"Where Will All the Buildings Go" by Laura van den Berg (in Brooklyn Magazine, March 4, 2014)

My Post on "Opa Locka" by Laura Van Den Berg

Quite recently I read and greatly enjoyed my first story by Laura van den Berg, "Opa Locka".  After posting on this story I was very happy to find one of her short stories published in the excellant New York City focused online journal Brooklyn Magazine.  

I prefer posting  when I can about stories that can be read online and one of my purposes in this post is to share with my readers a link to this delightfully strange brushed by magic realism story, with a reading time of just a few minutes.  I read "Where Have All the Buildings Gone" three times.

Ellen is an ariichtect with a high end firm.  Her current assignment is to design a parking garage.  When it comes time for her presentation she brings in a model of an entire city and ends up being fired.   Her husband teaches at an expensive private school.   One day Ursula, a student at the school where her husband teaches knocks on her door and inexplicably asks to live in their basement.  Now the strory becomes very strange and we begin to see Ellen has her issues. They have to move as without her pay they cannot afford the rent and her husband moves to another school.   I don't want to tell any more of the plot as it is so much fun to read.

You can read the story here 

http://www.bkmag.com/2014/03/05/where-will-all-the-buildings-go/

From the author's web page

http://lauravandenberg.com/

Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her M.F.A. at Emerson College. Her first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009), was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. Her stories have appeared in Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and have been anthologized inThe Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize XXIV. She is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, Ragdale, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

She has taught creative writing at Grub Street, Gettysburg College, as the 2009-2010 Emerging Writer Lecturer, the Gilman School, as the 2010-2011 Tickner Fellow, Goucher College, Johns Hopkins University, the Maryland Institute College of Art, George Washington University, and in the M.F.A. programs at Emerson College and Warren Wilson. She is the 2014-2015 Faculty Fellow in Fiction at Colby College.

Her second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in November 2013. The Isle of Youth was named a “Best Book of 2013″ by over a dozen outlets, including NPR, The Boston Globe, and O, The Oprah Magazine, was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor Award, and received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Both Laura’s collections were longlisted for The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

I can see myself reading both of her collections soon.

"Opa-Locka" by Laura Van den Berg (2012, from The Isle of Youth, a 2014 O. Henry Prize Story)

I was very happy to find a story by Laura Van den Berg, from her collection The Isle of Youth, included in The O Henry Prize Stories 2014 anthology.  "Opa Locka" is a story of a very sad dysfunctional family.   Set in a part of Miami a long way from the glitter and glamour of South Beach, it focuses on two sisters.  Their mother is on a six month around the world cruise, their father just disappeared long ago.  One of the sisters did six months in jail for breaking into and robbing houses. They have started a dectective agency.  When we meet them they are on a "stake out", trying to prove a man is cheating on his wife.  I felt like I was along for the ride.  The author does an excellant job making the dysfunctional family very real.  We listen to them talk about why their father deserted them. We wonder but never learn how the mother paid for the very expensive cruise. I don't want to tell to much of the plot. The author has shed light on a dark world.  This is a very good story and I look forward to reading more of her work.

From the author's web page

http://lauravandenberg.com/

Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her M.F.A. at Emerson College. Her first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009), was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. Her stories have appeared in Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and have been anthologized inThe Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize XXIV. She is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, Ragdale, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

She has taught creative writing at Grub Street, Gettysburg College, as the 2009-2010 Emerging Writer Lecturer, the Gilman School, as the 2010-2011 Tickner Fellow, Goucher College, Johns Hopkins University, the Maryland Institute College of Art, George Washington University, and in the M.F.A. programs at Emerson College and Warren Wilson. She is the 2014-2015 Faculty Fellow in Fiction at Colby College.

Her second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in November 2013. The Isle of Youth was named a “Best Book of 2013″ by over a dozen outlets, including NPR, The Boston Globe, and O, The Oprah Magazine, was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor Award, and received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Both Laura’s collections were longlisted for The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

"Up High in the Air" by Laura van den Berg (2012)

Laura van den Berg's debut story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year award, longlisted for The Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Award. Her second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in November 2013. A Florida native, she holds an MFA from Emerson College and is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences. She currently lives in Baltimore and teaches at George Washington University. (From Amazon)

I first heard of Laura van den Berg through an endorsement of her work by Karen Russell (almost every body's favorite contemporary short story writers) in the online edition of the Miami Herald.  Both grew up in south Florida and both left as soon as they could.  Another factor that put van den Berg on my want to read list was her short listing for the Frank O'Connor Prize.  I was very happy to find the Boston Review had one of her stories online.   

"Up in the Air" centers around the life of a young female professors of language studies.  Her life is in crisis.  Her mother seems to suffer from near psychotic delusions (she calls her to tell the daughter that her hair is on fire), her husband has recently vacated his decent job as a researcher to join a group, without pay, searching for a giant Loch Ness type monster that some claim has inhabited the Great Lakes for hundred of years.  She tries to hold onto her sanity.  Her department chairman is pressuring her to publish research papers.  She is having an affair with one of her students and has sex with him in her office.  He thinks it is a serious relationship, she does not.  She drinks too much.  She knows her husband may be losing his  grip.  She feels guilty of her lack of care for her mother, maybe her father killed himself a few years ago and now her mother thinks he is plotting to kill her.  She wonders if her husband knows of her infidelity and if this is part of why he seeks escape.  

"Up in the Air" is an excellent story about the pressures of life, about escapism, about coping with pressures from many directions, about dealing with madness in those closest to us.  I look forward to reading more of her work.