Eight years of crossings, written down
Texel Tales is a small, slow, mostly handwritten journal kept by a few of the people who cross between Den Helder and Texel often enough to feel they belong to both shores.
It started, as these things do, almost by accident. In the autumn of 2017, our founding editor — a marine biologist who commuted to a field station on Texel — began keeping a notebook of what she saw from the upper deck of the ferry: the gulls, the seals, the shapes of the sandbanks at different tides, the strange flat light of the Wadden Sea in late September. She showed the notebook to a friend, who showed it to another friend, who suggested, very politely, that it should be a magazine.
Eight years later, we are still not quite a magazine. We are a journal, which is a kinder word for a periodical that comes out when it has something to say, rather than to a schedule. We publish three or four times a year, in small print runs of fewer than nine hundred copies, and on this website for readers who can't pick up a paper copy at the harbour kiosk in Den Helder or at the corner shop in Den Burg.
What we write about
Everything we publish touches, in some way, the ferry crossing or the island that the ferry serves. That includes:
- The crossing itself — short essays, crossing reports, sketches from the upper deck, conversations overheard on the lower deck.
- The Wadden Sea — field notes about birds, seals, mudflat ecology, the salt marshes between Den Helder and the island.
- Texel — its four lighthouses, its sheep, its bakeries, its small museums, its long beaches and its even longer winters.
- Reader letters — about a crossing remembered, a relative remembered, a year on the island that changed somebody's mind.
What we don't write about
We do not run advertisements. We do not publish sponsored posts. We do not pretend to be a guidebook, a travel review, or a comparison shopping site. If you want a discount code, you are in the wrong harbour.
Who we are
The editors
- Femke van der Bie — founding editor, marine biologist, lives outside Den Burg, crosses on the 07:30.
- Joris Klompé — managing editor, born on the mainland, married into a Texel family, crosses on the 17:30.
- Anouk Renders — sub-editor and photographer, divides her year between the island and a flat above a fish shop in Den Helder.
How the journal is funded
Texel Tales is reader-supported. The print run is paid for by people who subscribe by post, and the website is paid for, mostly, by a small grant from a regional cultural fund. We do not take money from ferry operators, hotels, tour companies, or any business that would have an interest in what we write. If we ever did, we would tell you, and the journal would probably stop being interesting.
"Write slowly. Read slowly. There is no hurry on the Wadden." — Femke van der Bie, founding editorial
Our pace
We publish a new issue when the next one is finished, not when a content calendar tells us to. In practice, this means three to four issues a year, usually somewhere near the equinoxes and solstices, with a small extra issue if the autumn migration is unusually busy or the winter ice does something we have never seen before.
If you've reached this page, thank you for reading slowly. If you'd like to write to us, our contact page has all the usual addresses.