Author Kim van Alkemade engaged with the Siena community on March 6 and 7 as this year's Greyfair Living Literature Series visiting writer. During her visit, she spoke with creative writing and literature classes, gave a reading of her newest novel, and conducted a craft talk titled “Animating the Past.”
“I really love setting stories in the past, because the past is never really in the past,” van Alkemade says. “I think one of the things I like so much is finding ways that things still resonate today.”
For van Alkemade, her family history has been the biggest inspiration for her newest novel. Her father’s Dutch background and her mother’s Jewish background laid the historical foundation for Counting Lost Stars. The novel’s storyline is set in 1940s Holland during the Holocaust. With such an important historical event comes heavy and tedious research.
“It was really hard, the Holocaust research, especially during the pandemic lockdown,” van Alkemade says. “The people that I am researching are in a moment where they don’t know what’s coming. I think I sat in a sort of dread for a while.”
Some were surprised by the amount of work conducted by an author of historical fiction.
“I definitely think there is a lot more that goes into writing a historical fiction novel than meets the eye,” said September Mostransky ‘25, a communications journalism major. “I knew that a lot of research had to be done with writing novels in general, but writing a historical novel is an entirely different situation. Certain aspects simply have to be accurate.”
Van Alkemade visited two classes during her stay, answering questions and sharing her experience as an author. Those who attended her craft talk got to engage in a writing activity. One of van Alkemade's techniques for writing historical fiction is using images to spark inspiration. Student participants were given a few images of Siena College during the 1930s and 40s that van Alkemade found in Siena’s archives and were given the task of coming up with a story based on the image of their choice. This new way of thinking creatively about history surprised some non-English majors.
“I have never done anything like that before, and it was really fun to think so creatively about the pictures,” said Christopher Nattrass ‘25, a history major. “When studying history, you often analyze sources to extract information, except instead of facts I was looking for a story to tell.”
Many of the students felt a similar unfamiliarity, even with a writing background.
“I have never tried to write something creatively based on a picture, so I thought this was an interesting and unique exercise,” said Mostransky. “I also thought it was fun to see old pictures from my college and then make up stories about what could have been happening at that time.”
Van Alkemade spent thirty years as a professor at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania. During that time she had numerous creative nonfiction pieces published in literary journals like Alaska Quarterly Review and So To Speak. After retiring from Shippensburg, she began writing her first historical fiction, the New York Times bestseller Orphan #8 (2015). Van Alkemade continued to combine her love of writing and history and followed her first novel with Bachelor Girl (2018) and Counting Lost Stars (2023).
Van Alkemade has already begun her next novel and plans to write and share her experiences with students for as long as she can.
“I really have enjoyed being here at Siena College,” van Alkemade said. It’s amazing to me that somebody wants to hear what I have to say about things, but I try to be as real and honest as I can about it.”
