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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

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

Laura van den Berg

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" As we know all too well, our early years are formative in ways it can takes us a lifetime to grasp. Those years leave deep marks; in that way, the stakes of childhood are inherently very high. "

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" I lived in Florida until I was 22. "

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

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

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" I think we're often guilty of gravitating towards the familiar. Even if we recognize that certain patterns are unsatisfying and destructive, there can still be a comfort in the familiar recognition of a cycle repeating itself. "

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

" 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

" In August 2008, I moved with the man who would become my husband from Boston to a cabin in rural North Carolina. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills. "

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

" 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

" 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

" In the novels I most admire, there is this sense that, within the confines of the world, the possibilities are always opening in new and surprising ways - that was a quality I strived to capture, with the hope that the reader would be willing to follow me. "

Laura van den Berg

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

Laura van den Berg

" 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. "

Laura van den Berg

" In 'The Third Hotel,' my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She's trying to make sense of her husband's death, how someone's life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life. "

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

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

Laura van den Berg

" I do not work well when I am in living in a cyclone of panic. I reject actively seeking out destabilization and suffering as a creative model. "

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 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

" 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. "

Laura van den Berg