MIEKE EERKENS's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Creative Nonfiction, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica, among others. She earned an M.A. in English from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Eerkens teaches creative writing online for UCLA Extension's Writers' Program and as a visiting instructor for the Iowa Summer Writing Program. She divides her time between Amsterdam and California. All Ships Follow Me is her first book.
This memoir is honest, unflinching, reflective, and carefully
researched. . . . Eerkens's self-awareness and desire to honestly
grapple with the history in front of her is worth every sentence.
Reality is never an absolute, and truth is always messy."--Book
Riot"A generational memoir of war and its long-lasting effects on
descendants....The author examines the psychology of loss on the
part of children caught helplessly in tumultuous events....The sins
of the fathers are visited on their children, indeed. Eerkens'
poignant book sheds new light on the history of World War
II."--Kirkus Reviews
"A war memoir that reads as hauntingly and movingly as a
novel...[A] fresh and courageous look at Dutch, and indeed global,
history, and as importantly, at her parents, whose personal growth,
strength, and perseverance are nothing short of marvelous. Highly
recommended."--Historical Novel Society"In this masterful memoir,
Eerkens has written an epic account of her family's colonial and
wartime past that reckons with the often mysterious and
misunderstood legacy of intergenerational trauma. Lyric,
meditative, and deeply reported, this is an essential book that
reveals so much about what we need to know about being
human."--Jennifer Percy, author of Demon Camp: A Soldier's
Exorcism"A thrilling, brilliantly told, briskly paced adventure
story that could not be more timely. In exploring the resilience of
her Dutch parents, who survive fascinating childhoods--he, as a
young boy in a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia, she, as a
young girl in a family persecuted by their fellow Dutch citizens
for assisting their German oppressors--Mieke Eerkens asks what it
means to be at once a victim, a colonist, and a collaborator. All
Ships Follow Me is an important work of literary nonfiction and
essential reading for Americans wondering about the responsibility
they bear in the modern age. It's a book you'll read in one sitting
but will be haunted by for years to come."--Kerry Howley, author of
Thrown"Setting her book within the chaotic and tragic aftermath of
World War II, Mieke Eerkens has composed a provocative and
beautiful story in All Ships Follow Me that boldly tightens its
aperture on a single family's experience, and unflinchingly exposes
the welts of history that can affect us all, and the inheritance of
a sorrow we share."--John D'Agata, author of About a Mountain"The
confluence of conflicting war traumas fuels the emotional heart of
Mieke Eerkens' insightful narrative. All Ships Follow Me is an
excavation of the scars of war drawn from personal interviews,
archival documents, and immersion in the physical and psychic
spaces of the past. It is also an imaginative quest to understand
how trauma influences generations, sometimes directly through
behavioral quirks and aberrations but also through a vulnerability
to sadness and the illusion of home."--Patricia Foster, author of
All the Lost Girls"A remarkable and unique portrait of
inter-generational family trauma and collective guilt, All Ships
Follow Me troubles the waters, in the most nuanced and moving
fashion, of more conventional journeys of victimhood and good guys
triumphing over bad guys. In no way an apologist for her father's
side of the family, Dutch colonists of Indonesia for generations,
or of her maternal grandfather's participation in fascist politics
in wartime Holland, Eerkens nonetheless spares us excessive mea
culpas. Instead, she takes an unflinching and riveting look at the
complex histories of both sides of her family and the persistent if
invisible legacies of World War II and colonialism that followed
her to her childhood home in Southern California."--Robin Hemley,
author of Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness
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