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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Hello everyone. Welcome to this is the Place, a podcast series from the Common magazine on the New Books Network. The Common publishes literature and art with a modern sense of place. I'm Emily Everett, managing editor of the magazine and host of the Channel. Normally we're talking to contributors to our most recent issue, but today we are changing things up. We have one of our first contributors, the incredible Lauren Groff. She has a new book out, so we'll be chatting about Brawler, her short story collection, her first one in seven years and back in 2011, her short story Exquisite Corpse appeared in the first ever issue of the Common. Lauren Groff is a three time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of the novels the Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix and the Vaster Wilds, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the story prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics circle Award. In 2024, she was named one of the Time 100 Most Influential People. Groff's work regularly appears in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into 36 languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband run an independent bookstore, the Lynx. Lauren Grof, thank you so much for joining us.
- [01:21]
A
Oh, it's a delight and a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
- [01:24]
B
Would you just set the scene for our conversation? We always have folks sort of describe where they're calling from now.
- [01:29]
A
Yeah, it's in my house in Gainesville, Florida. I'm on the second floor. This is the study that I made after my older son moved into a big boy room. So it has sort of baby dreams undulating across the wall. It's kind of lovely.
- [01:45]
B
That sounds perfect for our conversation. Yeah, I would love to start with a reading. Would you just read us a few paragraphs from something in your collection?
- [01:52]
A
Sure. This is the second story in the collection. It's called between the Shadow and the Soul. I'm just going to read maybe the first paragraph. They had lived together for 25 years in the old stone house on a bend in the river. They were young when they first saw the place. Wildly in love and so poor they could afford only one of two dwellings in the valley. A battered trailer huddled against the cold wind and the antique house in foreclosure, a breath from letting the weeds muscle it back into the earth. Lily had wanted the trailer. When he flicked on the lights there, no shower of sparks fell from the knob and tube wiring. But Eliza had vision. We'll be happy in this house, she said, watching the green river slide through the willows. So they spent the first spring, summer and fall living in a tent in the largest bedroom, cooking with a propane camper stove and bathing in the river. And they taught themselves how to shingle the roof, to wire and plumb, to plaster and paint and scrape and refinish. Nearly every penny they made went straight into the house. Nearly every spare hour was spent on house projects or finding antiques at yard sales and in thrift stores and bringing them back to life.
- [03:05]
B
Thank you so much for reading that. So I am not in the office today, but our office is in Frost Library, which is the library at your alma mater, Amherst College. So that's sort of our home. So I feel like we should start there. And I was wondering if that's where you started writing and if you feel like, you know, how you feel Amherst or like sort of Amherst's long literary history has sort of contributed to your early writing days.
- [03:30]
A
Oh, I mean, it contributes still every single day. You know, I did start writing fiction there. I was a poet as a teenager. And the year abroad that I spent in France between high school and college, and I was very serious about it. I really loved formal poetry. And I took a lot of poetry, you know, learning poetry classes to get the history of poetry. So Professor Pritchett. And now I'm forgetting everyone's names, but, you know, I. My written poetry, I don't know. There was something not quite right with it. So I, you know, I wasn't. I became less and less enchanted with it. And one day I took Dr. Judy Frank's intro to Fiction class, and it changed my life forever and ever. It was, you know, not only did she teach us so beautifully, she also taught us living writers, which I hadn't ever read up to that point. You know, I'm an autodidact. As a high schooler, I went to the library, just, you know, read whatever I could find. And I don't think I read anyone alive until our class. And so I was like, you know, from, you know, this sort of private art form of writing, of literature. Suddenly I was introduced to maybe a viable, you know, art form for my own life. And it was, you know, the clouds parted, the angels sang. It was. It felt immense. And, you know, other classes that even I don't even consider as part of my foundational formation as a writer have continued to contribute to the subjects that I write about. Right. Matrix Comes directly from my love for Marie de France that I Learned about in Dr. Paul Rockwell's class. And, you know, so every. Every step of the way, being an Amherst grad meant that I was taught how to think on a high level. And I have no skills whatsoever, but I can think, which is really amazing.
- [05:30]
B
A great recommendation for the liberal arts education.
- [05:33]
A
Exactly.
- [05:35]
B
That's great. I love that because I also, like. I know that Judy Frank's fiction class is still, like, changing people's lives, like, every day, every semester.
- [05:42]
A
I believe it. Yeah. Yeah. She changes people's lives. That's the value of an incredible professor. Right. Someone who sort of is with you for the rest of your life. It's really magnificent.
