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" 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
Early
Exposed
Many
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" 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
Mental Health
Depression
Health
" I think my concern is I know my voice, and I know the kinds of landscapes that interest me, so my primary concern is doing the most I can with those voices and those landscapes. "
Laura van den Berg
I Can
Voice
Think
" 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
Pleasure
Way
Work
" As a teenager, I struggled a lot, had several major depressive episodes, and ended up dropping out of high school and getting a GED. "
Laura van den Berg
High
Lot
Out
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Life
World
Work
" 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
Me
" '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
Storm
Book
Joy
" For three years, I lived in a miniscule apartment on Beacon Street, less than a mile from the Boston Marathon explosions. "
Laura van den Berg
Street
Boston
Lived
" I love noir, quite obviously. "
Laura van den Berg
Love
Obviously
Noir
" 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
Voice
Trying
College
" 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
Best
" I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways. "
Laura van den Berg
Unexpected
Rule
Followers
" Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer. "
Laura van den Berg
Struggles
Doubt
Anxiety
" 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
Rise
Fiction
Social
" I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't. "
Laura van den Berg
Million
Know
Ideas
" To me, in general, something that's really rich in terms of identity about transit spaces is that they're so intimate. Especially thinking about long international flights when we're trying to sleep on the plane - we're total strangers, but we're sleeping next to each other. "
Laura van den Berg
Me
Identity
Rich
" 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
Me
You
Work
" 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
You
I Am
Mirror
" 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
Great
House
Memories
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Never
Men
Literature
" I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear. "
Laura van den Berg
Hear
I Am
Am
" There's the public self that we present to the outer world. There's the private self, which maybe takes more time to access. But ultimately, what I'm most interested in as a writer is a few notches below the private self. "
Laura van den Berg
World
More
Present
" Youth is such a fascinating and volatile concoction of vulnerability, dependence, restlessness, relentlessness. You're still learning the terms of the world and of the self, in a very immediate way. "
Laura van den Berg
You
World
Learning
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Good
Learning
Mean
" 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
You
Uncertainty
Think
" 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
My Own
Own
Found
" 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
Humor
Tragedy
Art
" The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are. "
Laura van den Berg
Short
Long
Here
" 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
Hotel
Trying
She
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Say
Want
Open