Authors Carrie Callaghan and Mieke Eerkens explore the past in differing ways in their most recent books. Mieke’s All Ships Follow Me: A Family Memoir of War Across Three Continents is a memoir with implications for today, and Carrie’s A Light of Her Own fills in the gaps in the life story of a woman painter at the time of Rembrandt. In their Author to Author conversation, Carrie and Mieke go deep about the risks of memoir and the allure of adding a personal touch to vague histories, and the facts and lessons they learned along the way.

Carrie Callaghan: Your memoir begins with a thoughtful invocation of the ghosts of your family’s past. Both your mother and your father suffered scars from World War II, but they’re not the scars that we’re familiar with, nor are they scars that we necessarily know how to address. Your mother’s parents were arrested as Nazi sympathizers, and your father spent time in a Japanese concentration camp. Why did you, as you write, go looking for the past?

Mieke Eerkens: There are a few reasons that I wanted to dig deeper into my parents’ pasts, and these sides of history that, as you point out, haven’t been considered as widely in World War II literature or media. First, it was a way to understand my parents’ behavior. As with many children and parents, I struggled with aspects of our relationship. Really understanding the details of my father’s trauma as a boy on his own in an internment camp where a third of the prisoners died of starvation, for example, helps me have compassion for his hoarding of food and things. It’s a survival instinct for him. Likewise, on my mother’s side, understanding the events that led up to her carrying this huge feeling of shame and unworthiness through her life–the real trauma of having her friends and country label her as “bad” because of her father’s political choices–helps me to have less resentment toward the fact that she was more passive and never took initiative on our behalf, that in several ways my siblings and I were put in the position of parent. She was afraid of the judgment of others, so made herself as small as possible.

Mieke: Your book also goes looking for the past, but frames the real history of painter Judith Leyster in a fictional context. Why were you drawn to this historical figure? What compelled you to write this book?

Carrie: The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is one of my favorite places, and I often wander the halls. In 2009 I came upon an exhibit that gave me shivers: a series of paintings done by a woman, a master painter at the time of Rembrandt. Central among the paintings was her bold, gorgeous self-portrait. I marveled that there was a woman painting and selling her works 400 years ago. I needed to learn her story, and researching for my writing is the best way I know to dive deep into a topic and learn every crevice of it.

Mieke: Yes, I can totally relate to that impulse. I think those kinds of organic experiences that suddenly drive you to write something rather than sitting down and trying to think of something you want to write about, so often result in the strongest writing too. I’m curious why you chose to explore the past through historical fiction rather than nonfiction.

Carrie: Fiction is such a flexible form, allowing writers to guess and fill in life’s gaps in a way that is quite honest — since we admit we’re lying from the outset. I had questions about Judith — how did she dare to achieve what she did, what sacrifices did she make along the way, whom did she love and whom did she hurt — and I could only answer those questions if I invented. Hopefully in doing so, I’ve created a version of Judith that is both vivid and inviting to the reader, so readers will be inspired to learn their own version of Judith.

Carrie: How did researching and writing your book affect your relationship with your parents?

Mieke: Filling in the details about my parents’ past allowed me much more compassion. I let go of a lot of anger. In my book, I mention a show I saw Oprah Winfrey do on “trauma-informed care”, which, instead of asking, “Why are you doing that?” asks, “What happened to you?” This is so aligned with the whole impulse of writing this book. It also allowed me to understand and work on myself, because of course, as children, trauma gets passed on behaviorally from generation to generation. If we don’t know where it comes from as children, we can’t heal it.

Carrie: You said there was more than one reason for exploring your parents’ incredible history – what was the other?

Mieke: The second reason I wanted to dig into this side of history is to bring awareness. A lot of Americans don’t realize that the Japanese government murdered millions of civilians or had brutal internment camps in World War II, and I think acknowledging the victims is important, just as it is with the Holocaust. It’s so important to me to address this dichotomous thinking we have about war, especially in the United States, where World War II was not fought on home soil, but was experienced from afar through events in newspapers and newsreels that were curated for the public.

Carrie: That’s a really good point.

Mieke: This sort of ties into my third reason, which is that many of the attitudes that led to World War II are once again on the rise around the globe, but people cannot necessarily see the parallels, because they don’t see themselves or their communities as similar to those in the 1940s in Europe. People think of a Nazi sympathizer, and they think of a bad guy who kicks puppies and yells at children. But it’s much muddier than that in reality. People aren’t all good or all bad, usually. My grandfather both helped to hide Jews during the Holocaust and warned his Jewish colleagues about planned Nazi raids, yet he also wrote racist articles and stayed a member of the party that supported Hitler. He didn’t believe the Nazis were going to murder the Jews, and by the time he saw it happening, it was too late. He was under pressure to stay in the party.

Carrie: Why are these parallels important today?

Mieke: Well, because I see this in today’s society. People who consider themselves “good” support fascist leaders, with the claim that they “don’t agree with everything he does, but…” By having people read the narratives of WWII that they are not already thoroughly familiar with, it gives a more comprehensive picture of the situation on the ground back then, and helps them to see that we aren’t so different in this era; the dangers of a repeat of history are still very much there, in our own society. And I guess this also echoes back to what I say on a personal level: If we don’t have a full picture of what led to the trauma of our past as a culture, we can’t heal it.

Mieke: I can see some themes in your book that also make it a very topical subject matter, especially in this era of awareness about inequality between men and women in the workplace and other issues surrounding gender-based prejudice. What are your thoughts about the importance of your book’s historical subject matter to a contemporary reader?

Carrie: Writing historical fiction is an act of bridge-building. I’m choosing a historical topic precisely because I think it will matter to contemporary readers, whether it’s because the life lived is so different from our modern lives or because there are some important similarities. While researching and writing A Light of Her Own, I ended up surprising myself with how relatively independent women of that time were. Dutch women ran businesses and had agency in ways that contemporary readers don’t expect when looking back to the 17th century.

Carrie: Was there anything in your research that surprised you?

Mieke: On a personal level, definitely, regarding my grandfather. But as one does when diving into archives, I also discovered random, interesting things that surprised me. For example, I learned that there were two points in time when Nazi collaborators and Jews actually lived in the same concentration camps together; the first when the collaborators thought the Germans were being defeated and fled to Westerbork transit camp, where they thought they’d be protected by the Germans. The second was at the end of the war when the collaborators were rounded up and sent to the concentration camps, some of which were still occupied by Jews who had nowhere to go after the liberation. I also learned that there were Jews in the National Socialist Party prior to the occupation. When the party allied with the Nazis, a dozen of these Jews were sent to a special house called Villa Bouchina, where the head of the National Socialist Party tried to protect them from Hitler.

Mieke: What was your research method? Did you visit any libraries, talk with art historians, etc., and what was your favorite part of conducting the research itself?

Carrie: Accessing the lives and personalities of people who lived 400 years ago is hard, but I was fortunate to have vivid paintings by Judith and her contemporaries. I used those paintings (plus dozens of books and articles) to inform my knowledge. At one point in my writing, I had to imagine the scene where Judith applies to join the Painters Guild of Haarlem. She would have had to present a “master” work to apply to the Guild. The books about Judith said they didn’t know what she had presented, so I had to guess. Looking at Judith’s challenges and gumption, I decided she would have presented her self-portrait to that panel of men. So that’s how I wrote the scene.

Months later, I talked to the leading art historian on Judith Leyster. “We have some new research,” she said. “Based on the size and materials in the painting, we have concluded Judith used her self-portrait to apply to the Guild.” I had chills. And that’s my favorite part of research – those discoveries.

Carrie: Speaking of chills, have family members read your memoir? That’s the audience that most terrifies me, particularly when it comes to those personal revelations.

Mieke: Yes, my parents read the book before it went to galleys. I feel so grateful about how generous they’ve been to allow themselves to be exposed like that to the world. Especially with regards to my mother, who has so much shame surrounding her family history and is so afraid of other peoples’ judgment. And the whole extended family has been amazing in this regard. I hear nightmare stories from friends about their families excommunicating them after publication, and I can’t tell you how much I am touched by the support of my family who, by no choice of their own, are being exposed to the world. I think this issue is the minefield of nonfiction. I teach nonfiction writing and tell this to my students all the time. Write about others with respect for how you are exposing their lives. Tread thoughtfully. Don’t write gratuitously. Include what is necessary to illuminate the issues at hand in your book, but always be sensitive to the ways that you are laying yourself and others bare to the world, because once it is out there, there is no erasing it from the public record. It’s a big responsibility we have as writers who describe real people and events. I try to expose the more vulnerable parts of my life too, as a balance. There’s nothing I recoil from more than nonfiction that exposes real people’s most vulnerable experiences or characteristics purely for the sake of spectacle and shock factor, with little essayistic value in the broader narrative. Especially when the authors holds themselves high and dry, exposing none of their own flaws while they throw everyone around them under the bus in their writing. That’s the worst.

Mieke: It has been so great to have this dialogue, Carrie. As we wrap up, I would ask that cliché question on everyone’s mind- what are you working on now? I’ll be out on my book tour, and then diving into a book about women’s issues that have affected my life, as well as finishing a screenplay that I’ve been working on for several years off and on. What’s next for you?

Carrie: Mieke, it’s been a delight to learn more about you and your writing. We didn’t even get to talk about our shared Dutch setting! We’ll have to continue the discussion over tea someday. As for my next project, I’m finishing up edits on another historical fiction book due out in November. It’s about real-life American journalist Milly Bennett who covered murders in San Francisco and civil war in China, but finds her greatest challenge in 1930s Moscow, when her Russian husband is arrested by the secret police but no one knows why. It’s titled Salt the Snow.

Mieke: Sounds fascinating! I am looking forward to reading it.

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Mieke Eerkens holds an MFA from the University of Iowa in Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Guernica, Creative Nonfiction, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her book, All Ships Follow Me: A Family Memoir of War Across Three Continents is available April 2 from Picador. Order at: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250117793. Visit her website at MiekeEerkens.com.

 

 

Carrie Callaghan’s debut novel, A Light of Her Own, was published by Amberjack in 2018. Her next novel, Salt the Snow, is forthcoming in November 2019. Carrie’s short fiction has appeared in Silk Road, Amsterdam Quarterly Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere. She is also a senior editor and columnist with the Washington Independent Review of Books. Say hi on Twitter @carriecallaghan

Photo by Erica B. Tappis Photography.