- [05:53]
B
Oh, I love that. So one thing I was thinking about while I read your collection is, like, how long it takes a story collection to come together. I mean, certainly novels take a lot of time as well, but I feel like they're like a little bit more a time and a place, like a snapshot of a moment and a writer's life. Whereas, like, a story collection really spanned a lot of those moments. And I know some of these stories in the collection were published in 2018. 2019. I feel like some of them. I read them then, and that feels like a lifetime ago with the pandemic and everything. So I wonder if you could just talk about what it's like publishing a book that feels like it contains so many years of your life and sort of stories that might now to you feel sort of like a long time ago.
- [06:34]
A
Yeah, not only that, some of these stories first came to me as stories decades ago. I mean, the Wind, which is the first story in this book, I first got a glimmer of it, oh, gosh, when I was maybe a late teenager. So my. My teenage years, my Amherst years. And I just was never successful at finding a container or a shape or a sculpture that, you know, of. Of size that would fit this story until fairly recently. So, yeah, no, for. You know, and you're right, a novel for me is something that you walk around in. It's an atmosphere. It's something that every single thing you do while you're writing the novel sort of indirectly goes into the book or sometimes even directly goes into the book. For me, it's different with the short story. And other writers who are primarily short story writers think of this radically differently from the way that I do. But the way that I think about short stories is as poetry. I mean, they come to me in the way that poems used to come to Me, which is to say that there's an initial glimmer that I leave well alone. I don't touch it for a very long time. It stays in the back of my mind. And as it does, the subconscious is this gorgeous, incredible, mysterious thing. And it adds density and gravity and weight and kind of intensity to some of these ideas. When you are living your life and maybe you go to an art museum, something will tickle that idea, and it'll. It'll make it grow in a distinct direction. And then finally, for me, I wait and wait and wait and wait until one day the story sort of comes to the fore, and it needs to be, you know, put onto the page. And I feel so grateful for that moment because it's all I can see and I have to do the story. And I. I know, honestly, when I. Whenever I finish a story and I feel like it is finished, I feel as though it's possibly my last one. Right. Whereas with a novel, since I'm always living within a novel at every point in my life, I'm not, you know, I will always be writing a novel. I don't know if I'll, you know, ever be given the grace of a story falling into me again. And every time it happens, it feels, you know, miraculous.
- [08:53]
B
Probably this is a logistical question, and maybe it's just that your agent tells you it's time, but, like, how do you know when it's time to have a story collection? Like, when do you feel like you have it?
- [09:01]
A
Yeah, it wasn't Bill. It was, you know, it was me. I don't know. You know, I felt as though the stories were speaking to each other. And what I really wanted to do was sit down with them and figure out how. And as soon as that happens, you know, you can sort of sift through and juxtapose an order. I had about 18 stories that I finished and published at the time of Sitting down that could have been in this book. But I really like to shape my story collections. I like to have the stories speaking under the surface to one another. And so it feels really necessary that they not just be like a story collection, not be just like a hodgepodge or a throwback of stories that they actually speak to. Some sort of common idea or theme or argument or something like that.
- [09:50]
B
Yeah, it really does. It feels like that. It feels very tight, like a nice length, like. Yeah, it just does feel crafted.
- [09:56]
A
Oh, thank you.
- [09:58]
B
I did want to ask you about Bill Clegg, your agent, because I saw that you dedicated the book to him, which was very sweet. And he's sort of this, like. I don't know, it feels like a larger than life character and sort of, you know, agenting over time. I just wonder if you would talk more about dedicating it to him.
- [10:13]
A
Yeah. I love Bill. He's my work husband. My husband is not at all jealous. Even though we've been together, oh, my gosh, almost 20 years now. What had happened was I had graduated from my MFA program at Wisconsin and had a fellowship in Louisville at the time as the Axton Fellowship. And I had. While in my MFA program, I'd finished my first two books. So that would be the Monsters of Templeton and Delicate Edible Birds. And I had a story very luckily it was just like a breath out of the blue in the New York, not in the Atlantic, which was one of the first stories I ever published. Bill saw it. He had just come back to publishing after a hiatus, a forced hiatus in his life. And I think I might have been the first book that he sold back in Agent Tang. And so I love that man, beyond love. He is one of the great readers and he will find. Fight for you so hard. I just, you know, that's what a good agent does. They're. They're not just business people. Like, a really good literary agent is someone who is a friend to your work. Sometimes Bill tells me that a story is not ready to go, and I cry. And then I think about it, and he's always right.
- [11:35]
B
Right.
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A
I mean, I think that that is, you know, someone who won't let you put things into the world that are not quite at the level that you're yearning to be working at. That's really helpful as well.
- [11:47]
B
That's amazing. Yeah. He sounds invaluable. I'm sure you don't know this, but I'll tell you. One of our former interns at the Common who started around the time that I started at the Common, so she's a recent Amherst alum. She just sold her novel to Riverhead with Bill Clegg.
