Retracing the Path to a Writer's Paradise

As I prepare to return to Key West after too long away, I revisit to this conversation with master storyteller Lauren Groff. I had the opportunity to interview Groff the last time I was living in Key West, as she anticipated leading a workshop and speaking at the Key West Literary Seminar. Now, as I work toward the completion of my own collection of essays, I reflect upon her collection of short stories, Florida, and return to her words of experience as a writer deeply grounded in place.

Lauren Groff is a storyteller comfortable with the wild and the mundane, writing with fascination about reptiles, The Bible, the struggles of marriage, and even where those three meet.  “Snake Stories” from Florida opens: “Babe, when Satan tempted Adam and Eve, there’s a pretty good reason he didn’t transform into a talking clam.” Groff transports the reader to the unfamiliar via the familiar, asks us to consider the horrifying and subversive from the comfort of our backyards and bedrooms. And isn’t that just so Floridian? Groff became a literary star on the rise when her novel Fates and Furies hit bestseller lists across the country, and since, she’s delighted her readers with many more forays into fiction, including Matrix and The Monsters of Templeton. Her short story collection Florida also put her on the map in the Sunshine State; Groff draws her adopted home in dark, lush brushstrokes on the page. She also was generous enough to catch up with this writer about her work in the world of words, the storiest of women breaking out of the domestic sphere, and what it’s like to survive a dry January in Key West.

ST: The language of lushness and darkness in Florida really spoke to the nature state: the oak trees, the feral cats, the weird neighbors. Why did you choose Florida as your home (or, as you’ve been quoted, how did it choose you)?

LG: I am from upstate New York and never thought I'd live here, but I fell in love with a Floridian, was forced to move to Gainesville, and after a few years of sorrow, felt myself expand to meet the place. I find Gainesville magnificent and humble. Florida as a state is many states all monkey-breaded together, and it's somewhat futile to talk of it as though it's a cohesive entity.

ST: It’s truly a bizarre amalgam, which you capture well. Your fiction is so lyrical. Did you start out as a poet? 

LG: I did! I thought I was a poet--I even went to Amherst College because Amherst was the town of Emily Dickinson. But in college, the clouds parted, the angels laughed at me, and I became a fiction writer.

ST: So, Amherst taught you that you were a fiction writer; often writers are drawn to Key West to find out who they are. How do you experience the creative energy in Key West? Are we successfully overcoming our reputation of just being a great drinking town?

LG: One excellent way to overcome the reputation is to see the town as a teetotaler, which I've been all January; this means that I see it early in the morning when all the drinkers are sleeping; I spent hours at Judy Blume's Books & Books, walked and biked and ran on the shore, and wandered through Elizabeth Bishop's house. I spent about a bare minute on Duval Street and ran away screaming. I don't know about your reputation, but I do love the Key West I saw.

ST: There is a thread in Key West literary history of writers being drawn to self-destructive behaviors (Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Tennessee Williams)… Do you think that good art necessarily comes with a side of destruction or trauma?

LG: I don't think this at all. I do think that good art is made by staring with patience and care at the darkness of the human heart, but anyone who has survived to adulthood has plenty of darkness just from being alive as a human being. Nobody needs to be suicidal or mad or an addict to make good art.

ST: In FATES AND FURIES, you write about a marriage from two contrasting perspectives. Non-fiction writers sometimes struggle with narrative “fairness.” Is fairness a concern in fiction?

LG: I think fairness to the characters is definitely a concern; fairness to the reader is the ultimate goal.

ST: In The Atlantic, you wrote about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, another writer who subverted the traditional feminine and the domestic spheres. Can you talk about your influences in writing about marriage and domesticity?

LG: The history of women writers--and some sympathetic male writers like Henry James and Leo Tolstoy--can be seen as the history of writing against the cage of domesticity. I think of people like George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Sappho, Elizabeth Bishop, and on and on as all working together to build a great cathedral of testimony about what it is to be the so-called domestic sex. 

ST: It’s not just women in marriage and partnerships that occupy your pages. You capture the complex dynamics of female friendships well. Do we have a responsibility as women writers in terms of how we write about women?

LG: I love women deeply. I think, as women writers, if we try to write against type to find the human being beneath all the cultural expectations, we are doing our part.

ST: There’s no easy pivot from that to male praise, but I have to ask you about your most illustrious fanboy. Barack Obama called FATES AND FURIES his favorite book of 2015! Writers look forward to these milestones: first being published, then being in The New Yorker, then being on The New York Times Bestseller list. Are they the satisfying markers of your career, or is the reward truly in the work?

LG: I am a person who has long struggled with anxiety and depression: I wake up every day in this body and mind and have discovered that no matter what plaudits my work get, I'm still the same person; I don't suddenly become free and full of constant light. Plus, I think it's a mark of capitalism to find self-worth in one's curriculum vitae; an artist is a person working in opposition to the values of capitalism. All this to say that long ago, I had to come to terms with the external joys of publishing being fleeting, that the warm internal joys of writing are the lasting joys. 

ST: That is totally sound, and at the same time, most of the writers I know also seek a broader readership or some recognition. You’ve found that. You’re so well-published for how young you are. What is your writing routine and discipline?

LG: I'm not that young! Honestly, it'd be wrong of me to talk about writing routine and discipline (every day, starting at 5 a.m.) without also talking about the privilege with which I grew up: born into a family with loving parents, enough to eat, good education, good health, the freedom to choose my own way in life, a husband who can cover bills when I can't, as well as my whiteness and cis body in a profession that caters for those things. I was born on third base. Which is not to say that people without these privileges can't have an equal life in publishing, just that it's a lot harder, and requires a lot more sacrifice and willpower.

ST: What about Key West inspires you?

LG: The light in Key West is astonishing, as is the literary history and the feel, once you're away from Duval Street, of being in a small town.

ST: Margarita or mojito? 

LG: Far too sweet. For me, it's a gin martini with olives, but not dirty.