With a formative experience as a student at UVM and a career in political journalism, Jan Gangsei, ‘92, finally settled into her ultimate passion as a fiction author.
Young adult fiction author Gangsei was born and raised in Barre, Vt. She had a typical New England childhood, where going outside and skiing was accompanied by a deep love for writing, she said.
“I always wrote as a kid,” Gangsei said. “I definitely enjoyed telling and making up stories.”
At the beginning of her college career, Gangsei was initially drawn to journalism. However, in a creative writing class that she took with now retired professor Margaret Edwards, those interests began evolving into larger goals of becoming an author.
“I remember taking her class and I wrote a story,” Gangsei said. “At the end of doing all of our critiques, she gave me my story back and it just had one little line on the top. It said, ‘This deserves publication.’”
Gangsei credits Edwards in developing her confidence about becoming a published author, she said.
“I had always wanted to write a book but I think that really planted the seed,” she said. “It took a while to grow, but I credit her a lot for giving me the notion that I could do more than just write stories as a little hobby.”
In this class, Gangsei also learned how to navigate criticism directed at her literary works.
“I had a much thinner skin when I was in college,” she said. “But it was actually in my creative writing class at UVM that I began to understand that it was actually more unkind to withhold thoughtful critique.”
Gangsei recognizes the utility of criticism within the writing process both in terms of giving criticism and receiving it.
“Writing is a very personal, solitary experience during which you expose a bit of your soul,” she stated in a Nov. 4 email to the Cynic. “But it’s important to remember that while writing is personal, criticism is not. Art is subjective. And a good critique can help improve your work.”
With her dreams of becoming an author still in mind, Gangsei continued on her journey in journalism. In the summer and through the fall of her senior year, she interned with South Burlington’s WCAX-TV Channel 3 News, receiving hands-on experience in broadcast journalism.
After graduating, Gangsei began working as a journalist for a newspaper covering northeastern Vermont and New Hampshire. Here, she was able to cover a myriad of stories, spanning from the police beat to more mundane things, such as downtown St. Johnsbury, Vt. getting a new four-way stop.
Although working in journalism gave Gangsei opportunities to write about many different topics, she found herself attracted primarily towards humanist, personal stories, she said.
“I’ve met a lot of interesting people and I’ve always been intrigued by them and their individual stories,” she said. “I think that’s always appealed to me. Because then my imagination can run away.”
For Gangsei, these humanist stories continued to uncover her deeper interests and goals in writing fiction, she said.
“This type of reporting that I kept getting drawn to sort of led into what I ultimately wanted to do, which was write fiction,” she said.
After four years as a journalist, Gangsei took a step back and got a job working in public relations in Key West, Fla. where she met her husband.
After they got married, the pair of them moved around a lot due to her husband’s job. It was with this mobility that she shifted her focus to fiction.
“[Writing fiction] was something I’ve always loved, but it was also something I could do from anywhere,” she said.
She and her husband ended up living in many places including Washington D.C., New York and Barbados. Living in these different places, experiencing different lifestyles and meeting different people gave her more experience to use as a writer, she said.
With their move to Barbados, Gangsei’s husband had gotten a job as an attaché. With that position, they both had to go through the defense agency’s entire training program, where they learned things like how to shoot a gun and how to react if taken hostage, she said.
“I’ve definitely been able to use some of that experience in some of the books I’ve written,” she said. “The Vermont girl, thrown into funny situations, right?”
By finally settling down in Washington D.C., Gangsei has also experienced a “fish out of water” feeling when comparing growing up in a small town to now living in a metropolitan area, she said.
“You meet such a wide variety of people,” she said. “There’s a different level of everything when you’re in a big metropolitan area, a different level of wealth and privilege and backgrounds.”
In her upcoming young adult murder mystery, “Dead Below Deck,” set on a cruise, the main character Maggie reflects many of Gangsei’s experiences as well.
“I definitely drew on the experience of being a Vermont kid,” she said. “I always enjoyed those types of stories where the small town person is in this big, new environment.”
Gangsei also called on her past when writing the novel in a stylistic sense as well.
Throughout the story, the reader is exposed to journal entries, police interviews and news clips. Having worked in journalism, this multimedia format appealed to her, she said.
Remembrance of the past is what inspired Gangsei to write the thriller after her own experience on a cruise right before COVID-19 hit in 2020. She experienced thoughts of wanting to rewind time and do things differently, which created the center of Maggie’s story, she said.
Other themes of her book also reflect on her life experiences, such as wealth and privilege, military combat and morality, she said.
Gangsei hopes that the novel will be a fun and engaging read for everyone.
“It’s a privilege as an author to have somebody else read my words, so hopefully, [readers] just have fun with it, like a little escape,” she said. “I feel like fiction is an escape. It’s an opportunity to step out of your own little bubble and live in another one for a little while.”
“Dead Below Deck” by Jan Gangsei will be released from HarperCollins on November 19.
