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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. "

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" 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

Enough

Build

Lights

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

" With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" For three years, I lived in a miniscule apartment on Beacon Street, less than a mile from the Boston Marathon explosions. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We're all trying to figure out on a daily basis what kind of person to be, aren't we? I am, at least. "

" 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. "

" Culturally, there is often the expectation that women should be repelled by anything too ugly, too violent. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I was born and raised in Orlando, where the economy and culture has been powerfully shaped by tourism, and so I've long been interested in how we narrate the places we visit, how the gap between what we see and what we know manifests when we're traveling. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I think where a writer falls on the realism/non-realism continuum has a lot to do with their sight, as in, 'This is how I see the world.' And it seems my sight is off-kilter and kind of strange, but I come by that naturally; I'm not consciously pushing toward a particular point on the continuum. "

" 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

Love

Need

" 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

Kid

World

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

Laura van den Berg

Hear

I Am

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Florida is a very idiosyncratic place in a lot of ways - as are many parts of our fine country, but one could say Florida is particularly idiosyncratic. "

" America loves a good comeback story! "

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

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

" Publishing at a young age is not really an indicator of talent. "

" I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.' "

Laura van den Berg

Battle

Think