about that!" but, after a few moments, it's clear they're talking about German POWs. Ironically, the POWS were far freer than the German-Americans who were interned. Many of those POWs were place on farms as labor; others were held in cities and towns (including Indiana town where I grew up) and bussed every day to work in various industries, including factories. I have only hearsay evidence on this–but one woman I met told me she worked in a war-supply factory alongside German POWs who were allowed to do all the work there except to "pack the parachutes." I never tried to follow up on that to verify it, but it stuck with me because it pointed up the degree of comparative freedom allowed to actual German soldiers when some naturalized American citizens (of German and Italian descent) were, for years, literal prisoners enclosed by barbed wire and under constant surveillance from sniper towers.

BB: In your research, did you find that one area of the country had more German interns than others? Or was this beyond the scope of your research?

NJ: Honestly, I don't remember the details of those figures. I do remember digging into that when I needed, for the sake of a scene, to get the men interned at Fort Lincoln with Otto and Kurt to say where they were from. The plains states are certainly in that category, with their large farming communities–communities that were largely German. And cities with big German populations like Chicago and Cincinnati were heavily represented by people who were arrested, interrogated, and often interned. Unlike the Japanese population, the German population was much more widespread across the country (and their immigration history deeper)–often with one or two towns or counties in various states that had a heavy concentration of German immigrants, but not necessarily the state as a whole. One of the most chilling aspects of the roundups for the Germans was that it seemed so random–one or a few people in a town, for instance. The Japanese internment, which most people seem to be familiar with, was driven by the War Relocation Authority, which wasn't created until March 1942. There were some Japanese who were rounded up in the first post-Pearl Harbor sweep, and those arrests, as for the Germans and Italians, appeared more random, with a person or two here or there being suddenly snatched away from their daily lives. Some of those Japanese who were arrested and interned in December of 1941 and the early months of 1942 were ultimately reunited with their families in camps that held the Japanese (entire communities) who were forcibly removed as a result of the War Relocation Authority.

BB: Do you know if many people went back to Germany as an alternative to internment? Did the internment program last all through the war years?

NJ: The quick answer to your questions is "yes." Many internees did choose to repatriate to Germany–but this "choice" was often made under extreme pressure and threat. Those who were deported could never return to the U.S., but internees were pressured to make the choice to repatriate under threat of deportation–which of course meant they could never come back to America. Internees who agreed to repatriate had to sign an oath that they would never speak about or write about anything that happened in the camps. If they violated the oath, neither they nor any members of their family could return to the U.S.–a threat that kept parents of American-born children silent. Internees who were paroled and allowed, on certain restrictive conditions, to remain in the U.S. also had to sign such an oath, which threatened re-arrest and immediate deportation if violated. Even camp employees had to sign secrecy oaths–which accounts for why so few people have heard about this. All the documents related to the internment program were classified and sealed until the passage of The Freedom of Information Act allowed some–often heavily redacted–to be accessed. Many naturalized American citizens were among the internees, and virtually all the children of German internees in the family camp in Crystal City, Texas, were born in America, holding birthright citizenship. Some children were born in the camp. The internment not only lasted through the war years, but well beyond. Some internees were held as late as 1948, and those who were paroled were under the scrutiny of parole officers well into the 1950s. At the end of In Our Midst, I've included a note of historical context that provides more detail than I can give here.

BB: Sometimes plots and characters take on a life of their own. Did you find you needed to make any significant changes to your initial outline for either as the story developed?

NJ: As I mentioned regarding my experience with the character of Mabel in my novel The Sisters, yes, indeed, characters, in a manner of speaking, take over. This doesn't bother me at all as a writer, because for me the process of writing is more about listening, watching, discovering who my people are and why they are that way–what has made them so. I try not to consciously make any choices for them, but rather wait to recognize what choices they would make. Then of course, I have to be ready to watch and listen for how other characters respond to those choices. Sometimes my characters do things that upset me–but then, so do people in real life. I never work with an outline and, when beginning something new, I won't have more than a vague idea of where the story and the characters will end up. I may have a sense of a few key events along the way, so I try to see if my characters will move toward those events, given who they have become. I think for both novels, I suddenly knew the ending, with absolute clarity, when I was 75-100 pages in–I'm counting pages I considered worth keeping–so then my task was to figure out how what I need to know, what I need to discover, to get the characters to that ending.

