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" America loves a good comeback story! "

Laura van den Berg

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" I think my favorite horror films are really grounded in human psychology, which is to say I think through sort of extreme dislocations of reality. "

Laura van den Berg

" Youth is such a fascinating and volatile concoction of vulnerability, dependence, restlessness, relentlessness. You're still learning the terms of the world and of the self, in a very immediate way. "

Laura van den Berg

" Florida is a most unusual place. It can feel at once stifling and like anything is possible there. "

Laura van den Berg

Anything Is Possible

" As a genre, the best horror poses central human questions - Who can you trust? What is the cost of our secrets? What is our relationship to history? What are we blind to? What evils are lurking under the smooth surface of the self? - through radical dislocations. "

Laura van den Berg

" In terms of specific cinematic influences, certainly I'd recommend 'Juan de los Muertos,' and I also really love this French zombie movie - 'Les Revenants' - where the dead reanimate for no apparent reason. "

Laura van den Berg

" Not long after watching 'The Passenger,' I wrote the first lines of 'The Isle of Youth,' which concerns twin sisters who swap identities and become ensnared in the Miami underworld. "

Laura van den Berg

" I take a pretty expansive view of craft, which is to say I don't see craft as just being technique - it's also process; subject; ideas and feelings; visions and dreams; the words that are put down and the words that are avoided. "

Laura van den Berg

" Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation. "

Laura van den Berg

" I've had a somewhat typical experience in that many of the contemporary writers I was exposed to early on were white and often male. "

Laura van den Berg

" Unlike a novel, where you expect a different kind of arc that leaves us with a somber sense of resolution, I think a story in some ways as like a train window: being able to watch the landscape pass for a certain amount of time. And then your stop arrives, and you have to leave. "

Laura van den Berg

" A sense of play is important when I'm writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially. "

Laura van den Berg

" As a young writer, I was sort of sailing around trying to 'find my voice' - for lack of a better term - and I was really chafing against the very minimal brand of domestic realism that I'd read so much of in college. "

Laura van den Berg

" Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories. "

Laura van den Berg

" As a reader, I appreciate a world that feels unsettled and also visceral, inhabitable, so that's a quality I try and bring to my own work. In this way, dislocation and precision make total sense to me as a unit. "

Laura van den Berg

" I am temperamentally drawn to work that shoves the strange and normal against one another, it's true, although I don't see the 'strange' and the 'normal' as being two separate categories of experience; for me, they are intertwined, hard to separate. "

Laura van den Berg

" If you're working on a novel, whatever you do, don't say, 'I am almost finished with my novel.' It's worse than chanting Bloody Mary three times in front of a mirror. "

Laura van den Berg

" I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways. "

Laura van den Berg

" I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you. "

Laura van den Berg

" If I'm really rolling with a short story, I work on it everywhere and end up with a finished draft in a couple months, but a novel really demands that I step out of my life and vanish into the world of the book. "

Laura van den Berg

" Being scared by a movie offers a safe catharsis, because the terror is confined to the screen. It's an adrenalin spike, and when I come back down, I feel a bit more leveled. "

Laura van den Berg

" It's not easy to craft a novel that gradually erodes the reader's comprehension of the world, of reality and identity and the passage of time. "

Laura van den Berg

" I think writing, or any form of art-making, is a way to prepare for not being here. Not that we can. No amount of preparing can really ready us, in a meaningful way, for the great void that awaits us all. "

Laura van den Berg

" I've always been most drawn to fiction that wrestles with that death-fear. Sometimes I joke with my students, 'If no one is in danger of dying, I'm not interested,' but of course I'm not really joking. "

Laura van den Berg

" Ever since I started writing in college, I have, save for a few short breaks here and there, been working away on something. I love it, I need it, and so it never occurred to me to put writing on the back burner. "

Laura van den Berg

" I teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, 'House Taken Over,' a short story by Julio Cortazar, is a work I regularly teach. "

Laura van den Berg

" I realized that, for me, travel for work - I'm not speaking so much about travel for pleasure - had actually become a way of avoiding life. "

Laura van den Berg

" A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem. But it's common enough to encounter a hodgepodge instead, where flashes of brilliance are undercut by clunkers. "

Laura van den Berg

" I lived in Florida until I was 22. "

Laura van den Berg

" I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear. "

Laura van den Berg

" I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way. "

Laura van den Berg