American - Writer | 1983 -
I do not work well when I am in living in a cyclone of panic. I reject actively seeking out destabilization and suffering as a creative model.
Laura van den Berg
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Like many artists, I have issues with anxiety and depression, so I try to live in a way that supports my mental health.
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We write in a culture that favors the heft of the novel. Better still if the novel in question is large enough to be wielded interchangeably as a doorstop and a weapon.
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Like many American readers, I was first introduced to Magda Szabo's work when New York Review Books reissued the Hungarian master's profound and haunting novel 'The Door.'
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A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem. But it's common enough to encounter a hodgepodge instead, where flashes of brilliance are undercut by clunkers.
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Being scared by a movie offers a safe catharsis, because the terror is confined to the screen. It's an adrenalin spike, and when I come back down, I feel a bit more leveled.
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I teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, 'House Taken Over,' a short story by Julio Cortazar, is a work I regularly teach.
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In my own life, I have found grief to be enormously distorting, particularly if it's sudden or extreme in nature.
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I take a pretty expansive view of craft, which is to say I don't see craft as just being technique - it's also process; subject; ideas and feelings; visions and dreams; the words that are put down and the words that are avoided.
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I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn't have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work.
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I can't write anything if I don't know where it's set, where the events are happening - even if the details of setting are minimal.
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As a genre, the best horror poses central human questions - Who can you trust? What is the cost of our secrets? What is our relationship to history? What are we blind to? What evils are lurking under the smooth surface of the self? - through radical dislocations.
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