Laura van den Berg is the author of the short story collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us.
–Name a childhood hero. 
Nancy Drew.
–Name a work you wished you’d written.
The Quick & The Dead by Joy Williams.
–If you had to order your work by how successfully you completed what you set out to accomplish, what would that list look like?
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us is my first book, so that’s all I have to go on at the moment, but within that collection there are definitely stories that I feel more successfully accomplished what I set out to do than others.
–Name a writer in history you would’ve like to have been a contemporary of and why.
I would have liked to have been a student in Robert Lowell’s poetry workshop, to swill martinis in the middle of the day and bask in all that brilliance (Lowell! Sexton! Plath!).
–Name a work of yours whose reception you’ve been surprised about and why.
A story in my collection, “Up High in the Air,” tended to get a poor reception in workshop, the consensus being that readers couldn’t connect with the rather misanthropic narrator, Diane. Why is she so awful, people would want to know, but I, and therefore the story, didn’t have the answer. To me, she just was who she was. I had always assumed this choice in characterization would limit the story’s audience, so I was very surprised when it found a home in the Boston Review and was later selected for Best New American Voices 2010.
–Correct a misperception about you as a writer in fifty words or less.
Because of the foreign settings and science-based premises found in some of my stories, people have assumed that I’ve lived in exotic places and have a background in the sciences, when in reality I grew up in the suburbs of Florida and flunked high school chemistry.
–Name a trait you deplore in other writers.
Pretension.
–Name your five desert island films.
Annie Hall, Manhattan, Heat, Pulp Fiction, and Head-On.
–Name a book not your own that you wish everyone would read.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I’ve talked to quite a few people who quickly tired of the style and put the book down, but there’s this amazing scene with a man in the bottom of a well about mid-way through the book and if you can just read past the well scene, you’ll be hooked.
–Name a book you suspect most people claim to have read, but haven’t.
Moby Dick.
–If you could choose one of your works to rewrite, which would it be and why.
All of them.
–Share the greatest literary secret/gossip you know.
If I told you, people would break my kneecaps and set my hair on fire.
–Name a book you read over and over for inspiration.
The Lover by Marguerite Duras. There’s so much about this novel that inspires complete awe in me-the profoundly complex psychological landscape, the indelible images, the tone, the mystery.
–Name the writing habit you rely on to get you through a first draft.
I keep reminding myself of the power of revision.
–Name a regret, literary or otherwise.
How much time do you have? Well, for starters, when I was younger, I sent stories off too hastily, something I regret now.
–Name your greatest struggle as a writer.
To keep evolving, instead of covering the same ground in the same ways.
–Name a question you get about writing to which there really is no good answer. “Where do you get your inspiration from?” I wish I knew!
–Name a question you wish you had been asked.
“Would you like a million dollars?”