Kristopher Jansma on What Writers Can Learn from the Failures and Rejections of Famous Authors

It is perfectly understandable that many people would feel trepidation about having a writer in the family. What private foibles and peccadilloes might be used to define a fictional protagonist; which family secrets will be revealed in a memoir? 

Novelist Kristopher Jansma’s grandmother, a survivor of the Hunger Winter of 1944, had a different attitude, hoping that her talented progeny might one day tell her story and bring attention to an under-studied area in WWII history: the Nazis’ occupation of Holland, and the famine their blockade caused during the final year of the war. 

Her aspirations were realized this summer with the publication of Jansma’s fourth novel, Our Narrow Hiding Places, which, according to the author, is based directly on his grandmother’s experiences growing up in Holland during the war. As a work of fiction, though, there is room for narrative embellishment and elements of magical realism. The sections set in the ‘40s are framed by chapters in the present-day, in which Will Geborn (a stand-in of sorts for Jansma) confronts his own sense of self while listening to the stories his grandmother, Mieke, tells him. 

History buffs will come to Hiding Places for the beautifully detailed sections set in the past, but the novel’s central subject—the genetic, cultural, and emotional inheritance from Will’s ancestors—lies within the novel’s back-and-forth structure, and enriches what could otherwise have been a mere history lesson.

Sating the appetites of his most ardent fans, Jansma now brings forth yet another book, his first essay collection, Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers. The pieces in this book—which should prove of interest to anyone curious about the creative processes of canonical novelists—serve as pep talks aimed at young writers intimidated by the inimitable genius of Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, and others. By analyzing their unpublished or unfinished works, Jansma demythologizes these giants of literature without diminishing their greatness. He shows how, through the input and assistance of spouses and editors, rigorous revision, and repeated failure and rejection, they created the works they’re rightly known for today.

I met Jansma during his stint teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, and caught up with him near the beginning of his book tour for Hiding Places. We talked via video call about how his real family history informed his novel, his research into Dutch culture and folklore, and his column about unfinished business.

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Seth Katz: A couple of years ago you published an essay in Tablet discussing your conversion to Judaism, whether that made you a “Jewish Writer,” and what that was supposed to mean in the first place. At one point, you say it felt odd, as a previously non-religious person, to convert from “nothing” to “something.” In Our Narrow Hiding Places, Will thinks of his Dutch ancestry as, likewise, “nothing.” Was part of your work in writing this book to find out what it means, also, to be a Dutch writer? 

Kristopher Jansma: Yeah, absolutely. I love that connection. Will gave me a chance to voice some of the things that I had always felt about being Dutch growing up, which never meant a whole lot to me. I had an awareness—not of it being “nothing,” but of it not being the same as what it meant to other people I knew to have the heritages that they had. Italian friends would invite me over for the feast of the Seven Fishes, and I had a Jewish friend when I was young who invited me to a Passover seder. I had this constant feeling growing up that other people have these cultural things that they get to turn to when things are hard or when they’re looking for meaning in life, and I just didn’t really have that. 

I started working on this book early in 2020 during Covid, and that was also when I decided that I wanted to convert to Judaism. At the same time, I was talking with my grandmother about our Dutch past and trying to connect with what she had to share. And interestingly, when I first met my wife, Leah, who is Jewish, my grandmother mentioned offhandedly that we have Jewish relatives from generations ago. I finally got a chance in this process to dig through some of her files. She has a family tree that goes back to the 1600s, and we do have a Jewish relative named Jacob DeWitt, who emigrated. I think the story is that he fled Portugal during the Inquisition and came to Holland, which was a fairly common thing at the time, as Holland was one of the few places that would accept Jews. And so, it seems as if it died off there; he either stopped practicing or converted, or something else. But during my conversion process, I had to pick a Hebrew name to use, and I went with Jacob, in honor of my ancestor. Jacob was also the name of the Jewish character in my second novel, Why We Came to the City. 

SK: One way that you explore Dutch culture in the novel is through folktales. When did you start exposing yourself to Dutch folktales and how did your interest in folklore inform your vision for the novel? 

KJ: I went looking for it because I knew that might be a way to connect to something further back. And when I teach magical realism in my classes, often we’ll talk about how some of the elements that seem magical to us may be more familiar in the culture where the stories are coming from because they’re drawing from myths or legends or folklore. So I started looking around for these older Dutch folktales and found a collection online, and then later I was able to find an actual book of them. And they’re wonderful. One that comes up in the book a couple times is a story about a boar with fiery tusks that inadvertently shows the early Dutch citizens how to plow the land for farming purposes. The tusks leave these giant ruts in the ground, and then things start growing from the mounds of earth, and this becomes the key to an agricultural society. I just loved that idea. So I started reading them all and pulling little bits out that I wanted to reference in the story. I did ask my grandmother about it eventually, and she said, “Oh, I’d never read any of these,” and she said she grew up on Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. By the time she was growing up those had taken over. 

