An Interview with Johanna van Zanten

Johanna lives in Kelowna, BC, Canada, and Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico. Born in 1949, she is an immigrant from The Netherlands (1982). After many years as a child protection social worker, she discovered her love of writing short stories in her late fifties. She attended creative writing courses in her free time at the U of BC and Okanagan College, and attended writers’ conferences and workshops to hone her skills. Some of her stories made the shortlists and longlists in contests (Glimmer Train, CBC/UBC Short Story Contest) and she won the Wine Country Writers’ Festival story contest – nonfiction 2021.

Several stories were published locally and online (Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Sage-ing—a magazine for aging with grace).

Johanna self-published two novels with Bookbaby/KD Select-Amazon in 2012 (On Thin Ice) and in 2017 (Guardians’ Betrayal). Histria Books of Las Vegas, member of IPG Independent Publishers Guild, published two novels in its imprint for fiction: Addison & Highsmith: Between A Rock And A Hard Place (December 1, 2021 in hardcover, and August 1, 2023, in paperback and eBook) and The Imposter (January 16, 2024 in hardcover, and eBook).

Johanna retired in 2016 from her day job and has since dedicated most of her time to writing short stories and novels; a memoir is in the works.

---

---

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

I read from a young age, preferably books of my older sisters (romance novels, such as Angelique of the Angels, over my head at times). I promised I would write books myself one day. Life led me to different places and another country, and my focus was on making a living first. After a serious relationship fell apart, leaving me with plenty of free time, I decided to work on that promise to myself. That was it! I never looked back, completely absorbed by the craft and the pleasure I derived from writing.

What inspired you to start writing this book?

I did a lot of research for my previous book about my parents during the Second World War, and I collected so much information on my grandmother, who is also a character in that novel, that I just had to write The Imposter, not just because of the ready material, but also out of admiration for my grandmother, the protagonist. Although in the family we never talked much about her, specifically about those difficult days of the Second World War and her role in it, I wanted to understand her motivation to become a fan of Hitler. My ability to follow her in my imagination through her childhood and coming of age in the 1900s, with the facts that I discovered about her—such a different world from how I grew up—I became her and could see her path.

Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

The book almost wrote itself with my grandmother’s character as the protagonist. It became the prequel to my earlier novel. I found out my grandmother had a crazy life. In the end of absorbing her life’s details, I understood that she had always treasured her identity as a German. For that, growing up in Germany, she hid her part-Slavic heritage, as in mainstream society Slavic people were looked down on and discriminated against. So, she must have felt like an imposter, deep in her heart, while she covered up her Slavic heritage. I came to it when the story was near its end and only after I understood her torturous motivation to choose Hitler as her hero. Finding the title was a process, which took two years from the start of working on this story.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

Burning Down The House by Talking Heads.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

I worked for seven years prior to my immigration in a therapeutic community/treatment centre for heroin addicts, as a creative therapist and as a group worker. I learned so much for my own life from having worked there. I worked in Indigenous/First Nations communities in the north of Canada, and I also was a child protection social worker for fifteen years prior to my retirement.

What books did you read (for research or comfort) throughout your writing process?

I read anything and everything I could lay my hands on—the classics, the best sellers, and the historical non fiction—researching my last two stories, including the thirteen works of Professor Lou de Jong’s research about the war, The Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Second World War, and lately I have read quite a few memoirs. I was quite shocked by the novel Educated by Tara Westover, but it taught me a lot about the current American condition.

What advice would you give your past self at the start of your writing journey?

Begin to write sooner and get an MFA in creative writing.

What’s one thing you hope sticks with readers after they finish your book?

How complicated people are, and how life’s circumstances can become unmanageable, but we have to make choices anyway, never to be taken lightly, as they have consequences.

---

Are you a writer, too? Submit your manuscript to Atmosphere Press.