It’s Still Just Fiction: A Guest Post by Kristopher Jansma
When Kristopher Jansma sat down to begin writing about his grandmother’s experiences during WWII, he wanted to make sure he did it right. In his exclusive essay below, Jansma dives into his hesitations on recreating such a pivotal time in history, and the invaluable advice that got him out of his head.
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Our Narrow Hiding Places: A Novel
Our Narrow Hiding Places: A Novel
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Hardcover $30.00
Pushcart Prize-winning author Kristopher Jansma’s novel of a war-torn Netherlands introduces readers to a harrowing story of perseverance and the power of family.
Pushcart Prize-winning author Kristopher Jansma’s novel of a war-torn Netherlands introduces readers to a harrowing story of perseverance and the power of family.
Beginning to write OUR NARROW HIDING PLACES, I had one large reservation. It wasn’t that I’d need to travel around the world during COVID to revisit the site of family traumas. It wasn’t that I’d need to conduct hours of interviews with my grandmother, whose childhood the novel is loosely based on. My hang-up was that I did not know if I could write “historical fiction” or even what that was, exactly.
I’d almost always written about what I considered “the present” but which was really the recent past. Working from my own experiences, and from the lives of my contemporaries, I’d never really questioned this facet of my work very much. As a thirtysomething millennial writer, living in Brooklyn, I saw myself as part of a generation all trying to say something about how it is now.
But then ten years went by and I became a fortysomething “elder millennial” writer, living in the suburbs, teaching at a university, and reminded every day by my hip young students that I was no longer part of the “now.”
In many ways this was a relief—only what else to write about?
For my whole life I had been interested in writing a novel about my grandmother’s experiences during WWII. When she was eight years old, she’d survived a horrific period known as The Hunger Winter, when the Nazis occupying The Netherlands began starving the Dutch citizens to during one of the coldest winters on record.
20,000 Netherlanders died over seven months. Children wandered the streets carrying spoons hoping to find someone with a little soup or gruel left to share. My young grandmother saw people passing out in the streets from hunger. As she has told me all my life, if the war had lasted even two more weeks, she’d have died as well.
But even with this great story to tell, and lots of incredible detail pouring out of my research, I was concerned I didn’t know how to write “historical fiction.” How could I recreate the details of a world I’d never seen? What did I know about the day-to-day life of my grandmother, in another country, in the midst of a global war? How to transmute that into words?
Then one day I did an interview with my former professor Alice McDermott for a magazine. She asked what I was working on, and I told her how I had been digging into this subject but was scared I didn’t know how to write historical fiction.
She kindly advised me to put it entirely out of my head.
“It’s still just fiction,” she said.
Four simple words reminded me that, whatever distinctions are made by marketing teams and booksellers… all fiction is still just fiction. The job of writing fiction is the same at its core, no matter where or when that fiction occurs. With this all in mind, I began writing, and soon found that not only was it something I did know how to do, but that it was incredibly exciting.
In the book The Art of History, writer Christopher Bram notes that novels about the past are a passport to spend time in a place that is unlike everything we see around us now. He calls historical fiction a “fact-based fantasy, a dream with footnotes.” Just as a reader might be overwhelmed with daily life in 2024 (who isn’t?) and choose instead to spend time on Marsor in Middle Earth—someone picking up my novel gets to peace out for a while.
Bram also makes another compelling point which I continue to dwell on. He reminds us that, “Most novels aspire to the condition of history.”
Writing my earlier novels set in the recent past, hadn’t I hoped that in ten years or a hundred, some future reader might pick them up to get a sense of “what it was like back then”? Won’t every novel, eventually, be a historical novel?
So don’t worry, as I did, about going into the past. Look away from the here and now and you’ll find loads of unturned stones. The past gives you freedom to say something new. It’s still just fiction.