Not-an-Interview with Alice Munro

Q: Earlier this year, I posted a brief appreciation of one of your stories from Friend of My Youth. In it, I mentioned your move away from the epiphanic structure of your earliest stories. Is it fair to say that this shift is responsible for what we readers might think of as a “typical” Alice Munro story, with its labyrinthine network of complexities? How long do you usually work on one of your stories before you know it’s ready?
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Q: In the back matter of Best American Short Stories, you almost never write much about yourself or the origins of the story selected. Are you fiercely private about such matters, or do you just think some things don’t need to be explained?
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Q: And speaking of Best American — or any anthology with “American” in the title — does it irk you how greedy we Americans can be about claiming you as our own? You are Canadian, after all.
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Q: And finally, which young short-story writers do you recommend to readers?
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Q: That’s very kind of you. Thank you. I look forward to reading more of your work, as well. Final comments?
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Mini-Interview with Laura van den Berg

Many interviewers have asked you about the intersection of the mythic and the mundane in your stories—we all want to bring up Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster—but I wonder if this was an impulse in your earliest work, or something you came to later, after you’d been writing for a while.
That’s an interesting question. The aesthetic/tonal zone that the stories occupy is something I’ve been working toward for a while. While my earlier work didn’t have elements like Bigfoot or Loch Ness, the stories were beginning to explore the gap between traditional realism and magical realism or fabulist writing—so while there was nothing overtly magical happening, the sense of reality was a little tilted, a little warped. But it took me a while to learn how to utilize event, to make things happen. A lot of my really early stories have premises like: woman sits alone in room, contemplates the existential.

You have served as an editor for several publications—Redivider, Ploughshares, West Branch, Memorius—so I am interested in your take as both writer and editor: Are we again in the middle of what might be called a period of resurgence for the short story?
You know, I’m not sure I’ve seen much of a shift in either direction. We hear about things like “the death of the short story” and “the revival of the short story,” but I think that’s kind of cultural jibberish, marketing talk. While I can think of several entities that have recently, or semi-recently, come into existence and forwarded the short story cause—One Story, for example, and Andrew’s Book Club—I haven’t observed much of a change. Sometimes collections are really hard to sell, sometimes not. Lots of good collections are being published and some get the attention they deserve and others are overlooked. Collections are snagging major awards/honors—see both Oprah’s and the Pulitzer committee’s most recent selections—but that’s hardly a first. From an editorial perspective, the magazines I work with have always gotten stories and continue to get stories (the only shift there would be a general increase in submissions). Some are good, some are bad, and some are mind-blowingly awesome. In the end, my hesitation to proclaim a “resurgence” of the story implies that stories disappeared from view at some point, and I don’t really believe that to be the case.

You’ve lived in several parts of the country. How is your work affected by these different locales?
I grew up in Florida and, even though none of the stories in my collection are set in Florida, there’s a weirdness to the landscape that had an effect on me. The state has an unreal quality that definitely influenced my work, and since I spent a lot of my time in Florida longing to be elsewhere, I was always thinking about what far-flung places I would want to see.

Is there a story in What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us that is especially memorable for what it taught you about writing, or yourself as a writer? Would you mind taking us through a quick tour of that story’s evolution?
All the stories taught me something important and, in particular, I learned a great deal from the title story, thanks to Hannah Tinti of One Story. When Hannah and I first started working on the story, it was far less linear and jumped around in time a lot. I had big ideas about what I wanted to do with the psychology of time passing and the nature of memory, so when Hannah suggested I push the story in a more linear direction, a part of me worried the story might become, somehow, less complex, but that fear was quickly squashed when I began to see how much more precise the characters, and their emotional and psychological landscapes, were becoming, how much more dimension the story was taking on. So I learned that sometimes you have to set aside your conceptual aspirations and ask yourself what’s at the heart of the story and what really matters for the characters.

And with other stories, I learned that you have to follow your gut when you intuitively know that something is important, even if you can’t articulate why said thing is important with perfect clarity. It seems important for writers to be at once really open and stubborn as hell.

Indie Pick, November 2009

The stories in Laura van den Berg’s rich and inventive debut, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, illuminate the intersection of the mythic and the mundane.

A failed actress takes a job as a Bigfoot impersonator. A botanist seeking a rare flower crosses paths with a group of men hunting the Loch Ness Monster. A disillusioned missionary in Africa grapples with grief and a growing obsession with a creature rumored to live in the forests of the Congo. And in the title story, a young woman traveling with her scientist mother in Madagascar confronts her burgeoning sexuality and her dream of becoming a long-distance swimmer.Rendered with precision and longing, the women who narrate these starkly beautiful stories are consumed with searching for absolution, for solace, for the flash of extraordinary in the ordinary that will forever alter their lives.

Barnes & Noble recently selected What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us as a holiday season pick for their Discover Great New Writers Program.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her MFA at Emerson College. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the 2009 Julia Peterkin Award, and the 2009-2010 Emerging Writer Lectureship at Gettysburg College. Formerly an assistant editor at Ploughshares, Laura is currently a fiction editor at West Branch and the assistant editor of Memorious, an online journal of new verse and fiction. She has taught writing at Emerson College, Grub Street, and in PEN/New England’s Freedom to Write Program. Her fiction has or will soon appear in One Story, Boston Review, Epoch, The Literary Review, American Short Fiction, StoryQuarterly, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prize XXIV: Best of the Small Presses, among other publications. She is currently at work on new stories and a novel.

ABOUT THE BOOK
“”In her affecting debut collection, van den Berg taps into her characters’ losses with an impressive clarity. Each of these stories is meticulously crafted, and often the protagonist is recovering emotionally from a staggering life’s blow. In ‘Goodbye My Loveds,’ two siblings are reeling from the death of their parents, scientists fatally snake-bitten in the Amazon; a sister leaves college to take care of her 12-year-old brother and recognizes the need to suppress her own needs in order to help her brother face their new lives. In the beautifully elegiac ‘Where We Must Be,’ a failed actress gives up on L.A. and finds work as Bigfoot in a theme park; her love affair with a young neighbor dying of cancer underscores the preciousness of time’s passing. In the title story, a young woman learns to face her fears while spending time with her scientist mother observing endangered lemurs in Madagascar. These tales are the work of a notable author finding her voice.”
—Publishers Weekly

“These characters lose themselves, intentionally and otherwise, but they’ve got the courage to go about finding themselves, or changed versions of themselves, in the elegant process of drowning, cleansing, and rebirth.”
— The Believer

“In her debut collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, Laura van den Berg finds the tension between science and magic and walks it like a tightrope. These stories find the common ground between myth and the human condition, exploring the inner lives of men and women who cross paths with the Loch Ness monster, or Bigfoot, or lemurs in Madagascar whose screams can turn a heart into stone. It is a fantastic and fascinating world, full of discoveries and moments of wonder, a book meant for the explorer in all of us. Any reader will be glad to have found it.”
— Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief

“What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us is a lovely, remarkable book, full of people who strive mightily to believe in things ”Bigfoot, the Lochness and Lake Michigan monsters, a tunnel leading to the other side of the world, husbands, wives, lovers, parents” they shouldn’t. But Laura van den Berg lets her characters believe, and believes in them, and makes us believe, and care, too. Calm, wry, and compassionate, somehow all at once, this book is impossible to resist, and I’d bet big money that we’ll be talking about Laura van den Berg and her fiction for years to come.”
— Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

WHERE TO BUY
Your local independent bookstore
Powell’s [buy new, even if used is available]
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble