Summerland

Simmerlân (1996), in which Hylke Speerstra reported on the walking trips he made (then as editor-in-chief of the Leeuwarder Courant) through Friesland two summers in a row, was again written according to this procedure.

It Simmerlân, based on news that was too small to make the newspaper. ‘Then I spoke to people on the street. In no time, they turned completely inside out about their existence, about their loneliness.’

Simmerlân is a collection of 27 stories that Speerstra initially published as journalistic impressions in the Leeuwarder Courant, when he wandered through Friesland in the summers of 1994 and 1995. Those impressions – expanded and processed – were published as a book in 1996. One of those stories is called In dauwiete moarn yn Spears (A morning – wet with dew – in Spears). During that walk, Speerstra discovers that the time-honoured family farm was no longer there. He then muses briefly about Hantsje Jans: ‘Hy hat myn famylje erflik belêste mei it reedriden’ (He hereditarily burdened my family with skating).