We’d like to welcome Nancy Jensen, author of In Our Midst, to our discussion. You can find information about the book on BookBrowse and the BookBrowse Book Club discussion here.
Please feel free to reply to this post (use the blue Reply button at the bottom) with additional questions for @Nancy_J!
Hi Nancy - Thanks for joining us. Where did the idea for In Our Midst come from? What made you decide to write about German individuals’ experiences in America during WWII?
What was the process you used to research the topic? Did you uncover anything surprising?
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?
What was your biggest challenge when writing the book? Did you run into any roadblocks?
Thank you for inviting me to be part of this discussion! One of my favorite things to do as an author is to talk with reading groups–always such great questions–so I’m sure I’ll enjoy this experience.
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 awhile, 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.
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?
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.
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.”
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.
Would you mind giving us an example from In Our Midst? I’m curious about what kinds of things would fit this category. If you think it might be a plot spoiler, you can use the spoiler tag to blur your response (click the little wheel on the bar above & select “blur spoiler”)
You talk about your research above, and 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?
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?
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.
@Peggy_H . 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.
I was really upset when Bess turns on Nina and Nina, in response, turns on Bess. Even though I knew why this was happening, it still upset me. The same was true for me when Kurt salutes the Nazis in the Crystal City Camp. I know what he’s up to and why, but at that moment, Nina doesn’t. I know why Kurt can’t explain, but it’s still upsetting. Maybe what upset me most was when Johan orders Kurt and Otto to get out, just after Kurt has prevented Johan’s daughter Sophie from being trampled–and further upsetting that Johan demands that his family have nothing to do with the Austs after that. But Johan, too, is in crisis when this happens, and he shows his true colors when he alerts Otto and Nina to the attack on their sons.
Thanks, Nancy! Yeah, you were right to use the spoiler tag there. I think most of the folks on the forum have read In Our Midst but for anyone who hasn’t: Be warned, readers! Definite spoilers there.
I think it’s interesting that many of the scenes I found most upsetting as a reader are the ones you found most upsetting to write!
Hi Nancy! It’s so wonderful for you to join us and allow us to ask you questions. I really enjoyed reading In our Midst but at times it was really hard for me as it triggered a lot of what me and my family experienced in the 90’s during the Balkan wars. Have you personally experienced any of the hardships the characters experienced and if so, how has that influenced this book? I really enjoyed your style of writing and I’m looking forward to reading more of your work - past and hopefully future!
@kim.kovacs 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.