{"id":11195,"date":"2024-09-18T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11195"},"modified":"2024-09-17T20:54:54","modified_gmt":"2024-09-18T00:54:54","slug":"meet-author-laura-van-den-berg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11195","title":{"rendered":"Meet Author Laura van den Berg"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The interviews the late lamented Glimmer Train<\/em> magazine published are a fine source of information on authors beyond, say, John Grisham and Lucy Foley. The mag\u2019s interview with Laura van den Berg was published in 2012\u2014a dozen years ago. Accomplished as she was at that time, she\u2019s done even more now! Then, she was \u201cworking on\u201d a novel (isn\u2019t everyone?), but now she\u2019s published three: State of Paradise<\/em><\/a>, The Third Hotel<\/em>, and Find Me<\/em>, plus four collections of short stories, including the one with my favorite title, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears<\/em><\/a>. All the while, she\u2019s been racking up the prizes. (Van den Berg\u2019s website here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her newest novel, State of Paradise<\/em><\/a>, was published only two months ago and deemed a \u201cmost anticipated book\u201d by a great many review publications. NPR said it was \u201cat once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida\u2019s psychogeography,\u201d and if you know very much about Florida, van den Berg\u2019s home state, you\u2019ll know what a deep and complex subject that can be. \u201cSo many worlds,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the interview, she talks about the attraction of Gatorland, where people wrestle alligators, which reminded me of Karen Russell\u2019s 2011 Swamplandia!<\/em>, a Pulitzer Prize finalist about an entire family of Florida alligator wrestlers. Not recommended bedtime reading. \u201cAnd many other parts of the state are just as strange,\u201d van den Berg says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike so many authors, van den Berg didn\u2019t 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\u2014not the classics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of her learning to write fiction was to learn how not to be \u201cwillfully strange.\u201d When her stories have strangeness in them, as they often do, it must \u201chave roots in the characters\u2019 lives\u201d and not feel as if she is \u201cimposing strangeness on them.\u201d Certainly in writing mystery and suspense stories, events, however untoward, should not feel arbitrary or conceived merely to move the plot along. If you\u2019ve ever found yourself thinking a particular character wouldn\u2019t act as the story describes, you may have encountered something \u201cwillfully strange.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twelve years ago, van den Berg explained her attraction to magical realism themes, \u201cmonsters and myths,\u201d as due in part to Florida\u2019s influence. In addition, she says, \u201cthere\u2019s so much about the world, so much mystery, that I would never understand,\u201d 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\u2014Nita Prose\u2019s The Maid<\/em>, Liz Nugent\u2019s Strange Sally Diamond<\/em>, or Tim Sullivan\u2019s Detective George Cross<\/a> come to mind\u2014may be another manifestation of shifted perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of the pleasure of reading van den Berg\u2019s work or that of the other authors I mentioned is sorting out what\u2019s real and what isn\u2019t. These alternative realities, like belief in the Loch Ness Monster or the power of wishes, are both \u201cbeautiful and terrifying,\u201d she says, because in a way, \u201cit\u2019s easier to not<\/em> believe in things.\u201d And, \u201cThere\u2019s a beauty to people who do live in the world with imagination, and who embrace the mystery of the world at large.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take it from me, it\u2019s possible to love such flights of imagination and the cut-and-dried world of \u201cjust the facts, ma\u2019am\u201d police procedurals at the same time.More Recommended Florida Reading:
<\/em><\/strong>Swamplandia!<\/em><\/a>by Karen RussellNaked Came the Florida Man<\/em><\/a>by Tim Dorsey \u2013 irrepressible craziness<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s interview with Laura van den Berg was published in 2012\u2014a dozen years ago. Accomplished … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Author Laura van den Berg on appreciating the oddities and mysteries in life. She's from Florida. There, oddities and mysteries are what it's all about!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,174,5,29],"tags":[1710,2226],"class_list":["post-11195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-first-draft-blog","category-imagination","category-writing","tag-florida","tag-magical-realism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2Uz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11197,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11195\/revisions\/11197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}