Edward van de Vendel

When I wrote The Days of Bluegrass Love, I was in a constant fever. It was one of my first books and I didn’t really know what I was doing. Tycho and Oliver had appeared inside me—they were calling the shots. I followed them with my pen, so fast I felt like I was burning up.

It was 1998. Up until that point I’d only published a handful of children’s books, most of them poetry. But I found myself yearning for a book that gave a visceral, first-person account of a love sparking between two boys. Until that point, the queer books I’d read—if I could even find any—had mostly been tragic: death and heartbreak were never far away. Now I wanted to write the kind of book I wished had been around fifteen years earlier, a book like a warm glow, a book in which many shots get fired, though they never hit love itself.

The romance between Tycho and Oliver wasn’t based on autobiographical experience, but I did use the backdrop of the summer camp in Knoxville, Tennessee that I’d been to and my travels to Norway. I started, tried, failed, started again, and, after a while, there was a manuscript that my Dutch publisher was willing to publish. Although I barely had a say in how the story unfolded out of me, I knew one thing: even though at the end they would be separated by distance and time, the protagonists would not be letting each other go.

It will come as no surprise, then, that Tycho and Oliver lived on even after I finished the book. In time I went on to write another two books about them: the sequel Our Third Body, published in 2006, about Tycho going off to college after returning from Norway, and the prequel Oliver, published in 2015, and set two years before the events of Bluegrass Love. I was able to do that because of the boys themselves, but also because of a wonderful gift that I was given: to this day, Tycho and Oliver continue to appear in the messages I receive from readers. The Days of Bluegrass Love and those emails changed my life.

I came to understand that a book is nothing if there is no one out there on the other side—the young people who are willing to make it into their book. One reader wrote that he had used it to confess his love to his best friend; another said he’d read it a total of seventeen times; yet another addressed his letters not to me but to Tycho. I learned from them and others that the purpose of a book is to pass on a fever—if only to a handful of others. That’s why I’m profoundly grateful to my European and American publishers and readership for the way they made room in their lives for Tycho and Oliver back then.

• A page about The Days of Bluegrass Love on shepherd.com can be found here (also for ordering the book).

• The Dutch Literature Fund made a special in English, to be found here.