When I was only 4 years old, my father read from the comic series 'Jommeke'. Queen of the Underworld was about a witch who abducted children to make them her subjects. I believed everything that was drawn and written in that album. It was there, so it existed. At 7, I escaped from school and ran off to the castle in our village to discover if there were children captured in the cellars. And of course our old neighbour was a witch. She could definitely conjure. How else could she know I sneaked into her garden? Our other neighbour was a nice lady, who had lost one finger. I tried everything just to get a glimpse of that hand.
Exciting was fun. Adventures were great. I ended up inventing my own stories. My sisters thought it strange that especially in our garden grew a candy bush. And that I was the first one to discover it, of course. My brothers followed me when I went hunting escaped criminals with bow and arrows and catapults in the abandoned railway bed.
When my brothers and sisters grew older, the magic disappeared. So I decided to write journals, poetry, comic books and books.
A few years ago I explored the ancient art of storytelling and so I returned to my roots: telling stories. Writing books, movie scripts and theatre plays, all these art forms belong in the storyteller's range. And telling stories is how I started. The circle is round again.
Of course I also need to work to pay the bills. I've lived and worked in South Africa at the Consulate General of Belgium in Johannesburg. After my return to Belgium, I returned to the beautiful abbey of Averbode where I was a journalist for Top-Magazine. I made a leap to the transmission tower of our national broadcasting centre (VRT) in Brussels, where I at first was an editor and filmmaker for tv, lateron I worked for Radio1. I left the VRT to start writing my first novels: Witte Pijn and Merg en Bloed. I returned to work at Clavis Publishing as editor, Foreign Rights Officer, Press Officer and subsequently Publisher.
Today I am a freelance writing and storytelling coach, translator and (script)writer.
