In Process With: Laura van den Berg

"I believe so much in the power of practice, the way work accumulates over time."

This month’s In Process With…brings us into the early morning light of Laura van den Berg’s desk.

I don’t pretend that when I write any of these intros I do so from an unbiased standpoint; I have invited writers I admire and respect to the series, but I want to say up at the top here that I’m a Laura van den Berg completist, a pre-orderer of any forthcoming books, someone who has called her “a literal genius” and is just waiting for the MacArthur Foundation to catch up. Not that she is a slouch in the awards department by any means; her work has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She’s written six—SIX!—books and has another that I’ll be pre-ordering as soon as that button goes live, called Ring of Night. Her latest is State of Paradise, set in her native Florida, is now available in paperback.

Well before she became a boxer in her spare time, Laura committed to badassery in her author photos. I’m not just talking about how her her hair always looks otherworldy, as if she’s channeling power from another dimension, but because she is cognizant of what an easy smile implies if you are a woman in the world and refuses to be made in that image when it’s next to her work. As she puts it in this interview with Guernica —one I think about every time I encounter a woman’s author photo:

“I suspect women authors feel more pressure to appear soft and approachable, like someone who would be fun to invite to your book club. And in real life, I would like to think that I would be a fun person to have hanging around a book club, but these are dark, tough stories and so it makes sense to have a photo that reflects that. But our culture does not do a great job of honoring complexity in women, in giving them the space to contain multitudes.”

I first encountered the multitudes in Laura’s work when we were in the same issue of Glimmer Train (RIP, what a mag for the short story!) in 2013. Her story in that issue, “Antarctica,” also found in her collection The Isle of Youth, would go on to earn a spot in Best American Short Stories that year. I’d begin teaching it to students shortly after. I have read and loved many other van den Berg short stories—the title story from “I Hold a Wolf by the Ears” sometimes just rises up in my mind, equal parts recalled dream and example of craft I want to be inside of again—but no matter how many times I re-read it, I always find a new place to hook into “Antarctica,” a story with visible layers of time and setting and seamless character complexity that’s never failed me in a classroom. Writing about it now makes me desperately want to teach it again, to explore with a group of writers the questions it asks about who the people we love are—and as is often the case in van den berg’s work, were. Van den Berg’s is a body of work populated by ghosts, specifically of intimacy; at times, her work seems like an argument for their existence as created by the sort of love that can only be illuminated by the very question of loss. Though her novel The Third Hotel is ostensibly a story about such ghosts (and film! and Cuba!), I always describe it as a novel about the mysteries of marriage.

If you, too, want to be a Laura van den Berg completist, in addition to reading through all the books, I suggest: subscribing to her newsletter on writing and fighting as an amateur boxer,

FIGHT WEEK

. Reading her latest, not-yet-collected short stories online: “Ghost Horses” at Sewanee Review and "Cake" at The Baffler. And of course, reading on to find out what she’s working on next.

-Danielle

What have you been working on this week?