SK: With this being your fourth published novel, are you able to look back and see any connective tissue in all of your work? It seems to me that there is almost always an element of storytelling built into each novel. In this case, you have Mieke telling her grandson stories about her childhood under Nazi occupation. At first these sections seem to be flashbacks, but eventually it becomes clear that she’s narrating these episodes to Will. And of course, eventually, we learn who authored the eely folktales.

It’s always a question for me when I’m reading: who’s telling this story? Why is it being told to me?

KJ: I think that’s probably the biggest through-line between all the things I’ve written. When I went to the Johns Hopkins writing workshop, it was steeped in a postmodern ethos. The program was founded by John Barth, and one of my professors was Stephen Dixon. With one of my earliest workshop professors, actually—this was at a summer program at Brown—we looked a lot at stories within stories and things like that. It’s always a question for me when I’m reading: who’s telling this story? Why is it being told to me? If there’s a narrator, are they trying to confess something, or are they trying to be forgiven for something? If it’s written in the third person, where is it supposed to have come from? Those are big questions that I always have as a reader, so they find their way into what I’m writing. 

But this one was really different for me in a way. All three of the other books are really about friendships, or people finding family among friends. I’d never written something about an actual family, and this is very much about someone grappling with who their family is and what they’ve inherited from them. Some of that comes from my own discomfort in writing about specific people in my life. If I’m writing a story and there’s a mother in the story, people are always going to look at that and think that’s my mother, right? I always have reservations about writing about people without their permission. Other writers don’t seem to have this problem. But in this case, I felt really good about it because I knew my grandmother wanted me to write this story about her. And then the other members of the family that come up in the intermediate generation are very different from my parents. When I gave them the book, I was worried that they were going to be upset about it, and I was relieved when I heard back from them that they liked it. 

SK: That’s actually a great segue, because I wanted to ask you about something that you mentioned at the book launch in Brooklyn last August. You said that you visited the Netherlands with your grandmother while you were working on the book. That must have been an extraordinary experience. 

KJ: I wanted to go there from the start, but because of Covid, I had to keep putting it off. Every time I thought that I had a window where I could travel, Covid cases would tick up again. The situation in Europe was shifting all the time. Holland was in a lockdown phase for much longer than we were here. And then finally, by 2022, about two years after I started writing the book, the manuscript was mostly finished. I was thinking to myself, well, maybe I don’t really need to go. I managed to get a lot through research. And I’d been to The Hague before, a couple of times, and remembered it pretty well, and I felt like the descriptions had come through. 

But then I decided I’d fly out there, spend a week, visit a couple of museums, and I wanted to walk around in The Hague and go to some of the places that my grandmother had described. When I called my grandmother to let her know that I was going, she got very quiet, and she was like, “Oh, good for you.” And then a couple days later, I got a call from my mother: “Oma bought a ticket. She’s going to go.” It had never occurred to me that, at 85 years old, she would want to hop on a plane during Covid when she was as nervous as anybody about just leaving the house to go to the grocery store. But she wanted to go and be part of it. 

So I met her in The Hague. She stayed with a childhood friend of hers there, and the two of us drove down to the apartment building where her family had lived during the war. We stood in front of the building and she told me all about it. If I hadn’t stopped her, she probably would have just started buzzing until somebody let her in. She was quite emotional to be back there again, and memories started coming back to her while we stood there that she hadn’t described to me before. She pointed to a specific window in front to show me which apartment was hers. And then she pointed to some places where the brick still had little chips in it, and she said that was from when she was by the window one day and saw a soldier on the other side of the street. She waved to him, and he just lifted his gun up and started shooting. We had talked at that point for weeks and weeks over the phone, and I’d never heard that story before. 

SK: And that’s in the book! One of the most horrifying moments.

KJ: Yeah, I was able to then go back and revise some things, and I added a bunch of other details that I found while I was there. But I was able to put that scene into that section of the novel because I just couldn’t believe it. 

SK: Now that we’ve discussed the genesis of your novel, let’s talk about Revisionaries—which, with its focus on the writing process and inclusion of writing prompts for the reader, is very much aimed at young writers. Is there one of these chapters that speaks most to your own insecurities as a writer? Whom do you relate to most here? 

