Joke (or Johanna) Verweerd-Speksnijder was born in 1954 in the Dutch town of Krimpen aan de IJssel, in a family strictly adhering to the Calvinistic faith. The middle child out of five, she was a girl of extremes. She would always go along with someone else's feelings, and each emotion would - all by itself - grow into a story in her mind. She could be upset for weeks after learning about people she didn't even know, whose cat had been run over and killed, and be overjoyed for days about the carrots shooting up. Soon she learnt that what was going on inside her head WAS met with little appreciation, which turned her stories and songs into something she began to keep to herself.
When in primary school she discovered that letters combined to a word, words to a sentence, and sentences to a whole story, she was thrilled about the possibilities this discovery presented. She began to write herself. Initially, she would write down just anything she had been through that day. However, this didn't exactly yield earth-shaking stories, which gave her the idea of writing down things she could have experienced...
As a secondary school student, Joke made her first acquaintance with literature. It was poetry, more than anything else, that made her realise that writing poetry would matter to her for the rest of her life, even though no one else in her class cared. She learnt that a good poem should meet certain criteria of metre and rhyme, and with these criteria she would test all that she had written herself so far.
Constantly fiddling with the words until she was pleased with the result had made her apply the rules subconsciously, and so there was no need to change anything. This discovery brought home to her that rules weren't made to repress the creative process, but that they existed to identify the creative process.
After finishing secondary school, she became increasingly aware of a desire deep inside to put her human skills to use in a much different way, and so she applied for a job at the social department of the municipality of her hometown. She was hired and took up studying to become a social worker. These studies helped her gain a greater understanding of society and of the immediate world around her.
In 1975, Joke married and gave birth to a son (1976) and a daughter (1979). The writing of songs, poems and stories had so much become part of who she was, that it would have been hard to imagine life without it. Fortunately, her children proved a grateful audience.
Joke's first volume of poetry was published in 1983 by the Dutch publishing house Boekencentrum Uitgevers. To realise that other people could relate to what she had been keeping so much to herself was a most extraordinary experience.
Additional activities and duties
Joke Verweerd is the president of a Dutch Protestant authors' union, named 'Schrijvenderwijs', a post she took up in 1997. This union organises meetings three times a year, and they are well attended by its members.
Also, Joke frequently gives talks about her job, in public libraries, for unions and in schools. Besides, she leads so-called 'coffee mornings' for women, held on a regular basis, during which she gives a talk about a certain issue, conducting a debate about it afterwards.
Joke's novel The Winter Garden was filmed and she took upon herself the task of writing the screenplay. It made her realise how hard it is to visualise thoughts and feelings (which are the major elements of a psychological novel) and translate them into actions and behaviour. The film, entitled 'Ten Years Later', won an international award in the category of psychological drama. The film was shown on Dutch TV by EO, an evangelical broadcasting corporation.
Being an author of novels suits her better than being a scriptwriter. Still, writing screenplays gives her novels imaginative quality, due to the choice of words that has an impact on the reader's imaginative power.
If you have a question for Johanna Verweerd, send an email.
