I drafted the first story in my recently published collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, October 2009), just before I arrived at Emerson, and it was during my three years in the program that I shaped the collection. Apart from a foray into flash fiction in Pam Painter’s short-short class and a handful of academic essays, it was the only thing I worked on during my career as an M.F.A. student.

It’s hard to quantify how much of an impact Emerson had on my ability to assemble this book, but suffice it to say, it’s hard to imagine the collection would have come into existence, or at least have come into existence so quickly, if I hadn’t packed my bags and moved from the suburbs of Florida to the land of Red Sox and Irish bars and endless winters.

My initial mentorship at Emerson came in the form of my first workshop leader, Don Lee, former editor of Ploughshares. This was a major stroke of luck, since Don’s primary job was at Ploughshares and he rarely taught in the M.F.A. program. I turned in the story I’d written just before the start of the semester; it was called “Inverness” and centered around the interlocking searches for the Loch Ness Monster and a rare flower. Another story I workshopped in Don’s class, “The Rain Season,” which concerns a missionary in Africa’s growing obsession with a creature rumored to live in the forests of the Congo, also ended up in my collection. It was during that semester I realized I had other story ideas that involved myths and monsters, and I began to wonder if “Inverness” and “The Rain Season” could be the start of a collection. I expressed this idea—with some trepidation, worried it might sound gimmicky or weird—to Don in his office hours, and he was the first person to say, “Hey, that’s a good idea. Keep going.”

Other excellent teachers followed—most notably Margot Livesey, who read early versions of nearly all the stories in my collection with tremendous insight and patience; my thesis advisor, Jessica Treadway; and my thesis reader, Pam Painter. The non-workshop classes informed my book as well. Rick Reiken’s short story seminar, for example, challenged me re-think my concept of story structure and shape, while Bill Donoghue’s course in French fiction sparked my imagination and broadened its horizons.

But what really carried me through the writing and revising of this collection was the communal aspect of the program. I made some of my nearest and dearest friends at Emerson. One semester, after Monday night workshops, it became tradition for us to retreat to the Tam—a place most of us would never want to face in the light of day, but at the time, with its cheap drinks and nostalgia-inducing musical selections, seemed just right. Sometimes we talked about our stories, sometimes we talked about books we loved or hated, sometimes we complained about classes, sometimes we extolled their virtues. Sometimes we talked about nothing, sometimes we gossiped, sometimes (usually a few rounds in) we professed our friendships to be everlasting.

These nights had nothing to do with writing and everything to do with writing—since in order to write, we need to keep discovering the world, in ways large and small. We need to keep being daring and dumb and strange. We need the space to wander over to the edge of who we are and check out the view. We need, seemingly at the same time, to pay attention to and ignore the world—a balance, it seems to me, that is most naturally struck in the clamor and anonymity a city brings. Being in a classroom or hanging around a dive bar or walking down a city street might sound like slight ways to accomplish these rather lofty goals, but for someone who had spent her life in the same place and never felt like she’d done much of anything, Boston and Emerson were just what I—and my fiction—needed.

Laura van den Berg graduated from Emerson College with an MFA in Fiction Writing in 2008. Check out Vernacular’s review of her collection here, and find out more about Laura on her website and blog, lauravandenberg.com.

Stories from the collection have or will soon appear in One Story, Boston Review, American Short Fiction, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prize XXIV: Best of the Small Presses, among other publications. Laura is also 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.

Tags:   Alum Month · emerson alums · getting published · Guest Blogger of the Week · Laura van den Berg · short fiction · writing processNo Comments