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Dec
16
Laura van den Berg Guest Blogs!
2009 at 12am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Last week I raved about Laura van den Berg’s debut collection of short stories What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, which is simply enchanting. Today, I’m thrilled to welcome Laura to The Book Lady’s Blog, as she shares insights about the origins of her stories and her experience as a first-time author.
I wrote my first collection of stories, “What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us,” in about 4 years, from drafting the first story to submitting the final manuscript to my publisher, Dzanc Books. Much of the collection was written and revised while I was in the M.F.A. program at Emerson College, where I benefited hugely from the wise mentorship my teachers offered and the community of writers in the program. The collection has several thematic links, but I wasn’t aware of those overlaps until I’d written about 3/4 of the stories. It was then that I began to wonder if I didn’t just have a random assortment of stories, but perhaps the beginnings of a book.
In our correspondences, Rebecca noted one of these thematic links, that the central characters in this collection are all searching for something either elusive or imaginary, often a mythic monster of some sort, like the Loch Ness Monster or the Mokele-mbembe. This element is often central to the way the stories unfold, so I thought I would take a little time to explore the role of those creatures and the searches that accompany them.
In my stories, I see the monsters as manifestations of the characters’ desires, obsessions, and fears, as tangible expressions of intangible things. The creatures are also a stand-in for all that is ineffable to us, for all that is unknown and unreachable. This is part of the reason I chose to never have a creature appear “onstage”; I wanted to keep that ambiguity, that inaccessibility. After all, there’s so much we will never know, will never understand, about ourselves and the people around us and the world at large; my characters search for things like the Loch Ness and the Mokele-mbembe because they are trying to form a narrative that will make their own lives comprehensible; they want to have a purpose, to make it all make sense.
Another thematic connection in my stories is landscape. The settings tend to figure prominently in the stories, also working to suggest the unseen and the intangible and to apply pressure to the characters. A few of the landscapes are familiar—like Boston, where I used to live, or southern France, where I’ve visited—but many of the settings are places I’ve never seen firsthand. For example, the title story in my collection is set in Madagascar and centers on a young woman and her scientist mother, who has traveled to the island to study lemurs, but the closest I’ve ever come to Madagascar or lemurs is watching a program on the Discovery Channel.
Another story, Inverness, concerns a botanist searching for a rare flower in Inverness, Scotland; yet the only trip I’ve ever taken to Inverness has been courtesy of National Geographic. In fact, “writing what you don’t know,” or writing outside my own experiences, to put it more precisely, is another thread that runs throughout the book, with the far-flung landscapes (many of which I’ve never visited) and exotic vocations (all of which I’ve never held) that kept finding their way into my stories. In the collection’s early stages, this approach was, at times, met with some questions: Why write about a place you’ve never been to? I’ve been asked. Why not set the story in your hometown, or the city you live in now? They had their reasons—it’ll make the story more authentic—but, for better or for worse, I always found myself resisting. Over time, I realized writing outside my own experiences, writing what I don’t know, was the very thing that allowed me to access what I do know; the unknown was the key to getting my own emotional realities onto the page, to accessing my autobiography in a way that could inform my fiction.
The first book, at least for me, is a tricky animal. For the first time, you’re getting your vision of the world down in a comprehensive way; you’re learning what you think and know and feel and see and what you don’t know and don’t think and don’t feel and fail to see. Lorrie Moore has said that “if one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write” and that notion seems especially true for the first book, which, with time, seems more and more like an artifact of The-Best-I-Could-Do-Then, a thing to be proud of but also a thing to seek to progress beyond.
For me, the most magical part of having a book out in the world has been the opportunity to connect with readers. Many thanks to Rebecca for helping in that endeavor, with her kind review of my book, inviting me to do this guest post, and also for running such a terrific, book-loving blog. And many thanks to you for reading.
Visit Laura van den Berg’s website and connect with her on Twitter and Facebook to learn more about What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us.
Well, because of your review, this book sits at my bedside, vying for reading priority! This post was very insightful, and I think it will help me navigate the stories once I do read it. Thanks Rebecca!
Thanks so much, Sandy! Hope you enjoy.
Very best,
Laura
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