KJ: I started writing these as columns for Electric Literature called “Unfinished Business.” I was actually having lunch with former EL editor Michael Seidlinger, at one point, and I was telling him I had always wanted to teach a class where all we would read were unfinished works. And he suggested that I write these columns about them instead. But I never lost the idea that there was something instructive about these books—there’s some reason why I, as a writer, keep going back to them. Eventually I was able to figure out what that was. Looking at the unfinished or lost work of these writers shows us their mere-mortal nature. 

The first one in the book is F. Scott Fitzgerald, and that may be the closest to my fears as a writer. In high school, I loved The Great Gatsby, thought it was a perfect novel. I tell the story in the book about being in college and sneaking into this graduate class on Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, and reading Gatsby again and being more impressed than ever at how perfect it was. But then, reading Tender Is the Night, which I hadn’t read before, I was even more blown away. The deeper I got into it, the more depressed I got, because now I was appreciating how good these books are on a level that I hadn’t been able to before. When I was first reading them, I had this feeling that I could write something like that. Right? Maybe. And I think this happens to a lot of us: the deeper our appreciation grows for the writers we love, the more inhuman and immortal they become in our minds. We start realizing, well, I just can’t ever live up to that. 

And then we read The Love of the Last Tycoon, which was the final book that we were going to read for Fitzgerald. It’s not finished, but even the parts that are there are terrible. I was really stunned coming off of Tender is the Night. Reading those hundred some-odd pages of this book, I was like… this is kind of awful. The main character’s name is really corny, the writing’s not great, there are weird errors in here. I was really sad about that at the time because I thought this was what alcoholism and depression did to Fitzgerald: he lost his talent. But then as I looked into it more deeply—I write about this in the chapter—I realized actually that he was coming out of all that and regaining his abilities, and he was working really hard for the first time in a while and staying sober. He was keeping himself on task and relentlessly plotting the whole thing out. It’s just that he died before he got to make it really good. 

When you look closely at his other books, you see that they also went through these early stages where they were pretty bad. And he had a lot of help from both Zelda and then later his editors—they were the ones who really pushed him to turn them into these amazing books. And so that was what I suddenly realized: it’s not just this one genius figure who creates a flawless book out of nothing. There’s a process that you go through where it starts off bad, and then it gets better and better and better. Fitzgerald was a relentless reviser, which I had never known before. And none of that jibes with the myths around Fitzgerald as this freewheeling, heavy-drinking party guy in the Jazz Age. And that’s okay. But I do want people, particularly writers, to know that. He was that guy, but he also banged out short stories to pay the rent and would revise things within an inch of their life. He had these insane outlines, giant charts with multiple layers going through all the themes and every character and exactly what happens in each part of the book. All that hard work that you don’t ever get to see on the other end. 

SK: One theme that comes up repeatedly in these pieces is the contributions of editors, collaborators, and other people in a writer’s life. That comes up for Kafka and Woolf, as well as Fitzgerald, as you were just saying 

KJ: Fitzgerald never knew how to punctuate dialogue. His own editor says that in the notes at the beginning of The Last Tycoon. It’s the mistake I correct on all my freshmen’s papers. Like, where does the comma go? And now you’re able to go to Princeton and see Fitzgerald’s typed drafts, and you can see all the little mistakes and stuff like that that he’s making everywhere. He forgets how to spell the name of one of the characters in the book. 

SK: Which of these unfinished works do you think holds up the best as it stands, and which one do you most wish had been brought to completion? 

KJ: Let me start with the second part, the book that I think could have been great. I’m a little torn between Patricia Highsmith and Truman Capote, but I’ll go with Capote’s Answered Prayers. Some parts of it got published while he was still alive, and publishing those little excerpts may have ruined everything, because the people he was writing about started to shun him from society when they realized they were in his book. That worsened his spiral of despair. But what I love about Truman’s story is that he couldn’t admit that he was giving up on the project, even though I think he knew it was over. He would continue to pretend that he was writing it, and apparently would show up at parties with a manuscript that was like 10 or 12 printed pages of an excerpt from one of the stories that was finished, and then a whole bunch of blank pages. And he would even give readings from it, but he would either just be reading pieces that were finished or making things up on the spot. No one actually knows how much more of it he ever wrote because there are no copies that still exist. He claimed that he left it in a locker in the Greyhound station in Los Angeles and never went back for it. And there’s still a piece of me that wishes somebody would find it, even though I think that building has been destroyed. 

I think The Pale King by David Foster Wallace is one I enjoyed reading the most, because there is so much to that novel that even though it doesn’t really get where it’s going, after hundreds of pages. The parts that you get along the way are really developed and wonderful. And, you know, it’s frustrating because you never quite see how they’re all going to connect. But the experience of reading those fragments… I think it’s probably the most satisfying of all of them—it’s some of the most beautiful writing he ever did.