BB: What was your biggest challenge when writing the book? Did you run into any roadblocks?

NJ: That's a hard question to answer, or at least to parse out. The process of writing a book–for me, at least–is so long, so immersive when I have time to work, and so recursive (I revise so much along the way) that it's hard to remember any one or two elements that were more challenging than others, or what the roadblocks were. Still, if I think of roadblocks as points I just couldn't get past–points when I just couldn't envision where the story needed to go next–it all comes back to character. For instance, when I was quite well into the writing, I realized my character Kurt had started to seem like an extra person in the story who didn't have anything necessary to do. I didn't want to cut him because I felt I needed that dynamic between the brothers, but at that point, Gerhard was so much more alive for me than Kurt was, that I knew I had a problem. I started then to review all the lines of tension and I realized that what Kurt was missing was a partner. Nina and Otto have each other; Gerhard and Hugh have each other. Bess and Hugh are twins; Kurt and Gerhard are brothers–but what was out of balance were the couples. Suddenly I saw what had been riding just under the surface all along–that Kurt and Bess belonged together and that the story was not just a family story but a story about three couples. As soon as I realized that and then revised several earlier scenes, I was on my way again. As I consider the idea of challenges, I think it would be fair to say that I challenged myself, every step of the way, to incorporate only historical details my characters themselves could reasonably know, given their experience. Historical nonfiction–and I include here documentaries as well as books and articles–collects what's known, but much of what's known or knowable at the time of the writing was uncovered long after the actual events. A great deal of my research time was devoted to corroborating whether a fact I learned had actually been knowable by ordinary people in 1941–and knowable through means they would easily encounter, like daily newspapers, newstand magazines, and popular radio programming.

BB: Have you personally experienced any of the hardships the characters experienced and if so, how has that influenced this book?

NJ: I have not personally experienced anything like my characters' arrest, interrogation, and internment. Even the direct prejudices I've encountered in my life are minor by comparison–being female, a child of a single mother before divorce was common (my mother faced the kind of snide attacks Iris faces), being fairly poor in comparison to classmates–but I've never known a time as a reader when I didn't seem to internalize the pain of characters I had come to love. My first memory of this is of reading Black Beauty when I was about seven. My mother had bought a copy for me for Christmas because I was crazy for books and horses, and this was a book with a gorgeous horse on the cover. She almost took it away from me when she caught me reading, tears streaming down my face. I don't remember how I managed to get her to let me keep it, but after that, I read it–and reread it many times–whenever and wherever she wouldn't see me, sobbing my way through every time.

BB: It takes time & dedication to write a novel. What inspired you to make that effort or what made it possible for you to take time out of your life to research and write the book?

