I’ve long been an admirer of Kristopher Jansma’s fiction and the way it blends an empathic view of the world with an abundance of stylistic verve. His new novel Our Narrow Hiding Places explores the complicated history of one family, beginning with the Nazi occupation of Holland and continuing on to the present day. (As an added bonus, Jansma and I grew up in adjoining New Jersey towns.) I spoke with him about his new book’s evolution, the real-life history he drew from when writing it, and his forthcoming nonfiction book Revisionaries.

In addition to Our Narrow Hiding Places, you have a second book coming out later this year. Was it intentional to have both published in such close proximity? Was there any give and take between working on the two projects that surprised you as you were working on them?

My book Revisionaries is coming out on October 15th. I had, for a long time, been writing these columns for Electric Literature called Unfinished Business that were all about the lost manuscripts of famous writers. It was just this weird interest that I’d always had. When Michael Seidlinger was in charge of it, he and I had lunch or something at some point and I was telling him that I was trying to put a class together about these unfinished books. And he said, “That doesn’t sound like a class, but maybe it’s a column.”

So I started writing those columns and I really liked them. And I’d always sort of imagined that you put them all together in a book. Most of them I worked on with Jess Zimmerman when she was the editor over there. We worked on 10 or 11 of them together over the course of a couple of years. Anyway, long story short, she left there to go work at Quirk Books.

My agent and I talked about the idea of putting them together as a collection. We put together a proposal and we went out to a couple of places with it and my dream was to work with Jess on it. So I was really happy that she was excited to do it over at Quirk. 

The projects ended up overlapping because I had in mind to write about 10 or 12 new pieces for Revisionaries, plus quite a lot of editing of the old columns to refocus them for writers who are looking for guidance and inspiration the way that I had found in all those lost works. I ended up doing both of these at the same time. The fact that they’re coming out around the same time is a little crazy. I don’t know why I thought it was going to be okay to do two books in two months.

It’s interesting to hear that, given that in In Our Narrow Hiding Places, there is a manuscript of mysterious authorship. There’s another point where one character is looking at a Bruno Schultz book, and I feel like he’s one writer who looms over your book, in a very positive way.

I love him. And I’ve always loved the idea of an unfinished book. This was something I had to think about a lot as I was working on this collection, because I think in some sense, they have this huge potential that’s still unrealized with them. A lot of times it’ll turn out to be a project that the author, for whatever reason, just couldn’t finish at that time. Sometimes it’s something they were working on and then they happened to die. So there’s a sadness to that. I’ve always taken a kind of comfort in them because they can show us that even all of the things that we struggle with as writers on a daily basis are things that other writers have to contend with, too. 

Maybe Octavia E. Butler just got horrible writer’s block and never wrote a third Parable novel. And the story there turns out to be that she actually mapped out five more books that she wanted to write. She couldn’t get herself to write one. But just knowing that that kind of thing can happen to someone who’s a  total genius like Octavia E. Butler isa little sad, but it’s also makes me feel a lot better whenever I hit an obstacle. And in a way it did help with this project.

I finished a version of this book at the end of the summer of 2021, I think. And originally the book about all the stuff in the present day was happening during COVID. Will and his wife were having a similar kind of struggle with their relationship, but it was happening while they were locked in together in their apartment in Brooklyn. We submitted the book to a bunch of places and Helen Atsma at Ecco, who’s my editor now, was very interested in it. But she said, “We’re having a lot of trouble with novels that really deal heavily with COVID right now. People aren’t really interested in reading about it still. It’s just that the timing’s off.” 

She came back and said, “Would you be interested in reworking all those parts so that we can avoid the COVID thing?” And I had an idea then suddenly for a different version that revolves a little bit more around Will seeing his grandmother during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. But it required a huge effort to kind of revise. I took about 200 pages of material out and replaced them with about 100-odd pages of new stuff. Some things I was able to keep and others I couldn’t, but that’s the kind of situation that you find yourself in as a writer. Seeing the examples of all those other writers hitting similar kinds of roadblocks and persevering through it gave me a lot of confidence that this was something that I could do and that the book will be even better for it in the long run.

Over the course of the book, without necessarily spoiling too much, there’s an interesting sort of give and take between grandmother and grandson that involves both of them having health struggles at various points. I enjoyed the way they echoed each other, but I also appreciated that the health of someone in their 80s wasn’t the main point of the character.

There was a feeling I had as I was finishing the book where it just seemed like I was getting to the last chapter or two, and I had some ideas about what needed to happen to kind of wrap things up. One very natural course would have been to have Mieke die at the end, right. She’s an elderly woman. I realized that would give it a sense of finality, of conclusion. And yet I didn’t really want to do that. Maybe it just felt a little too easy. And because so much of the book is about what it takes to keep going in life day after day. 

