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" Whether it's via the monstrous or the paranormal, horror actually can really get at some of the most fundamental human questions. "

Laura van den Berg

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" When I'm between projects, I keep a journal I call a 'thought log,' and it's my practice to write down whatever interests me. "

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

" I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you. "

Laura van den Berg

" I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling. "

Laura van den Berg

" I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn't have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work. "

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

" 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

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

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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. "

Laura van den Berg

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

Laura van den Berg

" I've always been most drawn to fiction that wrestles with that death-fear. Sometimes I joke with my students, 'If no one is in danger of dying, I'm not interested,' but of course I'm not really joking. "

Laura van den Berg

" Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers. "

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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

" I teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, 'House Taken Over,' a short story by Julio Cortazar, is a work I regularly teach. "

Laura van den Berg

" Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer. "

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

" 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

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

Laura van den Berg

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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. "

Laura van den Berg

" '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

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

Laura van den Berg

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

Laura van den Berg

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

Laura van den Berg