NJ: It does take a lot of time! With only a couple of brief gaps (a few months to a year), I've had to work full-time at a paying job for the last 40 years. I even worked full-time while I was in college and graduate school, so it was always difficult to make time to write–even when I was specifically studying writing. For the last 30 years, up until May 2024, I taught writing and literature at the college level, so any focused writing had to be stuffed into a couple of summer months–but I was glad to have those. In the last 7-10 years, my summer months shrunk down to about four weeks, as the demands of my job increasingly required summer work of various sorts. Now I'm very happily working almost full-time at a veterinary clinic–but I'm now having to reset my rhythms for writing, as I no longer have a summer break to aim towards. For In Our Midst specifically, the drive to make the time for research and writing came from my unflagging feeling that this story had to be told. Any free time I could carve out of the school year–basically, all my personal reading time–was devoted to research and sketching out notes about my characters and what might happen so that I'd be able to pick up with the writing as soon as summer came. More generally, I can't commit to the hard work–and the huge amounts of time–unless I believe in the urgency of what I'm writing. Because of this, I start a lot of things that get abandoned because I discover I just don't care about the people or the situation enough. When a situation and a character or a group of characters get a death-grip on me and just won't leave me alone, I know I'm on to something. On a smaller scale, this was true for me when I was writing mostly short stories–though the commitment, or issues of commitment, didn't manifest until I had a first draft. A lot of stories fell by the wayside because I just didn't care enough to put in the time required to pull them apart and rebuild them (often many times) to make them better. It wasn't unusual for me to write a full draft of a story in a day or a week, but the ones I cared about could easily take a year or more to get right. Some of them slept in a drawer for years until I figured out what I really needed to do with them.

BB: Your first book, Window, is a collection of short stories and essays. How did that come about? Did you write them over a long period of time? Were any of them published as stand-alone works, and if so, where?

NJ: The publication of Window came about because Sena Jeter Naslund, the founder of Fleur de Lis Press, wanted to publish a mixed-genre collection. To that point, the press–which is dedicated to publishing first books for writers who have previously published work in The Louisville Review, which Sena Naslund also founded–had published a couple of story collections, poetry collections, and one or two novels, but no creative nonfiction. The Louisville Review had published a couple of my stories years before–both of which became part of Window. At the time of Sena's interest in a mixed-genre collection, I had begun publishing short creative nonfiction–short memoirs and personal essays–so she asked me to put together a book manuscript to submit for consideration. It was a lucky break for me, driven by Sena Naslund's generosity and support.

All the pieces in Window were published in literary journals over about a twenty year span, from the time The Louisville Review gave me my first-ever publication with a short story to a couple of essays written and published a couple of years prior to the release of Window.

BB: Has becoming a writer changed the way you read others' books, and if so, how?

NJ: I've thought of myself as a writer for so long that it's hard to remember how I read when I wasn't thinking that way. I am, though, conscious of how formally studying writing in college changed the way I read. I'd been writing long before that, and I'd picked up a lot intuitively from extensive reading, but it would never have been enough. Studying writing (because of a couple of extraordinary teachers among several so-so ones) forced me to figure out how writing I admired meant what it meant—how the writer made it mean, how the writer achieved whatever effect had arrested and moved me. That's not easy to do because great writing sweeps us in–and it seems effortless. Many of my fellow students resisted picking apart the technique because they said it spoiled the magic for them, but I never felt that way. I wanted to know how the magic was achieved, and I quickly discovered that knowing didn't at all inhibit my ability to be swept up all over again. Later, as a teacher, I found most of my students resistant to the hard work of understanding technique–much like former classmates–but the few who put in the time always got a little better with the next piece they wrote–maybe a very little, but recognizably better. Even now, when I just can't get a passage to do what I want it to do, what I need it to do, I dig through my memory and then my bookshelves to find a passage in another writer's work that achieved what I'm going for, and I pick it apart.

BB: Can you give us an example of the type of technique you mean? As someone who isn't a writer, I'd love to know what you look for when you're studying the craft of writing - what you pick apart, how you pick it apart. Like your students, I've always thought you just… write (and then get someone to edit the end result).

NJ: For writers who are just starting out, picking apart the technique might be a focus on basics–things like how to structure and punctuate dialogue (It's not intuitive for people brought up on movies); how to keep the reader grounded in physical space in scenes with a lot of dialogue, including how to connect characters with their bodies so they aren't simply disembodied voices. A little further along, writers can benefit from taking notice of how other writers balance dialogue with narrative, or how a skilled writer moves about in time without confusing the reader. I used to focus my students on transitions into and out of flashbacks, drawing their attention to how skilled writers move seamlessly into the past and back to the present without forcing their characters to suddenly pause for a kind of trance that is just as abruptly broken.