Without spoiling too much about the ending, I like that what ended up happening there was a little different, which is something I’ve heard my grandmother in real life talk about sometimes — how hard it is to be living as an older person when most of the people you’ve known over your life have already left.  The longer you live, the more alone in some ways you are. And on the other hand, you’re very lucky to get to do that. That requires that resilience that we’re talking about.

You’re also writing a lot about a childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland. Because it’s being told from a child’s perspective, there are certain things that are happening that Mieke is aware of and some things that she’s not aware of. There’s a comment one of her neighbors makes that suggests that he’s gay, but it’s not necessarily something she would understand at that point. What were some of the challenges of writing from a child’s perspective? And were there any books that you turned to for inspiration for that aspect of the book?

I’ve always loved doing that. Even some of my earliest short stories, a lot of them were about young children and were written from their points of view. I’ve always been a big Salinger nerd. And that’s something that I definitely picked up from him that he always did really well. 

There are a lot of things I’m drawn to about that kind of perspective. There’s a little bit more of an innocence that you can explore, but in Mieke’s case, there’s also seeing what happens to that experience as the world starts to affect that innocence. But there’s also the innate sense of playfulness that you have as a child that I think sometimes we lose track of as we get older. And there’s a curiosity about the world that I think — sometimes, for me — is more believable in a child narrator. Maybe that’s a sad thing to think, but that when I read these stories about adults who are just brimming with curiosity and observations about the world, I think, how many people do I know at this age who have the time to feel that way about the world? Whereas with kids, I think it’s something that happens really naturally.

There’s also a tension there because for all of the 1940s scenes, there’s always the question of, is one of the kids going to not realize that there is something that they should not say that they do say. I wanted to capture how scary it all really was for them at that age. I started this process by interviewing my grandmother about what she remembered. And I knew that in the book, the reader would understand that Mieke survives and lives to tell this story. So you have a little bit of comfort in that in the beginning, but you wouldn’t necessarily know from the start of the novel whether or not the other characters are going to be okay. And in fact, one of them has already  gone missing. One of the adults is missing and she’s fairly sure that he died in a concentration camp, but she doesn’t have any proof of it.

Really awful things happen to children in the book. Even though Mieke survives, she is brought to the brink of death by starvation, thanks to the Nazi blockade on food. She is put in pretty scary danger many times. At the same time, I wanted to be sure to leave room in the book for her to realize that there was still quite a lot of good in people.

A lot of the stories that my grandmother told me revolved around the people in her community, the neighbors that were there helping each other, the other families that lived in her apartment building, sharing food with each other, and things like that. There was a German couple that lived in her building who were anti-Nazi. But because they were Germans, they got more food rations than the Dutch people living in the building. They didn’t have any children, so they shared their food with the children in the building. So that was in my mind as well, that she felt like she would not have survived had it not been for the altruistic behavior of, of the others, who took a risk and helped other people out.

You mentioned earlier revising and cutting some of the present-day scenes, but how did you decide the best way to tell the part of the story set in the 1940s and deal with the passage of time there?

I thought about this a lot. In the first version of the story, where there was a COVID plotline, it was almost 50-50. It was almost an equal number of pages in the present and the past. And when I changed that around, one reason I changed it was that initially, I thought that the Hunger Winter and COVID were going to be roughly parallel events of equal weight. As I spent more time in it, I realized it wouldn’t quite work that way. COVID was awful. A lot of people died. It was very scary. And yet I couldn’t quite put it on the level of devastation as what was happening in the World War II sections. I realized that there needed to be a rebalancing.

I couldn’t quite decide how much to do it, because what I really didn’t want was for the present-day sections to be these very brief little frame narratives around the past part, which I, you know, I could see that that would be an easy way to do it. And in that case, the present-day sections would be mostly just a vehicle for telling the rest of the story. I knew that I had a lot that I wanted to say about what happens two generations later with Will that would require us to really get attached to him and spend some time with him and understand his life too.

I found, just kind of randomly, the novel The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai from a couple of years ago. That novel is about the AIDS crisis and most of it is set in the 80s, if I remember right. But then there are also sections that are happening more in the present day as one of the characters is going to find one of the other characters from the past. I  looked at that really closely and I started literally counting pages in the book because it felt like the balance that I wanted.

What I realized, and I don’t know how intentional this was on Rebecca Makkai’s part — I don’t know her at all. But if I run into her, I’ll want to ask her. She would have a section in the 1980s that was 20 pages. Then the next section set in the present day would always be half that length. It would be 10 pages. And then the next 1980s section could be, you know, 16 pages. And so then the next section would be 8 pages. It was almost exactly 50% in terms of page length. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but that seemed to be roughly the pattern.

