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" 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
Been
Away
Reality
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" 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
Landscape
Place
Writing
" 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
" 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
Living
Creative
Work
" 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
World
Possibilities
Quality
" I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling. "
Laura van den Berg
Small
Always
Axiom
" Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories. "
Laura van den Berg
Complicated
City
Many
" 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
" 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
" Like many American readers, I was first introduced to Magda Szabo's work when New York Review Books reissued the Hungarian master's profound and haunting novel 'The Door.' "
Laura van den Berg
New York
American
Door
" 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
Time
Childhood
Young
" 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
" 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
" It's not easy to craft a novel that gradually erodes the reader's comprehension of the world, of reality and identity and the passage of time. "
Laura van den Berg
Time
Easy
Identity
" 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
" Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer. "
Laura van den Berg
Struggles
Doubt
Anxiety
" 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
Not Knowing
World
Reality
" 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
Party
Say
Duck
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Think
Way
Writing
" I love noir, quite obviously. "
Laura van den Berg
Love
Obviously
Noir
" We're all trying to figure out on a daily basis what kind of person to be, aren't we? I am, at least. "
Laura van den Berg
Person
Kind
I Am
" 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
Options
Create
Age
" 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
Me
Need
" Publishing at a young age is not really an indicator of talent. "
Laura van den Berg
Talent
Publishing
Young
" In the world of the American creative writing workshop, I've encountered teachers who are tempted to place, or have actually placed, a moratorium on child narrators. Students love to write them, but children come laden with complications. "
Laura van den Berg
World
Child
Children
" 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
" To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills. "
Laura van den Berg
Memory
Think
Degree
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
Man
Husband
Cabin