What the World Will Look Like When the Water Leaves Us
Laura van den Berg
Dzanc Books, 2009
Every six months or so I interview a short story writer I like for Luna Park, a writer who has a new collection of stories coming out and whose stuff I had seen awhile in literary magazines and liked. Before interviewing Benjamin Percy, I had read countless stories by him and was mesmerized by his portrayal of the Pacific Northwest as a world of unexplainable mystery (which was exactly how it seemed to me as a young boy). Before chatting with Nam Le, I was already dying to know just how much truth there was in his representations of Colombian assassins, Vietnamese school children, and immigrant writers.
But after reading just one single story by Laura van den Berg in One Story—the title story of her 2009 debut collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us from Dzanc Books—I knew that, not only did I want to interview this writer, but I also wanted to read much, much more.
It has been often said that van den Berg’s stories are about monsters, and they are. Bigfoot. The Loch Ness Monster. The Mishegenabeg. You name it. Though it is fantastic to read about these creatures in van den Berg’s contemporary settings, the monsters are actually just a symptom of what the stories are most of all, of what makes them so enchanting. Above and beyond anything else, van den Berg’s stories are works of the imagination. They are stories that travel around the globe and into the minds of a variety of characters.
In an age of fiction that too often tells us what we already assume—from divorce to suburban kitchens to Manchuria—it is more than refreshing to read a writer so good that is so willing to step into the unknown. Rather than simply represent, van den Berg’s stories work to chart new territories. Or, as the young boy Denver from her story “Goodbye My Loveds” explains: “I spent all morning drawing a map of the other side of the world. I was going to find important things there.”
— Travis Kurowski is the proprietor of Luna Park.