And so I set that up for myself. I challenged myself to see if I could write the present-day chapters and keep to that strategy, basically making sure that they were always roughly about half the length of whatever you’ve just been through in the 1940s section.

It’s funny — I hadn’t realized that, but it makes a lot of sense. I know what contemporary central Jersey looks like, but I do not know what wartime Holland looks like. 

There’s a lot less that you have to do to get there. It  was really more of a restriction for me because I can just write and write, so like left to my own devices, I would have gladly written another 300 pages about Will, because I like him and I like that story. I have to set up guardrails for myself sometimes to make sure that the overall narrative doesn’t lose its balance or become something really unwieldy. 

One of the things that really surprised me about the book is the way that Will’s father becomes a character, despite being shown mostly through memories. He has this very interesting and very sad, and ultimately surprising narrative arc over the course of the book. Was that aspect of the book present from its inception? And how much of a challenge was it to have a major character who’s largely offscreen?

I’m always wary of getting lost in flashbacks. And in that way, you’re already jumping between timelines, and then having Will spending too much time thinking back on his own childhood seemed dangerous as well. When I started researching the history of the Hunger Winter, one of the things that I stumbled onto fairly early were some scientific studies that had been done. There’s a really wonderful New York Times article about the Hunger Winter. And they talked about this idea that because of the damaging effects of the famine on this generation in 1945, that they had now done studies and seen the downstream effects of that damage being passed on to the next generation and beyond.

It’s a key area in the study of epigenetics. There’s a lot of famine, obviously, in the world, but it tends to happen often in third world countries, where generally the health of the people is not as strong before the famine begins. And here, you had a situation where it was a relatively thriving, healthy community that was suddenly thrust into starvation. They’ve been able to study it really closely to see what impacts that actually can have. And so one of the things that came up in that article, where they mentioned some of the health effects that they’ve seen passed on to subsequent generations, is that there are all kinds of different things to do with how we process food. And then, but then mental health and schizophrenia were both specifically were both that came up as, as effects that they had seen.

There was something there that really spoke to me. When I was growing up, I was very close for a while with a friend whose father was gone. His father had had some sort of — I don’t know exactly what it was. Some sort of psychotic episode or schizophrenic situation. And my friend had grown up with this fear of, “When is it going to happen to me? Or will it happen to me?” I thought about that a lot as I wrote about Will’s character.

Our Narrow Hiding Places is a very realistic novel, but it begins with a section about about the history of surnames in Holland. It reads very much like a kind of creation story. What led you to open the novel with this story? Surnames play such a big role here, whether it’s this family’s surname being abbreviated when they moved to the States or the role that surnames might have played during the Nazi occupation. 

It was a story that my grandmother had told me, and it kind of came up out of nowhere, as we were talking about the Hunger Winter. I don’t think it was directly connected to a relative of ours. We were  just talking about Dutch last names, and how they often say something about who the family was — which  is pretty common everywhere. But in Holland, when Napoleon took over, prior to that, many Dutch people did not have a formal surname. After it was legally required, everybody adopted a name relatively quickly. And so you can trace the name back to whatever your relatives must have been doing around that time in history. 

I thought it was a really cool idea. As soon as she told me the story, it just resonated in my head with so much of the rest of what I wanted to write about. I knew this was going to be a book about what we pass on from one generation to the next, and how free we are to — and how free we are not, maybe — to shake off the things that we’re handed, whether it’s our genetics, whether it’s the narratives behind our family and the secrets that our families are keeping from us and things like that. It really connected with me. 

I thought about the kind of character who would refuse to have a name. I’ve always loved unnamed narrators in fiction. I taught a whole class once on unnamed narrators. In my first novel, the narrator has no name. So it immediately struck me as something that would be really fun to play around with: who is this guy who would go to prison rather than be forced to take a name. It may be a bit of a myth. But the story goes that those who did refuse to take a name were given the name Naaktgeboren afterwards, which translates to “born naked,” as some sort of punishment.

Like the character in the book, I actually thought to myself, “That’s such a beautiful name.” I could see why they would think it was an insult or a punishment, but actually think it’s a really beautiful thing to be named, right? I mean, what could be better than to be born with this idea behind you that you are like a blank slate? Like you’re, you aren’t clothed in anything yet from anywhere else. I love that idea. And it felt like it belonged thematically, right there at the start of the novel, even if it takes a few pages to get to Mieke and everybody else.

Photo: Vito Grippi

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