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" 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

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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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" When I'm absorbed in a work of fiction, time and place melts away, as though I've drifted away from my usual reality and been absorbed into another. "

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

" Not long after watching 'The Passenger,' I wrote the first lines of 'The Isle of Youth,' which concerns twin sisters who swap identities and become ensnared in the Miami underworld. "

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

" The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are. "

Laura van den Berg

" In terms of specific cinematic influences, certainly I'd recommend 'Juan de los Muertos,' and I also really love this French zombie movie - 'Les Revenants' - where the dead reanimate for no apparent reason. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" Here's something a little more personal: In my teens, I was having a hard time and ended up in a therapy group of young women, some of whom had endured terrible childhood traumas. "

Laura van den Berg

" Children exist in the worlds that adults create for them, both locally and globally, and their options are, by virtue of age, often painfully limited. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms. "

Laura van den Berg