A biography for Laura van den Berghasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer.”
“Like many artists, I have issues with anxiety and depression, so I try to live in a way that supports my mental health.”
“We're all trying to figure out on a daily basis what kind of person to be, aren't we? I am, at least.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I'm feeling despairing about writing is to write.”
“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.”
“With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world.”
“On my first trip to Havana, I was stopped by a woman who turned out to be a Canadian tour guide and who had mistaken me for a woman who had been part of one of her tour groups.”
“To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.”