Weekend Thread: What's Your Portal?
A little chit-chat with Laura van den Berg.
Hi friends.
Sometimes you go to a reading or a literary event and an idea from it really sticks in your head. A year later I’m still thinking about a particular line of discussion that took place during the launch event for Laura van den Berg’s brilliant novel State of Paradise. In the novel, a tech company develops a portal-like device, with the slogan go where you need to be. That night, Laura was in conversation with Marie-Helene Bertino and Hilary Leichter, and eventually the question was raised: What’s your portal?
I loved hearing everyone’s answers and I really chewed on it for a while. (Mine is reading a book!) Afterward I told Laura that “What’s your portal?” would have been a great marketing tagline for the book.
Sometimes a cake is a portal
The paperback for State of Paradise is out on July 8 and so I thought I’d revisit the question with Laura. Here are some thoughts from her on it:
“I remember that night Marie-Helene said she thought of portals as a kind of one-way gate: once you went through you could not go back. A portal was an escape to another place, yes, but also the passage through marked a turn or a change. I’ve been carrying that question around with me ever since: asking it of myself and of others. What are the things that allow you to escape to another place while also changing you along the way?
In the last year I’ve gathered so many answers! Grief, love, running a marathon, making art, travel, rehabbing a house, turning a desolate patch of land into a garden. As I’ve settled into a new project, I’ve thought often that writing a book definitely counts as a portal. I escape into this world I’ve imagined, and also the regular commitment to the work changes me over time. Usually these changes are subtle, but I never feel like I’m quite the same person by the end of a project. In fact, the moments of greatest ‘stuckness’ often happen because I was resisting some kind of needed change, either to my process or how I was thinking about the story or maybe even my own understanding of the kind of writer I am or am not.”
So I think you can see where I’m going with this. My question for you this weekend is: What’s your portal?
Have a nice Sunday.
Jami
You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.
How timely this post is today! I loved State of Paradise too. What is your portal? This has been a theme my entire life. I crossed a portal to come to the US in 1997 (which reminds of another great book, Exit West). I stepped through a portal when I came out in my early 20's (Happy Pride!), I stepped through another portal when I left a career in higher education in 2021 for a corporate job. I was forced through a portal I didn't choose two years later when I was laid off from said job. And then as a result of that layoff, I deliberately ran through a portal that has brought me here, to finally say it out loud: I'm a writer ❤️. And finally, as I write this, I stand before another portal. I'm taking time to decide if I will cross it and what it means if I do or don't.
I light a candle. A vanilla scented tea light that sits in conical mauve glass in a metal stand that I've had for thirty years. Something about the flickering light and the vanilla scent that helps me settle in. That and coffee. I must have coffee.
There are project-specific portals too. For my memoir, a picture of me when I was nine (one of only two that exist of me under ten years old). In the memoir, I alternate chapters on either side of a pivotal night when I was nine. For my novel-in-progress, it's a Newton's Cradle (those silver click-clack balls). Newton's Cradle is also the title of the novel.
Other meaningful knickknacks on and around my desk: a pewter wizard my mother gave me; a small barbie doll, her hair in a bun, that I think I stole from my friend Stacey; some glitter false eyelashes; a pack of B'loonies; sparklers; my college copy of As I Lay Dying; and a minibar size bottle of Chartreuse I got in New Orleans that makes me think of Hemingway, to name a few. I guess I have a lot of portals.