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

America loves a good comeback story!

Laura van den Berg

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.

Laura van den Berg

Publishing at a young age is not really an indicator of talent.

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

Unlike a novel, where you expect a different kind of arc that leaves us with a somber sense of resolution, I think a story in some ways as like a train window: being able to watch the landscape pass for a certain amount of time. And then your stop arrives, and you have to leave.

Laura van den Berg

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.

Laura van den Berg

I realized that, for me, travel for work - I'm not speaking so much about travel for pleasure - had actually become a way of avoiding life.

Laura van den Berg

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.

Laura van den Berg

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

Laura van den Berg

I wager we have a vast amount of literature out there that tends to the stories of men, so I've never really worried too much about attending to stories of women.

Laura van den Berg

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

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

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

The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different.

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

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

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 lived in Florida until I was 22.

Laura van den Berg

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.

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