More developed writers can benefit from taking a close look at particular passages that have moved them in a way they want to move their readers. This examination might include studying the lengths and structures of the sentences, and their relationship to each other. How many long ones, how many short ones? Why are the short ones placed exactly where they are in the passage? How are the long sentences kept under control by punctuation. How do they still propel the reader forward despite their length? How do the sentences (and the passage as a whole) rise and fall, causing the emotion to rise and fall? What is the writer doing with sound and rhythm in the sentence to make it move as it does?

A quick lesson can be had by studying Alexander Pope's poem "Sound and Sense."

For me, as both a reader and a writer, sound is as important to me in prose as it is in poetry–and I think, in many ways, it's harder in prose, because the sound shouldn't overtly draw attention to itself, as it is often meant to in poetry. Prose has to seem natural and easy, so the reader stays immersed in the story, but crafting it that way is hard work.

BB: Thanks for the detailed answer! I bet you're a wonderful teacher. Have you ever thought about an online writer's class, or writer's seminar?

NJ: I retired from 30+ years of teaching last May because of extreme burnout. I really don't want to teach writing again, though I have left the door narrowly cracked open for an occasional one-off craft talk.

BB: What advice would you give an aspiring writer?

NJ: Before you invest too much of your time, your money, your emotional energy, or your soul–or, if you've been doing this already and aren't satisfied with where you are–ask yourself these questions, and be honest with yourself about the answers. (No one else needs to know. Just answer for yourself.)

What work do you admire? (The answer might be a few specific works, or several works of one or a few authors; or the answer might be broader–as in a type of work, related by how you respond to them.) What sort of work do you want to write?

(The answer to this question might be poles away from the first. And that's okay. What's important is to recognize what the intersection of–or the distance between–the answers tells you about yourself.)

Why do you write? Or why do you want to write?

(The response here may be simple and straightforward, or it may be complex and multi-layered. Just do your best to articulate it to yourself, because this answer is the one that can keep you going when you're stuck or fed up.)

Acknowledge that the answers to any or all of these questions will probably change over time, so it's good to check back in with yourself once in awhile, giving yourself fresh clarity if you need to reset your path.

BB: What question do you wish people would ask (or ask more often) about your work?

NJ: Hmmm…I'd really like someone to ask me whether I'd prefer chicken or salmon at the Pulitzer Prize dinner, haha.

Seriously, though, I'm just happy when someone is interested enough in my work to ask me a question about it.

BB: If readers could walk away with one key message from In Our Midst, what would you hope it to be?

What I hope for most is that readers come away from the book with a heightened–or a renewed–awareness that what happens to the Austs could happen to any of us. Perhaps in a subtler form or in a smaller circle; perhaps, terrifyingly, on a much larger scale. Any of us might belong in some way to a group that tomorrow might be declared and propagandized as dangerous, as the enemy. This group might be national origin, as it is for the Austs–despite the fact that they are not Nazis and would have opposed Nazism had they remained in Germany. Effective propaganda about enemies relies on simplistic, broad-sweep inclusion: everyone born into a particular country, a particular race, a particular religion–or people who thoughtfully choose a religion different from the majority of their neighbors. Such a declaration might target groups based on gender identity, sexual orientation, general political affiliation, or even a single belief. While I hope readers will connect by realizing that they might be the next target of this kind of propaganda, I also hope they will recognize and acknowledge how they might be vulnerable to casting people into simplistic, broad categories and harshly judging them for that. My character Nina has to reckon with this herself, when she remembers not speaking against her customers' attitude toward the Black family who stop briefly outside the restaurant, and when she struggles to admit to Iris how she has misjudged her. Nina reckons internally with her guilt, but she still struggles with vocalizing it–even though she is actively suffering from the recognition of how many people whom she counted as friends will not speak up for her and her family. This is something I think most of us can't learn once and hold on to forever; we have to keep relearning it.

Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.