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" 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

Relationship

History

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" I wager we have a vast amount of literature out there that tends to the stories of men, so I've never really worried too much about attending to stories of women. "

" On my first trip to Havana, I was stopped by a woman who turned out to be a Canadian tour guide and who had mistaken me for a woman who had been part of one of her tour groups. "

" 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. "

" Often, contrasts bring art to life: the bright speck of paint on a dark canvas; the tightrope walk between humor and tragedy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Normally I'm the type who wouldn't bail on a responsibility unless dead on the side of the road, and I believe deeply in the importance of continuing to follow our own paths. "

" 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

Back

Down

" 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. "

" Like many American readers, I was first introduced to Magda Szabo's work when New York Review Books reissued the Hungarian master's profound and haunting novel 'The Door.' "

" 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. "

" Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer. "

" Children tell themselves stories, engage in self-delusion and fantasy, but those narratives are more evolving than calcified - and with that malleability comes both freedom and danger. "

" Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms. "

" Whether it's via the monstrous or the paranormal, horror actually can really get at some of the most fundamental human questions. "

" When I'm working on a short story, I could duck into a bathroom at a crowded party and write a scene, which is to say I can work in a very incremental way. "

" I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling. "

" 'Find Me' I think, is brooding in a very literal sense of the word in that you have all of these sort of interior storm that's growing within Joy over the course of the book and leading her to her moment. And certainly, I think there's an aspect of the supernatural. "

" Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I'm feeling despairing about writing is to write. "

" I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world. "

" 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. "

" Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers. "

Laura van den Berg

Teachers

Through

" I'm such a first-person writer. "

Laura van den Berg

First-Person

Writer

" I'm pretty sure that I've never confessed in an interview my weakness for McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. The cheese is fake. Who knows what that 'fish' really is. It is gross. It is amazing. "

" We write in a culture that favors the heft of the novel. Better still if the novel in question is large enough to be wielded interchangeably as a doorstop and a weapon. "

" The moment when my husband and I clasped hands and turned from our officiant, newly wed, was the most light-filled of my life. "

" The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present. "

" As a teenager, I struggled a lot, had several major depressive episodes, and ended up dropping out of high school and getting a GED. "

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