Laura van den Berg circled her partner on the mat at a Central Square boxing gym on a recent Tuesday evening, hands raised protectively in front of her face, delivering quick, precise jabs into the training mitts. Others in the class paused for water between exercise intervals, but van den Berg remained in place, bouncing on her toes, keeping loose for the next round.
This past summer van den Berg, senior lecturer in English, embarked on two parallel journeys: publishing her sixth novel, “State of Paradise,” and training for a boxing match that will take place this weekend in Waltham. She believes the practices foster similar useful qualities.
“Writing a novel and training for a fight both require an immense trust in process,” van den Berg said. “There are going to be times when you are really tired, overwhelmed, or defeated, and you have to trust in your program. Whether your program for a writer is writing five pages a day, or your program as a fighter is showing up to your daily training session, you have to trust in the power of cumulative labor over time.”
Van den Berg started writing “State of Paradise,” which was published in July, during the pandemic when she and her husband, Paul Yoon, also a fiction writer and senior lecturer in English, were living in her native state of Florida. It began as a daily practice of writing meditations on aspects of her surroundings: weather, landscapes, or family life.
“I did this for about six months with no expectation that it would turn into a book. Then a strange thing happened,” van den Berg said. “I realized I was writing these meditations in a voice that was like mine but also not mine. And that was the voice of the protagonist stepping forward.”
The novel follows a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author, as her everyday life in humid small-town Florida is disrupted by strange events — extreme weather, sinkholes, missing people, a cult in her living room, and a disorienting virtual reality device — that challenge her perception of reality.
While in Florida writing the novel, van den Berg, who began boxing for fitness and mental health in 2018, started getting more involved in competitive boxing. After her first USA Boxing-sanctioned fight in 2021 (which she lost by decision), she knew she wanted to try again but wasn’t sure she could find the time.
This semester, Laura van den Berg is teaching a fiction workshop, “The Art of the Short Story.”
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
“It can be easy to feel like, ‘Oh, I’ll do it next year when I’m not publishing a book, when I have more room in my schedule,’” van den Berg recalled. “I think I just realized at a certain point that that the ‘chill year’ that I’m waiting for is never going to arrive, and I just need to dive in.”
She began training hard with the help of a coach at Cherry Street Boxing in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She focused on both technique and endurance to prepare for the amateur match, which includes three rounds, each a minute and a half to three minutes in length.
Even during her book tour in July and August, van den Berg kept up her routine, waking early to run up hills in San Francisco, for example, before catching a flight to her next tour stop.
“You know your future opponent is out there somewhere, and you should assume that she’s getting up in the morning, doing whatever she needs to do to be successful on fight night,” van den Berg said. “That motivates me.”
This semester, van den Berg is teaching a fiction workshop, “The Art of the Short Story,” and co-teaching “Reading for Fiction Writers” with Neel Mukherjee, associate senior lecturer in creative writing. She divides her time between Cambridge and her Hudson Valley home in New York state, where she spends weekends, school breaks, and summers. While Cherry Street is her primary gym, she can often be found training at Redline Fight Sports when she is in Cambridge.
She often travels to sparring events around the New England area, seeking out new female boxers to practice with, something that can help prepare her for facing an unknown opponent on fight night.
To document her parallel journeys, van den Berg started a newsletter called “Fight Week,” where she writes about the intersection of writing and fighting. The title refers to the days leading up to a match, following the last hard training session — a time she describes as standing on the edge of a precipice, “about to step off into the air.”
Van den Berg believes writing and boxing both require a certain level of comfort with risk — whether it’s risking failure with a new narrative structure or injury in the ring.
“‘State of Paradise’ is certainly the most personal book that I’ve ever written. There’s a lot of me in there, so it was emotionally risky in a way that my other books really haven’t been,” van den Berg said. “In boxing, the more punches you throw, the more vulnerable you are. There’s risk in going hard.”
As the weekend fight approaches, van den Berg feels confident, embracing the nerves that come with the territory and knowing she’s done everything she can to prepare.
“There’s no way to know for sure what the outcome will be,” van den Berg said. “If you’re 100 pages into a novel, you can’t say for sure what it will be like when you finish. You can’t know for sure what the outcome of a fight will be. You have to have a deep belief in the process and cultivate a tolerance for sitting in doubt and uncertainty and being able to move through those emotions.”
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