- [12:01]
A
Oh, my God. What's her name?
- [12:03]
B
Julia Pike.
- [12:05]
A
Amazing.
- [12:06]
B
Yeah. You're going to hear about her book in a couple years.
- [12:08]
A
Yeah, I can't wait. I'm so excited. I know I will be. Sent it for sure. From Bill.
- [12:14]
B
Yes, you definitely will be. I'm sure they'll be bugging you for a blurb. Yeah.
- [12:17]
A
So happy. Happy to support another mammoth.
- [12:22]
B
Since we talked about the dedication at the beginning of the book, I was wondering about the notes that you included at the end of the book, Sort of a note about each story, sort of where the germ of it came from, or if there's maybe an autobiographical element to them. And I really loved reading those. And then I sort of asked myself, like, why do we as readers just, like, crave these, like, you know, real life details? Or, like, why do we want to connect the dots between fiction and real life? And I sort of wonder, like, if do you hemmed and hawed about including those notes or if it was always sort of your intention to include them?
- [12:53]
A
There's a little imp in me that wants to play, right, and wants to especially play with the titration of distance between reader and writer. I mean, I think that's what one is doing whenever one writes, right? There is a distance. You can make it tighter, you can make it more distant, depending on whatever craft elements you choose. But in this case, I had been the guest editor for both the O. Henry Prize one year and then the next year Best American Short Stories. And in both of those amazing anthologies, at the end of the book, you get little paragraphs about the story by the writer. And I find them so moving and human and smart. You know, back when I was a young writer, I would study them, right, to sort of understand how a person writes a short story, especially Alice Munro's, because she always illuminates the story at hand, you know, despite the fact that, you know, her life was really problematic, like, her stories are still really incredible. So, you know, I thought, why not? And I didn't do it for my two other collections. And I'm not sure why, other than the fact that it didn't occur to me, but it just sort of felt like one additional maybe. Like, do you know when you're watching a movie and you see beyond the credits, there's little B roll? It felt a little bit like that. Yeah, it was a little fun.
- [14:26]
B
It did feel. The notes felt playful. They weren't like. You know, sometimes notes at the end of a book or a collection are sort of heavy academic stuff about where the research was done or that kind of thing. And they felt a little tongue in cheek sometimes.
- [14:38]
A
Yeah, yeah, for sure they were. Yeah.
- [14:41]
B
So a great press release came with your book when it came to my house, and there was a mention they mentioned that your short stories are as satisfying as a novel. And I really loved that and obviously, like, wholeheartedly agree. But ever since I read that, I've been thinking about short stories and how they satisfy us. And I was curious how, you know, a story is done like, when does it feel satisfying to you? And is that the same thing as, like, making sure it feels satisfying for the reader?
- [15:07]
A
Oh, probably. Although, to be honest, and this is not me being, I guess, egotistical, but I don't think about a reader at all until the very, very end of the process. Right. But the reason is I'm trying with all my might to keep myself out of the story as much as I possibly. I. I think when I ruin a story, which is almost every other time, I'm ruining it because I'm imposing my ego upon the story, which is its own living creature and its own thing that needs to have its own space, its own time, its own silence, its own nourishment external to the writer. So I think often I try not to impose any idea of doneness on the story until one day when it sort of speaks back to me and it says, okay, I'm ready. I'm ready for other eyes. Right? And that's when I know that it's not that I'm done, per se, but I've taken it as far as I can. And maybe I need the help of another person or series of people. Like, if it. If it is published in the New Yorker, you have a series of really smart people helping you. So sort of, you know, finalize things, polish the brass, you know, make it. Make it look beautiful. Yeah.
- [16:29]
B
I think when I first started reading short stories, I mean, like, as with everyone else, it was in college and I was reading James Joyce's the Dead, and I thought that short stories, to be satisfying, had to have, like, a real, like, gut punch moment at the end. And a lot of great ones do, for sure. But I feel like there are so many stories that I've learned, you know, editing over the years that just want to be quiet, and you should, like, let them be quiet, and they don't have to have some sort of grand thing at the end. And I was thinking about, you know, the story collection side. So this story you mentioned, the Wind, which is a really terrifying short story about domestic violence that I remember reading when it was in the New Yorker. And then this past summer, I was lucky enough to hear you read it at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. And I know you were reading, so you didn't see, but, like, everyone in the crowd was, like, visibly squirmy from, like, the tension and the fear in the story. Like, even myself and the person sitting next to me had already read the story, and we were still kind of gripping the seats, and I was thinking about so Many of your other stories are much quieter. Like, the one you read from is sort of about a short time in a long marriage. And it's just sort of looking at some of these everyday life questions. The last story is about sort of coming of age, the first time you're an adult living alone. And I just was curious about what it's like to write stories that are about something big and dramatic and exciting and scary, and then also write ones that are just sort of about, like, quiet interpersonal stuff. And, like, I would assume that those processes feel really different when you're. When you're working on them.
