Rotterdam, NL · est. 1994
I write about the people who hold a neighbourhood together — the shopkeepers, the choir leaders, the woman who has run the same Saturday market stall since 1987. Mostly I write them down before nobody remembers to.
I grew up in Kralingen, on the east side of Rotterdam, in a flat above a laundrette that my grandmother ran for twenty-two years. She kept a ledger of every customer: name, date, what they brought in, what they paid, and one line about how they seemed that day. “Mevrouw de Vries — coat, collar torn — tired.” That ledger is the reason I do this work. It is also, more or less, the shape of this website.
I studied cultural history at Erasmus, spent four years as a researcher on a municipal oral-history project, and left in 2021 when the funding ran out and the interviews were still unfinished. I kept going on my own. I have been keeping going on my own since.
The index
Tap any line to open it. One at a time — I like the page to stay quiet.
A long essay built from my grandmother's laundrette ledger, cross-referenced against municipal records and eleven interviews with surviving customers. It is about what counts as an archive when the person keeping it never called it one.
Published in De Groene Amsterdammer, March 2024. Roughly 6,000 words. It took three years and I would do it again.
I spent nine consecutive Saturday markets standing at the same stall, helping sell plantain and dried fish so that I would stop being a person with a notebook and start being a person who was simply there. The piece that came out of it is less about the market than about the difference between observing and being useful.
Published in Vers Beton, November 2023. Photographs by Yusuf Bakker.
Four hours on a Tuesday afternoon in Delfshaven, recorded on a borrowed Zoom H5 because mine had finally died. She talked about the flood, her husband's boat, and the exact year the neighbourhood stopped knowing each other's names. She said it was 1974 and she was specific about why.
Transcript runs to 41 pages. Excerpt published in the Rotterdams Jaarboekje, 2023 edition.
A workshop I run for libraries, community centres and anyone who will have me. Two evenings: the first on asking questions that don't have answers yet, the second on what to do with a recording once you have it. No equipment required — a phone is fine, and I mean that.
Run so far at Bibliotheek Rotterdam, Het Nieuwe Instituut, and eleven neighbourhood centres across Zuid-Holland. Free for community groups; I ask institutions to pay, and they mostly do.
My first book. The Noord is the part of Rotterdam that got rebuilt twice — once after 1940, once after 2008 — and both times the people who lived there were consulted afterwards. I am trying to write the version where they are consulted first, retrospectively, by me, thirty years late.
Roughly 60,000 words drafted. Two chapters are with a publisher who has been kind but non-committal. I am looking for a residency or a grant that would let me finish it in one uninterrupted stretch.
People give me things. A bus ticket from 1968. A photograph of a shop that no longer exists. A recipe written in a hand nobody living can read. I keep them all in a filing cabinet in my hallway and I am slowly digitising them, badly, in the evenings.
If you have something like this and you don't know what to do with it, write to me. I will not lose it.
A short, slightly annoyed piece about the difference between what I do and what a newsroom does, written after the fourth editor in a row asked me to "find the angle." There is no angle. There is a woman who has run a stall for thirty-eight years and a reader who does not know her name.
Published in De Correspondent as a guest contribution. It got more replies than anything else I have written, most of them from other people doing the same work.
Now
Finishing chapter nine of the Noord book, which is about a street that was demolished in 1972 and rebuilt in 2011 with the same name and none of the same people. I have been stuck on it for six weeks because the obvious ending is the wrong one.
Running the street-interview workshop twice more before summer — once at a community centre in Feijenoord, once for a group of secondary-school teachers who want to do it with their classes. Both are full.
Digitising the filing cabinet. Currently at box four of eleven. The scanner is loud and I have started listening to the radio while I do it, which is how I found out about the market stall story in the first place, so it is not entirely wasted time.
Elsewhere
I am not on social media. If you want to know what I am working on, this page is the place, and I update it when there is something to say rather than on a schedule.
Contact
Commissions, workshops, archive donations, or a note about something you remember that nobody else does. I read everything and I answer slowly but I do answer.
The studio is on the second floor, above the bicycle repair shop — the bell is the one with no name on it. There is no lift and the stairs are steep, so tell me in advance if that is a problem and I will come to you instead.