‘Where We Must Be’ by Laura van den Berg

Sometimes, you read a story and go “oh, shit, I’ll read this person forever” and so it was for me with this story of Laura van den Berg’s. It’s about a woman who performs, if that’s the right word, as a Bigfoot impersonator and it has this remarkable strangeness to it that is also utterly rooted in compelling reality. In that way, her stories feel somehow more like life than life? I don’t know how else to explain it: there’s something about van den Berg’s writing that captures the compelling strangeness of the world as I experience it, or maybe as I’d like to experience it, or maybe as it could be experienced.

First published by The Indiana Review, 2008. Collected in What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, Dzanc Books, 2009. Read it online at Electric Literature

‘Antarctica’ by Laura van den Berg

In a very real sense, Laura van den Berg was my introduction to the short story. It was her story ‘Where We Must Be,’ collected in Best American Nonrequired Reading, that first got my attention, and she has had it ever since. ‘Antarctica’ is, I think, her most accomplished story, and was included in Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery Stories in 2014. Few writers can accomplish what van den Berg does in this story, which is to render whole and legible a terribly unfinished, incomplete soul. She does this in the person of Lee, our narrator, who ventures to the titular frozen continent after her brother is killed in a freak accident at a research outpost. The story is populated by characters facing circumstances they never intended to incur, and those are my favorite kind of characters to watch move through the screens of language and narrative.

First published in Glimmer Train, widely available in van den Berg’s collection The Isle of Youth, FSG Originals, 2013

‘Antarctica’ by Laura van den Berg

This story, not just about a sister searching for her brother’s remains and personal effects after he dies in an accident, but also about the impact of secrets in his life and hers, was my first introduction to Laura van den Berg’s beautiful work. I think a sense of the mysterious is what brings me back to this story – a bona fide sense of the mystery of other people, that is an earned mystery through a distinct level of alertness conveyed by the narration of the story, an alertness that is a characteristic of this writer’s other work also. I enjoy this mystery, cultivate it in my work. We are not fully knowable to each other, the story (and many other favorite stories) reminds us.

First published in Glimmer Train 88, Fall 2013, and collected in The Isle of Youth, FSG Originals, 2013

‘What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us’ by Laura van den Berg

Laura van den Berg’s stories grip me. They leave vivid impressions on my mind—I find myself turning over details days after reading them—but also demand re-reading, calling for another look, a deeper plunge. Her second collection, Isle of Youth, is a thing of beauty: seven stories that each work as perfect microcosms but, when read together, reverberate thematically, building layers of significance.

But the title story of her first collection, ‘What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us’, is my favourite of her works. It helps that the premise is instantly intriguing: a young woman who dreams of being an open-water swimmer travels to Madagascar where her mother is studying the collapsing lemur population. Where the story really shines, though, is in the way it unravels the complex interaction between mother and daughter—what Kazuo Ishiguro might call a ‘three dimensional relationship.’ The final shift in the story, projecting us forwards in time, is a killer.

First published in One Story 102, 2008; collected in What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us Scribe. 2011. Read the opening here