- [18:01]
A
Yeah, they don't, actually. It's weird that they feel just as urgent, you know, the quiet ones, the long scale ones. There's a story in this collection that's a novella. I think it's 92 pages. It's really, really long. It felt just as urgent to get it out there. And I'm not quite sure. I never know until three years after a book is published what I meant to say. Again, I'm trying not to impose my interpretation on something that's alive, beyond me. But I think. I don't know, I feel like in all of our lives, we have these periods of really deep intensity, and then we have these periods of fallowness. And it's natural. It's. It's the cycle of the planet, right? It's the cycle of the Earth. And with the advent of technology, we have smoothed out some of these times to make it feel as though the fallowness is unnatural, but it's actually deeply, deeply necessary to be a human being. Not only in terms of productivity, but also just in terms of the way we interact with people, being alive and being human beings on the planet. And one could say that these long spans, these quiet spans, could be boring on the surface. But it is our challenge, right, as artists and as humans to look more attentively and be captivated by the moment. Because there is no such thing as an uninteresting moment. Right? There's no such thing as a place that's not fascinating. It's really dependent on our ability to be open and vulnerable and awake and aware.
- [19:49]
B
One of the other things I noticed about the collection is it feels like there's a lot of mothers, you know, and there's this idea, you know, the last story has this idea of mothers being this sort of, like, struggle between, like, the animal and the God, which is just so beautiful. And I mean, I assume, you know, as a mother, that you've written about Motherhood in like a lot of different ways. I'm just curious like how you feel. Like that has changed over the years, you know, as you like kind of move through the many stages of motherhood.
- [20:16]
A
Oh God, yeah. Massive, right? I think you might actually one might be able to see in my early mother stories, abject fear and anxiety. Right. I think it's there everywhere. I sometimes I don't think of writing as cathartic at all, but I do think it can express the things so deep down that we can't even see them ourselves. And it's not that I'm not afraid because, you know, arguably it's more dangerous to have 17 and 15 year old boys who haven't really developed a prefrontal cortex yet. It's really terrifying. But at the same time, I know that if my plane gets grounded in a 10 day snowstorm, they'd be able to feed themselves. Right? They, they actually could survive. Right. They're not, you know, little polyps squirming on the floor. But you know, I think, I think the relationship gets more complex as they become more complex as adults and, or, you know, growing into adulthood. And my older son is going to leave in about six months and there's this really intense grief, bittersweetness and grief that I think is in everything that I've written in the past year or so.
- [21:39]
B
And I.
- [21:39]
A
And you know, again, it's not cathartic. It's not. Writing isn't meant to sort of be my psychotherapy, but it does, it does exist in some ways and it is fueled in some ways by what's going on deep inside. So, yeah. Oh man, we'll see. And we'll also see if there's going to be a moment when the young one is out of the house. Would I go through this great, like bursting into a different kind of life? I'm hoping that I get to see.
- [22:11]
B
Well, I'll be curious to read that story collection too. So always our last question on the podcast is to ask what you're working on now and what's next from you.
- [22:21]
A
Yeah. Oh, thanks. Right now I'm in the midst of two novels that I can't talk about, but I'm also doing the. I really love working with artists. And there's this great Florida painter who's, I think she's 82 years old now. Her name is Burnette Lawson, and I'm doing a catalog copy. But instead of doing just, you know, factual stuff, I'm writing little tiny mini short stories for each of her paintings and I'm in. I'm loving, loving the hell out of it. Her, she's so amazing. She's like cubist and funny and she talks a lot about consumerism or not talks, but, you know, paints a lot about, you know, it's very Florida coded, but it's very satirical. I just love her. So, yeah, that's what I'm working on right now. When I can focus enough to actually pay attention to the written word.
- [23:17]
B
That sounds nice though, like something a little like outside the box, you know, but still, still fiction. That sounds great.
- [23:24]
A
It's. Yeah, we'll see what comes of it. Who knows if nothing. And you know, I, I promised her I'll have something at the end of, you know, February. So I've got, I've got only a few more days.
- [23:34]
B
It's always tough when the book is coming out and you're doing all the interviews and stuff. Yeah. Well, Lauren Groff, thank you so much for joining us. It's been really great to talk with you and good luck with your book tour and all your stats.
- [23:46]
A
Well, it's so lovely to see you again and I hope I get to see you up in Northampton at some point or Amherst at some point.
- [23:53]
B
Listeners, you can read Lauren's story in the Common and subscribe to the latest issue atthecommononline.org. LifeLock how can I help?
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