Dutch Treats: An Interview with Marlen Visser
Author Marlen Visser shares the spark behind her unsettling story “The Night Watch” in Dutch Treats, her path from numbers to words, and why cheese lovers should put Gouda on their travel list.
Dutch Treats: Meet Marlen Visser
• Tell our readers a little about yourself.
We live in Gennep, in the north of the Dutch province of Limburg, three kilometers (1.86 miles) from the German border. Before that we were in the city center of Gouda, “the cheese capital of the world,” a paradise for a cheese addict like me, but we moved to the other side of the country to enjoy more natural surroundings.
I’m a writer in the broadest sense of the word: I write articles, blog posts, short stories, and novels. I also organize writing retreats to help beginning authors bring their books to completion. And I do guest lectures in schools, basing my talks around my YA novel Verraderlijk Patroon (Treacherous Pattern), in which the main character deals with the abuse of nitrous oxide.
In my last salaried job, I was the operations manager of a childcare organization. My working life was all about numbers, and in my spare time I was all about words. In 2020, when I realized that words that gave me far more pleasure than numbers, I left my job and began writing fulltime.
• Where did the idea for “The Night Watch,” your contribution to Dutch Treats, come from?
I was visiting a patient in a hospital one evening and noticed the night porter sitting in his cubicle. That image of a lonely figure, combined with the pervasive hospital odor, got my mind working. I asked myself what sort of person would take such a job, and I came up with the character Arjan, a man who had a rather unhealthy relationship with his now deceased mother, who’s never had a romantic relationship, and who mistakes the friendliness of a nurse for romantic interest. When the nurse makes it clear to Arjan that she isn’t looking for anything deeper than collegiality, something inside him snaps….
• If American readers were to visit The Netherlands, what’s one thing you’d encourage them to see?
Don’t miss the Gouda Cheese Experience! It’s a playful interactive museum that includes a cheese tasting. I know the owners, an enterprising mother and daughter. They worked hard to find investors and sponsors, so they could develop a classic building into a fun tourist attraction. It was an enormous undertaking—and they succeeded! Gouda is a lovely city in its own right, rich with history, with a compact center you can see in a day.
Dutch Treats will be available September 1st, 2025
Preorder now