A family of four flees domestic abuse in the early morning; a teenage diver reckons with her mother’s pain; a renter gets to know his landlady while digitizing social workers’ files on children in crisis. These are just some of the characters in Lauren Groff’s new short story collectsion, Brawler, all of whom are granted a deep and individual interiority, while still being narratively knit together by the all-too-common human experience of suffering. Groff’s proficiency with the novel format is well-known—she is the author of Arcadia, Fates and Furies, and Matrix—but Brawler is bound to make you long to hear her singular voice applied to short fiction more often.
This week, Vogue spoke to Groff about transitioning between writing novels and short stories, writing first drafts longhand, owning and operating an independent bookstore in Gainesville, Florida, and more.
Vogue: How does it feel to be delving back into the world of short stories?
Lauren Groff: It’s privately, or not very secretly, my favorite genre. I truly love being back in this world, which I feel is sometimes a harder sell for people. I’m trying to just really enjoy the experience of the book being out, instead of having anxiety.
Craft-wise, how does your process for writing short fiction differ from your process when you’re drafting a novel?
Oh, it’s radically different. I became a writer through poetry first, actually, and I think that the short story process, for me, is a little bit more like writing poems. With a novel, when the initial idea comes, it’s like this gnarly, wriggling knot, something that you want to pay attention to and live with and disentangle for five years, if need be. With stories, I let ideas sort of sit in the back of my head for a really, really long time, and in the case of “The Wind,” which is the first story in the book, I pulled it out once in a while and tried to write a draft, and it didn’t work for years. So stories actually take me a lot longer. It’s not a constant, everyday thing, but when they finally come to full fruition, it’s because I’ve carried them around for long enough, and then something in the world has sort of collided with that first idea, and it becomes something very, very urgent that I feel like I need to write the first draft of in one sitting. The process is absolutely radically different.
Is there an author of short fiction whose style you would say Brawler is most inspired by?
In everything I do, there’s homage to someone’s work. I think of literature as just a long, beautiful, deep conversation, and I’m very, very happy to be in conversation with writers that I really love. So it just depends on the story. I think a story like “To Sunland” has a very obvious Flannery O’Connor in it because I did an introduction for one of Flannery’s books of short fiction, and I was just really in her world. With the story “Annunciation,” for instance, I was reading a lot of Mavis Gallant, which is maybe reflected, but with something like “The Wind,” because it was so personal, it actually just sort of came out of all of the conversations I’d been having in my head, and it’s a little bit more of a thriller. I think my perennial short-story loves run the gamut; Joy Williams is a big one, Lorrie Moore is a big one, and Toni Cade Bambara’s collectsion was maybe the first collectsion by someone relatively contemporary that I ever read. There are so many incredible short story writers out there, and I love going back to that form.
Is there a character in this collectsion that occupied your thoughts the most after you finished writing them?
It’s almost like an exorcism. [Laughs.] It’s not that I don’t think of them after the fact, or even worry about them; I worry about Chip the most, from “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?,” because I don’t really know where he was at the end of that story. I’m really afraid of the darkness into which he sort of fell. You know, they all sort of come out of me, and then they exist on their own in the story, and I’m liberated to not actually think about them all that much afterwards.
When it comes to writing short stories, are you someone who writes too much and then edits down or starts short and then expands?
Everything I ever do is just intentional chaos. I have OCD, and one of my issues with OCD is that if I work on a computer, I can’t actually progress beyond about half a sentence. I’m constantly fixing that sentence. So everything that I write, the first many, many, many drafts are longhand. I’m sort of writing into the world and the ideas and trying to let the story come to the surface, as opposed to me imposing my concept of what the story is on the work. Some of the drafting process for short stories happens in the subconscious for me, as I’m walking around with the story for many years, but when I do sit down to write it, it’s this one big burst over the course of the entire story. I don’t reread it, but I do remember what I’ve done and the things that live in the gap between finishing one draft and starting the next one. Those are the truly living parts of the story that deserve to be in the story. So I just trust that anything that I thought was good at the moment of putting it on paper that didn’t actually make it in was just kind of a false friend, right? It doesn’t actually need to be in the story.
Can you tell me a little bit about what it looks like to run your Florida bookstore, The Lynx, these days?
Oh my gosh. It’s so gloriously fun. It’s fascinating, because we have a two-pronged thing; we have a for-profit bookstore, which is almost an oxymoron, and then a nonprofit. The bookstore was a community unification project, really, and something that we all work incredibly hard at to make sure that we’re providing resources for the community and bringing in writers and new ideas, because Florida is very much under the very heavy thumb of the Republicans and Ron DeSantis. We are under an authoritarian state, and so part of our mission is actually making sure that the books, the ideas, the people who other Floridians need to hear get to be heard, right? And then our nonprofit works really hard with local organizations across Florida to make sure that the books that have been banned in Florida—a state that is the number-one worst banner of books in the whole country—get into the hands of people who need them the most. I could probably be working 18-hour days every single day, but I also can’t, so I hired three extraordinary managers, and they do an incredible job. I work maybe two hours a day, paying bills and sort of strategizing.
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