Images
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
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.
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.
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.
The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface.
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.
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.
Florida is a very idiosyncratic place in a lot of ways - as are many parts of our fine country, but one could say Florida is particularly idiosyncratic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Florida is a most unusual place. It can feel at once stifling and like anything is possible there.
Like many artists, I have issues with anxiety and depression, so I try to live in a way that supports my mental health.
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.
As a teenager, I struggled a lot, had several major depressive episodes, and ended up dropping out of high school and getting a GED.
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.
I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way.
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.
I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling.
In my own life, I have found grief to be enormously distorting, particularly if it's sudden or extreme in nature.
I have no problem quitting things, because I have a horror of boredom.
'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.
I'm such a first-person writer.
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.
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.
Culturally, there is often the expectation that women should be repelled by anything too ugly, too violent.
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.
I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear.
With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings.
A sense of play is important when I'm writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially.
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.
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.
I think where a writer falls on the realism/non-realism continuum has a lot to do with their sight, as in, 'This is how I see the world.' And it seems my sight is off-kilter and kind of strange, but I come by that naturally; I'm not consciously pushing toward a particular point on the continuum.
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.
The moment when my husband and I clasped hands and turned from our officiant, newly wed, was the most light-filled of my life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways.
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.
In August 2008, I moved with the man who would become my husband from Boston to a cabin in rural North Carolina.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10