@Marijana_Bankovic Thank you so much for sharing your experience of reading In Our Midst. I’m sorry that it was painfully triggering for you at times; I hope that in some ways visiting a similar experience through the book was also cathartic for you. 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.
Hi Nancy! Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to ask questions. If readers could walk away with one key message from In Our Midst, what would you hope it to be?
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?
Has becoming a writer changed the way you read others’ books, and if so, how?
Nancy, It has been fascinating to read your description of your research and writing of this book. It is a story that needed to be told, and you have done it well! Having just turned 90, I do remember a lot of the WWII years and how it affected us in the U.S., but had never heard about Germans being interned in this country. Do you know if many of them went back to Germany as an alternative to internment? Did the internment program last all through the war years? And did it include any Germans who had become citizens of the U.S.? This whole story makes me think of Harry Truman’s comment that the only new thing is the history you don’t already know! I am so glad you wrote the story.
Shelley Wold
@HannahT Thank you for your question. 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.
@Shelley Wold Thank you for your kind words and for your questions. The quick answer to all of them 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.
Black Beauty is a beautiful story! I’m glad your mom allowed you to finish it. Have you read Pony Confidential? It reminds me of Black Beauty but with a bit more humor and less tears - please read it if you haven’t already!
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.
@Marijana_Bankovic I have not read Pony Confidential, but thank you for the tip!
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.
What advice would you give an aspiring writer?
What question do you wish people would ask (or ask more often) about your work?
Hmmm…I’d really like someone to ask me whether I’d prefer chicken or salmon at the Pulitzer Prize dinner. 
Seriously, though, I’m just happy when someone is interested enough in my work to ask me a question about it.
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.
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?