“If only you writers would leave out plots and give us just your daily life and the people. (…) What people want is atmosphere. Give us air, fragance, sunlight, storm.”
Beatrice Chase (Through a Dartmoor Window, 1917, Longmans, Green and co)

How could I tell you about cats in the moonlight, raindrops tapping on roofs, dogs next to human legs? How could I tell you about my fascination for the smallest small things that together make up life? Peeling an apple, giving someone a hand. Piano music coming from an open window, lively voices of children among high trees. The smile of a stranger, the fragility of old flowers.

How could I tell you about the incomprehensible that in fact knows no words?

Everywhere in Europe I went looking for ‘cooking mothers’ by the fireplace or the stove. It was quiet there. You could hear the ticking of the clock, the snaps of the scissor or the singing of the kettle. They rolled out pastry, cut bread, laid the table everyday with a cloth. ‘Nothing’ happened.

All those short, impressive meetings with people everywhere! I still feel moved whenever I think of Mrs Mary Smith in her sky-blue apron. Or Frau Wegeler who lived in the white silence of an Austrian mountain. Also, my meeting with the animal still loom large on my memory. The ancient sheepdog of Donald and the innocent chicken that Madame Mauriac plucked from the yard for the ‘Poule au Pot’…

Memories, meetings, experiences. They went beyond words, but they appeared as stories in all kinds of national and international magazines. At the moment, I still enjoy working in the world of magazines; for more than ten years now as chief editor for a big international publisher of trade journals. It’s still the people, their ‘ordinary’ lives and stories, that enchant and surprise me.
And I also have my life story full of events. Not only the light ones, but the darker ones as well. For some time even my fascination for the small was buried in a layer of sorrow. Still it was the yellow crocus that one day pulled me up again.

Three years ago my beloved dog Koen died. It was a big experience that made a much deeper impression than I could have imagined. That night of January 31, 2004, I had a dream. That stormy winter night was the beginning of my own publishing house. More dreams followed and especially actions. The joy with which I live my dream, is great and free. It leads to new meetings, new writers and new stories. In the meantime I work with several authors on new titels, such as Baby Birds by Reinhart Brandau from Worpswede. In essence they have a lot in common: they are stories about the miracles of everyday life. That mysterious life which we are all, human and animal, in the middle of.

Josephine Veering, spring 2007

“Sometimes I would look into the kitchen and see her reading a cookbook while she stood over the stove, her long yellow braid over her shoulders like a scarf, and I would have to look away from emotion. Such an ordinary sight, a woman stirring a pot.”
Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces, 1998, Bloomsbury)