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Biography · Duncan Dobbelmann
HomesickAn Atlas
A life told through places
Homesick:
An Atlas
By Duncan Dobbelmann
Two houses in Nijmegen, and a family history carried across the Atlantic.
Duncan Dobbelmann returns in memory to the houses his parents grew up in, and to the family life within them. Through childhood visits and a Dutch phrase his mother used to comfort him, he considers how the experience of war shapes a family long afterward, and how love can become bound up with fear.
From Homesick: An Atlas
Houses and Homes
Recently I have been taken with memories of houses and homes I have passed through in my life. Among these is the house in which my mother grew up, in the Netherlands just after the war. It took a long time for the name of the street, Huygensweg, to resonate and resolve for me on a map of the town, Nijmegen, which also happens to be the town where my father grew up, mostly. But my mother’s house, unlike my father’s only a few kilometers away, did not have the benefit of its own name, a mark of its uniqueness; it was, like all the other houses lining the street, a well-built, three-story structure on a small patch of land, perhaps a third of an acre. Huygensweg reminded me of the kind of street you might find in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn or Queens: clean, orderly, a square of lawn out front, a garden or patio in the back, a hedge here or fence there to stake out the boundaries, everything in good working order, usually someone out and about tending to something.
My mother’s parents had moved to that house from the south, from Brabant, just after the war I believe, when my mother was six. She had nine siblings, all of whom returned regularly to this house for a papal visit as they grew into their own lives, kids packed into station wagons. Eight of them remained in orbit somewhere in the Netherlands; the oldest sister stepped away to France to raise her own large family, and my mother, among the youngest, fled to America with my father. So our visits were less regular, even sporadic, no doubt also because they filled my mother with dread, as I later discovered. This was the house where she was kept in her place by a stern father who thought her flighty and artistic, characteristics that, as with her impulses to dance and laugh and sing, had to be curbed and corrected like her left-handedness; I came to understand from her that it was a house of silence and suppression, a joyless environment ruled by fear where, for example, her father — so sweet to his young patients at the hospital — forced her to put her fingers down her throat whenever she’d eaten something suspect, which seems to have happened surprisingly often.
A note from Magnafora
Where Magnafora begins
Duncan Dobbelmann is a cofounder of Magnafora. His writing is also one of the reasons we're building it.
We wanted a way for writers to publish on their own terms, set the price and size of their editions, and let readers collect the work they love. We began with Duncan's own publishing project, with the intention of making that opportunity available to other writers.
Homesick: An Atlasis our opening work. In it, Duncan returns to the houses his family occupied and the memories they carried with them. We're giving those installments a home here as we build Magnafora together.
We're starting with our own writing. We hope yours will join it.
Publish Something NewMeet the writer
Duncan Dobbelmann
In Homesick: An Atlas, Duncan Dobbelmann revisits his childhood as the American child of Dutch parents. He writes about the houses his family occupied and the habits they carried with them, reconsidering what he understood as a child in light of what he learned later about his mother's life.
“That grim mindset of survival, gained through trauma, infused even the most pedestrian aspects of their lives.”
From “Houses and Homes”
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