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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Laura van den Berg

Believe

Road

Responsibility

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

" I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to me: 'the pace at which we're learning crucial emotional information about the stories' central figures.' An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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

Work

Quality

" 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. "

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

" I love creating mysteries, but I am terrible at solving them. "

Laura van den Berg

I Am

Creating

" The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different. "

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

Laura van den Berg

First-Person

Writer

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" It puzzles me when writers say they can't read fiction when they're writing fiction because they don't want to be influenced. I'm totally open to useful influence. I'm praying for it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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