Jensen Finds Her Way Back to Fiction
with The Sisters

An exclusive Authorlink interview
with the author

By Ellen Birkett Morris
February 2012

Nancy Jensen has had a passion for stories ever since her grandmother taught her to read and write when she was four. After graduating from high school and marrying at 17, Jensen was determined to “live life” and give writing a try.

After the marriage ended in divorce, she returned to school and took a series of creative writing classes that led her to enroll in the brief residency MFA program at Vermont College.

“It was the perfect program. The brief residency format teaches you craft, but also teaches you to work and survive as a writer on your own. It provides a short cut to the things you can learn on your own,” said Jensen.

For her that meant grounding the interior monologues that she loved to write with details of setting and plot that were needed to carry the story along.

Armed with the skills to write, Jensen’s journey was interrupted by a personal trauma that kept her away from the page for ten years. When she returned to writing, she focused on essays for the first five years. Those essays and her short stories made their way into her first book, Window, published by Fleur-de-Lis Press in 2009.

She sees fiction and essay writing as interrelated arts with a difference in focus.

“I was using all the tools of fiction, building characters, selecting details, building scenes, arranging details to build suspense. The difference is that with fiction it begins with character and what is at stake for this person. With nonfiction there is a core incident at the heart of what you want to write about,” said Jensen.

Eventually Jensen found her way back to fiction and used her family history as inspiration for The Sisters. Living with her mother and grandparents at age ten, Jensen remembers her grandmother getting upset after receiving a letter saying her sister had died. Jensen had never heard the sister mentioned and when she pressed her sister and mother they refused to discuss it.

The Sisters follows estranged siblings Bertie and Mabel from the Depression through World War II and Vietnam, and beyond as they have daughters and granddaughters of their own.

The result was a multi-generational saga spanning a period from 1927 to 2007, which starts with sister Mabel and Bertie and steps into the experience the sisters and their children and grandchildren at different times

The book was written over five years with the work concentrated during Jensen’s summer breaks from teaching.

Having grown up with her grandmother, watching old movies and listening to older music, the sweep of the book felt natural to Jensen. Her research consisted of verifying facts from her memory. She also used E-bay to flesh out details of the stereopticon and Shirley Temple scrapbook featured in the story.

Jensen wasn’t sure she could sustain the narrative and was drawn to writing the story in episodes from differing points of view. Her greatest challenge was balancing the narrative. There were times when she wasn’t sure what direction to go in with Mabel.

“She was so strong and brave. I knew her dramatic moments but not about her regular life,” said Jensen.

She played a game of “what if” putting Mabel in various scenarios and came up with the idea of a fire which prompts Mabel to return to Juniper.

She revised each chapter several times as she was writing and added a new chapter about Mabel, chapter 13, after the book was sold.

Jensen worked with editor Hope Dellon at St. Martin’s Press.

“She told me where she thought the gaps were and where she flagged in her connection to a character, but she wasn’t prescriptive. She let me find my own way,” said Jensen.

She connected with her agent Lisa Gallagher through author Sena Naslund, who had been her creative writing teacher years before. Gallagher, a former publisher at William Morrow, started working as an agent and Naslund e-mailed her to see if she would read the manuscript.

The process moved quickly from there. Between March 1st and March 30, Jensen got an agent, did revisions and settled on a publisher for the book.

Jensen, who teaches in the low residency MFA program at Eastern Kentucky University, advises her students to read across genres and across centuries and to write “what calls to them” and not to follow trends.

She urges them to focus on the work, and if they aren’t picked up by a large publisher to consider small and university presses as a Plan B.