CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

Interview with Laura van den Berg, Part I

I first came across a story of Laura van den Berg's in an issue of One Story featuring the title work from her first collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, published by Dzanc Books earlier this month. The story intrigued me right away, with its authentic depictions of the complicated world of human emotion alongside similar complexities found in the natural world. (And, I must say, the title worked its charms.) The story—about a girl's introduction to both of these demanding worlds—begins as I found out later many of van den Berg's stories begin, in the mystery of exploration: "Madagascar was not the first expedition on which I had accompanied my mother."

Van den Berg earned her MFA at Emerson College. Formerly an assistant editor at Ploughshares, she is now a fiction editor at West Branch and the assistant editor for Memorious. Her stories have been published in One Story, Boston Review, Epoch, The Literary Review, American Short Fiction, StoryQuarterly, You Must Be This Tall to Ride, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prize XXIV, among other places. Brock Clarke says of van den Berg's first collection, "What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us is a lovely, remarkable book, full of people who strive mightily to believe in things." And Benjamin Percy adds, "There is a special kind of magic in the writing of Laura van den Berg, a damp-eyed sorceress who blends the mythological with the everyday, buoyant playfulness with lacerating sadness. Each sentence reads like a beautiful bruise smeared across pages as pale as the bodies that so often strip off their clothes and tangle together in these tender, elegant stories."

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Luna Park: Your first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us—aside from having one of the most fantastic and timely titles in recent memory—is a book that seems very interested in monsters and mystery. There are stories in the collection about Bigfoot impersonators, scientists pursuing “the sasquatch of Brazil,” mystical creatures in the Congo, and disappearing husbands. Yet, rather than represent a world where monsters necessarily exist and where the mysterious is deemed authentic, your stories tend to explore what such dreams of the monstrous do to us. In her recent review of your collection for The Believer, Nina MacLaughlin wrote, “This cast of creatures helps the stories explore what we believe, what we fear, and how we try to ‘bridge the unbridgeable.’” Do you agree with MacLaughlin’s reading? And are monsters—or, perhaps more accurately, our monstrous imaginations—an interest of yours as a writer?

Laura van den Berg: I’m definitely interested in our “monstrous imaginations,” as you put it, and tend to see the monsters in my stories as manifestations of the characters’ desires, obsessions, and fears, as having emerged from their emotional and psychological landscapes. While I think some of the stories allow for the possibility that, say, the Loch Ness Monster is a real thing in the world, my deeper interest lies in the ways the characters conjure these elements into their lives.

The monsters also stand-in for the things that are ineffable in our lives, for what is unknown and unreachable, which is part of the reason none of these creatures ever appear “onstage”; I wanted to keep that ambiguity, that inaccessibility.

LP: Your collection also has a wonderful global reach to it, with stories set in Boston, Paris, the Congo, the Amazon, the Loch Ness of Scotland, New York, and so on. The diversity made me wonder if you have visited the more foreign settings of your stories—such as Loch Ness or the Amazon—or if these settings were based on a mixture of research and imagination? For example, in your interview for Memorious with Jim Shepard, the two of you discussed the amount of research he does for some of his fiction—works often set in foreign places or the distant past. How much, if any, research do you do as a writer?

Van den Berg: I’m a visiting professor at Gettysburg College this year and, in a recent discussion with students on research in fiction, I found myself extolling the virtues of Wikipedia, forgetting they’ve likely been hearing all their academic lives that Wikipedia is the devil’s work—until, that is, I registered that the entire class was gazing back at me with expressions of abject horror.

So, as you can probably gather from that anecdote, I’m not a terribly rigorous researcher. I always do some research—hopefully enough to not make any major blunders, though I’m sure I have made some—and I like to look at photographs and listen to recordings and read up on the things that intrigue me. But I’m not exactly looking for facts; rather, I’m seeking the details that allow me to begin entering the world of the story—in the title story, for example, it was discovering the detail of the red dirt in Madagascar that made the story begin to take shape for me. I’m really interested in place, but more in the metaphorical possibilities of a setting and landscape as an instrument of pressure than adhering to some larger, factual reality.

I also don’t perceive the setting in my stories as being faithful renderings of the literal places; the Madagascar in the title story is not the real Madagascar, but my own fictional approximation. I haven’t been to a lot of the locales in the collection, though I used to live in Boston and have been to Paris a few times. This seems to disappoint people sometimes, probably because “autobiography” and “authenticity” are so often conflated—“But then how do you know X detail was real?” I’ve been asked. Fair enough, I suppose, but what does it mean for something to be “real” in a story? My feeling is that the only reality that matters is that story’s reality, so as long as the details, whether factual or invented, are things the reader can believe in, I have no qualms about making things up.  

LP: In your same interview with Shepard, he talks about how he is always “looking for, and interrogating, the weirdness in my work, since that was nearly always where the most intriguing, and intractable, emotional conflicts resided, usually in buried form.” It seems, with the locations and subjects of your works, that you are trying something outside the typical, to explore the weird. Though filled with domestic life and the detritus of the everyday, your stories are a far cry from fiction of the suburbs. What do you think—does a similar interrogation of strangeness play a part in your work?

Van den Berg: I am profoundly interested in the “interrogation of strangeness.” There is just so much that we cannot explain about ourselves and the people around us, let alone the world at large.  Take mortality, for example. It’s something we all face, but no one knows what will happen when they die. This is an obvious thing to point out, but it’s kind of staggering, really, and deeply strange to think about the aspects of the human experience that are inaccessible to us—and the ways in which we accept and refuse to accept this, the ways in which we keep digging around in the dark, trying to understand what the world, and our own lives, are made of. To that end, a lot of my characters’ esoteric searches and expeditions and obsessions are about trying to create a narrative that makes their lives comprehensible.

Also, I don’t view fiction as a representational art, as a replica of reality, but rather as something that pulls back the curtain of reality, which relates to the “interrogation of strangeness” you spoke of. When you start looking at the shadow selves, the shadow lives, the invisible currents that shape us as much as the visible ones, you often begin wading into very peculiar territory—which, for my characters, usually shows up via a “monstrous” element of some sort entering the story.

LP: You have a long history of working on literary magazines, such as previously at Ploughshares and currently with Memorious and West Branch. What’s the interest there? Are you specifically interested in literary magazine publishing, in the format and function of these the medium, or is it publishing on the whole that attracts you?

Van den Berg: Apart from a love of reading and discussing fiction and the immense joy of finding new work that resonates with me, I’m drawn to the collaborative aspect of literary magazine editing. It’s an amazing feeling, as you know, to work with a group of people to create an issue that you feel proud to bring into the world. I enjoy my work at West Branch and Memorious for different reasons—at West Branch, where I help edit fiction, I love sifting through the slush and finding the gems and with Memorious, it’s always interesting to think of how to best utilize our online format. There’s just so much exciting stuff happening in the world of online journals right now.

LP: How did your first literary magazine publication come about?

Van den Berg: I had a few very minor publications before this one, but my first significant publication was a short-short story called “Girl Talk” in StoryQuarterly. I was still in college, an earnest English/creative writing student, when I got word of an acceptance. It was an exciting message to receive and I remain very grateful to StoryQuarterly for taking “Girl Talk.”  I was still living in the suburbs of central Florida, where I grew up, and longing for a different kind of life. I wasn’t accustomed to having skills, to excelling at anything, so the StoryQuarterly acceptance was really crucial for me because it made that different kind of life start to seem possible.

[Check back for part II...]

[Above image is the cover of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, from Dzanc Books, 2009]