He wrote many books, in Drenthe or about Drenthe. He also wrote many plays and was a columnist for many years on Radio Drenthe and in the Dagblad van het Noorden. Jan Veenstra was a jack-of-all-trades who meant a lot to Drenthe culture. He died in the night from Monday to Tuesday.
“I became friends with Jan at the end of the seventies,” reflects Egbert Meyers, who has toured extensively with Jan and his wife Marga Kool in recent years. “That was during a writers’ camp in the German Bundes. We performed together as Drenthe-speaking writers and turned out to have a click, especially as people. That has always remained the case.”
Together they worked at Radio Noord, even before Radio Drenthe existed. The duo had a program there during the summer months. “We experienced all kinds of adventures, such as in the book On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It was actually a Drenthe-language version of it. Jan wrote the adventures, I made a song. Then we also had a program about Drenthe love. In it we described love from the Stone Age and mainly made fun of it.”
According to Meyers, this suited his friend. “Jan was a man of humor. That was reflected in these types of programs.” But their friendship went further than that. They were witnesses at each other’s wedding. And when Meyers had a hard time as a regional language official, his friend Jan stood up for him with a sharp column.
In recent years, Meyers has appeared on stage a lot, together with Jan Veenstra and Marga Kool. “We made the show Baby Boomers Blues. It was a combination of poetry, stories and songs, about where we stand in society now.”
Colleague Jans Polling praises Veenstra for what he did for Drenthe literature. “Jan was someone with ambition. He wanted to take Drenthe writing to a national level and stayed away from the stories about how beautiful it was here. In doing so, he laid the foundation for a renewal.”
“In addition, he had a specific humor, absurd, it seemed a bit English,” says Polling. “His way of writing made others start writing differently. And I think it’s great that he met Marga Kool. They strengthened each other.”
In Zuidwolde people react with disappointment to Veenstra’s death. In recent years he has written several plays for the theater associations in the village. “In 2020 he wrote the theater production about Mina Koes. Due to corona, that could not go ahead. A year later he came up with De Wraak van Mina Koes, a so-called chariot play, and we went on the road as De Bende van Mina Koes,” remembers Marjan Steenbergen. “After that we continued like this. It was a success throughout the region.”
In the context of 750 years of Zuidwolde, Veenstra wrote Spitwerk in Suthwalda for this year, a large-scale open-air theater piece with drama, songs and music. Another great success. Steenbergen: “We performed it in September. Veenstra wanted to be there at all costs. You could really recognize his plays because of certain Drenthe words, expressions and names. Jan had an enormous knowledge of history and then built a story around it. The facts were always correct.”
According to Steenbergen, the question is how to proceed with Mina Koes’ De Bende. “It will be uncertain for us. In any case, we will miss Jan very much. He was a very pleasant man with a sense of humor, but at the same time very down-to-earth.”
According to Bert Rossing of the Huus van de Toal, Veenstra was groundbreaking with his Drenthe literary books. “At the end of the 1980s, Zangares van Zulver, the first Drenthe literary novella, was published. And it was very modern for that time. The structure was completely different and that stood out. Before that it was more traditional and less socially critical.”
Veenstra managed to surprise his audience, Rossing explains. “If you saw Jan Veenstra like that, you thought: that is a very quiet guy. Nothing comes out of it. He was not a shouter, even though he grew up in the 60s. But there was so much in him, and it came out in his beautiful lyrics.”
Rossing also believes that Veenstra was a cultural all-rounder. One that was also innovative and somewhat contradictory. “He is one of the initiators of the Language Theater Night in Emmen and creator of the essay series The Sadness of Drenthe. Then he asked people: ‘Write a very critical piece about us Drenthe’. That does not suit the Drenthe people at all to stick their heads above the parapet, but he thought so and that resulted in very nice things.”
There were layers in all his works, Rossing explains. “With humor, also the pain and the dark side of life. Both in his columns and in his stories and plays.”
Rossing calls it a shame that Veenstra increasingly switched to Dutch in his written work, “but he said: ‘You have to hear Drenthe’.”
Jan Veenstra is 74 years old.