Laura van den Berg

I think my concern is I know my voice, and I know the kinds of landscapes that interest me, so my primary concern is doing the most I can with those voices and those landscapes.

The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different.

As a teenager, I struggled a lot, had several major depressive episodes, and ended up dropping out of high school and getting a GED.

I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear.

As for me, I was a lonely kid, with few close friends until I was an adult - even when I might have been perceived as being on the inside, I felt like I was on the outside, kind of like viewing the world through a sheet of glass.

On my first trip to Havana, I was stopped by a woman who turned out to be a Canadian tour guide and who had mistaken me for a woman who had been part of one of her tour groups.

I'm such a first-person writer.

I think writing, or any form of art-making, is a way to prepare for not being here. Not that we can. No amount of preparing can really ready us, in a meaningful way, for the great void that awaits us all.

Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer.

Like many artists, I have issues with anxiety and depression, so I try to live in a way that supports my mental health.

Here's something a little more personal: In my teens, I was having a hard time and ended up in a therapy group of young women, some of whom had endured terrible childhood traumas.

I think my favorite horror films are really grounded in human psychology, which is to say I think through sort of extreme dislocations of reality.