Hoi!

I wrote and rewrote this email a couple of times before sending it to you at the tail end of 2025. What to say? I could give you an overview of all the things I’ve written this year, the projects I’ve finished, the people I’ve worked with, and the sentences that helped me through an eventful year. I could make lists, endless lists, of the things I loved and loathed. (And yes, Cameron Winter would be on one of those lists).

But I decided to simply look back on the words that marked the last month. The darkest month, which invites us to reflect and commemorate, but I opted for sleep and savoury snacks instead. No recipe for deep insights. So, here are some things that reached my desk while finishing an essay and writing my first-ever (!) poem, which will both see the light of day in the new year.

Once they do, this letter will finally become somewhat newsworthy. I’ll make it my one New Year’s resolution, I promise.

From my desk
Words that found their way onto the page.

I worked on two written pieces this month. One I’ve been shaping for almost two years, the other just a few weeks. The former is an attempt to descend into the blazing mouth of a volcano, looking for that which explodes under pressure of concealment. In the latter I ascend north, where I discovered what the absence of light does to my sun-loving body. Both pieces circle a desire to approach something, but not so closely that the spell of the unknown shatters.

I based them on two winter trips I took a few years back. They represent a skewed version of my lived experience, mixed with literary references that mark the other side of those moments. Words I jotted down in unorganised notebooks while lying in strange beds, folded on plane seats, perched on pointy rocks, or simply stretched on my own couch. It took me years to revisit them and turn them into something else.

It has always been hard for me to form an opinion about things right after I see them, to immediately respond to life as it happens. I admire those who can go outside to lend an ear to whatever the world has to tell them, and to then go back home and write about it in one go. For some obscure reason, I always need to place those experiences within a castle of other things. A laborious habit I consciously try to bend, or sometimes even break.

That’s partly why I started writing these letters. A format that allows for loose threads, unfinished buildings, open questions.

After one of my trips north, I bought a collection of letters by Henrik Ibsen, intending to read them while my vision of Oslo was still fresh. Instead, the book ended up on my nightstand, unread, until last week. In a letter to Laura Petersen, a young writer seeking advice, he writes on June 11, 1870: “Intellectually, man is a long-sighted animal; we see most clearly from a distance; details distract; one must remove oneself from what one wishes to judge; one describes the summer best on a winter’s day.” Laura’s lived experience would later inspire A Doll’s House. Nora, in part, is based on the tragic life she came to live.

This advice from centuries past resonates. Perhaps because I’m looking for an excuse not to do what others dare to around this time of year: to capture life as it slips away in its most immediate form. Or perhaps Ibsen is right, and this is precisely the time to write of summers (and winters) already far behind us, reminding ourselves that experiences will always find their place in the constructions we build over time. Whether it is in the form of a best-of-2025 playlist, an end-of-year cryptogram, or a belated Christmas card. Or indeed those essays that take shape over years of reminiscing.

So, maybe this is all this email needs to do, for now: to gather fragments of another month that slips by, and to leave them on the page for a while, without the need to finish the building. The essay and the poem will see the light of day soon, and then this letter will have caught up with itself. Until then, I’ll keep writing to you from my kitchen table; unfinished thoughts, open threads, and all.

I hope your winter has its quiet rewards, too. Or as C. Winter sings:

Watching the bells, watching the lights
What I want is far away
Talk to the moon, flatten her down
Make her watch the wind all night, she can wait

Love takes miles, whatever that may mean.

From other desks
Words that reached me from other rooms.

This month, I’ve kept the list of hyperlinks short, despite my love for the blue underline.

Over the last year, I’ve read several Iris Murdoch novels, plus her biography on the side. Currently, I’m reading The Black Prince, which might have coloured this month’s Easy Puddings with its central tension between a brooding author who aims to create a masterpiece by taking his time and a much more successful writer who happily spits out a book every year. While it’s packed with Shakespearean references, I mostly find it an entertaining read.

Murdoch’s mischievous smile after she says “it’s the novelist's privilege to be able to see how odd everyone is” in this interview with Steinunn Sigurðardóttir on Icelandic TV made me realise she is indeed a funny writer, despite her serious philosophies on love and attention as an antidote to selfishness (which are worth diving into, especially when navigating family dynamics over the holidays).

Other than Murdoch, I haven’t read much worth linking to. Instead, I dove into the history of the figgy pudding, which is mentioned in the Christmas banger I Wish You a Merry Christmas. Who knew that a pudding could represent Christ and his twelve apostles, or that it would take cooks five weeks to prepare its signature spicy flavours. Well, now you do. I wish someone will one day make me a figgy pudding.

I also enjoyed receiving letters (in the broadest sense of the word) from my friends, who all dared to capture this year as it slipped by in a list, a review or a book of essays.

Like Charlie, whose collection The Boy, The Bucket and The Persistent Tide captures his musings as he visits all provinces of the Netherlands. I salute his boundless enthusiasm for the flatlands and his ability to find beauty in the most mundane settings. This month’s episode of More Poetry is Needed, in which his father Gary is the special guest, warmed my heart.

Or Grace, who once shook her head first when I asked her about the most romantic place in London, denying there is such a thing as romance in the city she grew up in, to then admit that the pub might actually be the place to be. She started grem, in which she cycles across London on Lime bikes to explore restaurants with friends. The letters so far include deadpan selfies, a playlist, and personal anecdotes on parting with lovers and buying new hats. I can’t wait to see these stories turned into short films.

Or Daniël, who writes about the books he loved reading in his newsletter Trema, making his friends (myself included) care deeply about titles they might otherwise never encounter. Apart from being an avid reader, he also cares deeply about the reading experience, so keep an eye out for the ongoing design improvements on his website.

Or Yuki, whose love for the arts seems boundless. Her newsletter, De Kho van Kunst, is the go-to guide for keeping track of all the great upcoming exhibitions, plays, and shows the Netherlands has to offer. She is also slowly becoming the voice for museum audiotours across the country—a thought I cherish.

And last but not least, Jurgen, whose carefully curated 25 from ’25 list I’ll carry with me, as always.

Diptych
Two images that found each other across my desktop.

Thank you for reading! I hope that one day this newsletter will turn into an actual correspondence. So, feel free to send me a letter back, in whatever format you fancy.

Groetjes,
Iris