Maren van Essen writes romance for women who have already survived something. Her fiction sits in the genre she describes as eerie-cozy: grounded in the sensory textures of ordinary life, cedar and cold coffee and wool worn soft, with something strange moving just beneath the surface. Her love stories take their time. So do her characters.The pen name carries family history. A great-grandfather crossed from Essen to Holland in the early twentieth century, and the name van Essen passed down throu