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" I think, in a lot of ways, if you really strip down some of the most compelling novels, in a lot of ways, they're detective stories. "

Laura van den Berg

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" I lived in Boston for three years, and during that time, I wrote my first collection of stories, 'What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us;' other stories that didn't make it into the collection; and several failed novel openings. "

Laura van den Berg

" I can't write anything if I don't know where it's set, where the events are happening - even if the details of setting are minimal. "

Laura van den Berg

" If we can think of a place, the physicality of a place, as a kind of 'material,' I would say the landscape of Florida in particular was especially important while writing 'Isle.' "

Laura van den Berg

" Since childhood, I've been a fan of mysteries - 'Nancy Drew' lovers unite! - but 'Vertigo' struck me as an entirely new take on the genre. "

Laura van den Berg

" Like many artists, I have issues with anxiety and depression, so I try to live in a way that supports my mental health. "

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

" When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we have these amazing memories of great Cambridge summers. "

Laura van den Berg

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

Laura van den Berg

" 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.' "

Laura van den Berg

" 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. "

Laura van den Berg

" I love noir, quite obviously. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" '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. "

Laura van den Berg

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

Laura van den Berg

" In my own life, I have found grief to be enormously distorting, particularly if it's sudden or extreme in nature. "

Laura van den Berg

" When I first left Florida for Boston, I was so eager to shed my Floridian identity, perhaps some of my earlier surreal gestures felt hollow and unconvincing because they were not rising from the particular brand of the uncanny I knew best. "

Laura van den Berg

" My students are often asking me, 'What do you think are the most important qualities for a writer?' And one thing I always tells them is that it's helpful to be willing to sit in a space of uncertainty. There are entire years, especially with novels, where you really don't know where the project is going. "

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

" 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 have no problem quitting things, because I have a horror of boredom. "

Laura van den Berg

" I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't. "

Laura van den Berg

" I think that one thing about teaching is you're trying to communicate your thoughts about a work to a group of people who may or may not share that sentiment. This has forced me to become a lot more articulate about what I respond to and what I don't respond to in fiction. "

Laura van den Berg

" Holy cow - everything about writing a novel is hard for me. "

Laura van den Berg

" In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" If I leave the fictional world for too long, it's a bit like stepping through a portal, entering another reality, and then not knowing how to get back to where you were before. "

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

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

Laura van den Berg

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

Laura van den Berg

" As for me, I was a lonely kid, with few close friends until I was an adult - even when I might have been perceived as being on the inside, I felt like I was on the outside, kind of like viewing the world through a sheet of glass. "

Laura van den Berg