Laura van den Berg

In the world of the American creative writing workshop, I've encountered teachers who are tempted to place, or have actually placed, a moratorium on child narrators. Students love to write them, but children come laden with complications.

Ever since I started writing in college, I have, save for a few short breaks here and there, been working away on something. I love it, I need it, and so it never occurred to me to put writing on the back burner.

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.

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.

I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.'

I love noir, quite obviously.

I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world.

I love creating mysteries, but I am terrible at solving them.

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

America loves a good comeback story!

I've had a somewhat typical experience in that many of the contemporary writers I was exposed to early on were white and often male.

When I'm between projects, I keep a journal I call a 'thought log,' and it's my practice to write down whatever interests me.