The interviews the late lamented Glimmer Train magazine published are a fine source of information on authors beyond, say, John Grisham and Lucy Foley. The mag’s interview with Laura van den Berg was published in 2012—a dozen years ago. Accomplished as she was at that time, she’s done even more now! Then, she was “working on” a novel (isn’t everyone?), but now she’s published three: State of Paradise, The Third Hotel, and Find Me, plus four collections of short stories, including the one with my favorite title, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears. All the while, she’s been racking up the prizes. (Van den Berg’s website here.)

Her newest novel, State of Paradise, was published only two months ago and deemed a “most anticipated book” by a great many review publications. NPR said it was “at once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida’s psychogeography,” and if you know very much about Florida, van den Berg’s home state, you’ll know what a deep and complex subject that can be. “So many worlds,” she says.

In the interview, she talks about the attraction of Gatorland, where people wrestle alligators, which reminded me of Karen Russell’s 2011 Swamplandia!, a Pulitzer Prize finalist about an entire family of Florida alligator wrestlers. Not recommended bedtime reading. “And many other parts of the state are just as strange,” van den Berg says.

Unlike so many authors, van den Berg didn’t start out to be a writer. She wanted to be a psychology major but ran into a major stumbling block: math. As a person who used to sleep with her statistics book under her pillow in case some insight would crawl out of it and into my head during the night, I can relate. What turned her attention to the possibilities of writing was discovering contemporary literature—not the classics.

Part of her learning to write fiction was to learn how not to be “willfully strange.” When her stories have strangeness in them, as they often do, it must “have roots in the characters’ lives” and not feel as if she is “imposing strangeness on them.” Certainly in writing mystery and suspense stories, events, however untoward, should not feel arbitrary or conceived merely to move the plot along. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking a particular character wouldn’t act as the story describes, you may have encountered something “willfully strange.”

Twelve years ago, van den Berg explained her attraction to magical realism themes, “monsters and myths,” as due in part to Florida’s influence. In addition, she says, “there’s so much about the world, so much mystery, that I would never understand,” that may be better described or appreciated through a totally different perspective. Her view was prescient, given the popularity of paranormal themes in fiction today. Recent crime novels with neurodivergent protagonists—Nita Prose’s The Maid, Liz Nugent’s Strange Sally Diamond, or Tim Sullivan’s Detective George Cross come to mind—may be another manifestation of shifted perspective.

Part of the pleasure of reading van den Berg’s work or that of the other authors I mentioned is sorting out what’s real and what isn’t. These alternative realities, like belief in the Loch Ness Monster or the power of wishes, are both “beautiful and terrifying,” she says, because in a way, “it’s easier to not believe in things.” And, “There’s a beauty to people who do live in the world with imagination, and who embrace the mystery of the world at large.”

Take it from me, it’s possible to love such flights of imagination and the cut-and-dried world of “just the facts, ma’am” police procedurals at the same time.More Recommended Florida Reading:
Swamplandia!by Karen RussellNaked Came the Florida Manby Tim Dorsey – irrepressible craziness