"Difficult to put down once you start reading and one poem or essay leads effortlessly to the next and explores just about every avenue or slant and while it is a journey through other people's memories it is also something of a going home." - The Tara Poetry Blog, April 2014 "'Motherlode' is Carolyne Van Der Meer's Orphic journey to reclaim the past of her mother, a child during the five years of Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The mosaic of poetry, fiction, and reminiscence is her 'Dodenherdenking', a remembrance of the dead, but also her immersion in the Lake of Memory. Her quest to understand a loved one expresses the need of every child and every parent to know and to be remembered. If the past is a foreign country, Van Der Meer shows us that with empathy and imagination we can enter that land as more than mere tourists."
Steven Manners, author of 'Ondine's Curse' and 'Valley of Fire' "A mesmerizing journey through occupied wartime Netherlands; the voices emerging from the pages are haunting: replete with powerful emotions and modernity."
Isabelle Laflèche, author of 'J'adore New York' and 'J'adore Paris' Content determines form, or, more precisely, the multiple forms that comprise Carolyne Van Der Meer's unique and moving new book Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experiences. Juxtaposing essays, poems, journal entries, letters, interviews, and short stories, Van Der Meer demonstrates how our life story is seldom, if ever, set in stone. Instead, it's a moving target, a kaleidoscope of the complicated ways in which we choose to remember... Motherlode is part of Wilfrid Laurier University Press's Life Writing Series. With more than 50 titles to its credit, the series aimes to "foreground the stories of those who may never have imagined themselves as writers." That said, this is a writerly book. Van Der Meer may not have started out with literary intentions, but by mixing fact and fiction, by involving a cast of peripheral charactersâincluding other Dutch war children, participants in the Dutch Resistance, and Canadian war veterans-she gives a voice to the previously silent "voices of the time."
Joel Yanofsky
Montreal Review of Books, Spring 2014