Interview with Lauren Groff

“One of the things that art can do is take pain and suffering, whether it’s our own or that of others, and turn it into a portal,” says Lauren Groff. “A portal where you can make something beautiful out of something that is very rough and tough.” Stories from Groff’s new collection, Brawlerjust one such portal that explores life’s traumas with insight and compassion. According to Groff, the stories are about how we hurt each other, often senselessly, and how violence is perpetuated across generations. At the same time, they show “our beautiful willingness to make things right, to be good, and to strive for goodness in other people.”

He was born in 1978 in Cooperstown, New York. Groff is the author of five novels, including Fates and furies (2016) and Matrix (2021), as well as three collections of short stories. Her awards include The Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and she was a three-time finalist for the National Book Award; He was awarded and named a Guggenheim Fellowship Time The magazine was included in the list of the 100 most influential people in 2024. Groff lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband own The Lynx bookstore, which was opened in response to the state’s growing book ban. The store features banned titles and its motto is “Watch Us Bite Back.”

I spoke with Groff about letting go of ambition, living between regret and repair, and how swimming freed his mind.

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You went to Kyoto last year because you love it The Tale of Genjian 11th-century Japanese novel that you describe as “patterned with recurring images and ideas: rapidly fading cherry blossoms, clouds in the sky, autumn leaves, the aching transience of life on this planet”. Did you feel a sense of transience when you were in Kyoto? Oh, yes. This was one of the great lessons of the trip. I remember watching someone making tea with incredible care, and as I watched, I thought that tea should be drunk. It’s not meant to stay here forever. The attention paid to every sensory and aesthetic detail of such a fleeting moment had a great impact on me. In Kyoto, I fell in love with the Japanese craft culture, which is about loving what you do as deeply as possible, rather than trying to achieve and be better than others.

Do you feel the urge to reach out and write the next big thing? Yes, because it’s hard to grow up here in the US and not be ambitious, especially as an artist. I really want to be like Japanese craftsmen. That’s the ideal, but it goes against everything I’ve been taught, especially since I was a competitive swimmer for a long time. What is athleticism if you don’t pit yourself against others?

That said, now that I’m getting older, I’m beginning to feel the grace of artistic aging to turn my back on the difficult ambition that drove me for so long. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to completely put that ambition aside. But I’m trying with a new understanding of craft and impermanence, fleeting beauty. That nothing we do now will last. The sun will explode. Everything will disappear.

One of the things that struck me about your new book is Brawlerits melancholy. What did you think about when choosing the stories? When I sat down to the eighteen or so stories I’ve written over the years, I didn’t have a particular theme in mind, but I think the melancholy comes from being here in the United States of America at this time and watching it all fall apart and fall apart and have two boys to draft. And love that you have kids, but now I see them leaving home soon. And with older parents. There is deep melancholy in life now.

Bardo teachings encourage us to accept reality, but not to give up. In your story “Between the Shadow and the Soul”, the main character wakes up when he meets a new person. However, she realizes that she does not want to leave her husband, and the part of her that has awakened falls asleep again. Accepts reality but seems to give up. I don’t see myself giving up at all. I think you understand the deep things going on inside. He accepts – surrenders to reality. She sees what is happening to her emotionally and then decides to be with her husband, this wounded person she loves deeply.

Surrender to reality, which includes surrender, can mean living with difficulty rather than running away from it. It’s about accepting the dark parts of yourself and loving them, even if you’ve never loved them before. It is part of being human on this planet. It is very easy not to give up. Turn on Netflix or sleep – I like to do both, no judgment. But instead, we can sit with the discomfort, knowing that it is the need for understanding.

In the bardo between birth and death, we are the artists of our lives, we shape our path with our decisions. Do you feel like an artist in your life? This is the most interesting question because the answer is obviously no and yes. I mean, I got a lot. My parents are the best parents in the world. They allowed me to read as much as I wanted, they gave me an education. And I grew up in a time and place where there wasn’t such an urgent sense that everything was going to fall apart. It was a graceful moment in the United States, in my hometown of upstate New York. So this is what I wrote. At the same time, I made decisions that shaped my path.

Surrender to reality, which includes surrender, can mean living with difficulty rather than running away from it. It’s about accepting the dark parts of yourself and loving them, even if you’ve never loved them before.

There is also a situation where a disturbed childhood, instability is responsible. This was true for a friend of mine who ended up in prison and had a come-to-Jesus moment when he said, “Even though I’m stuck here and everything is terrible—the food is bad, there’s noise, I’m always afraid for my life—I’m going to use it to become a better person.” He did it through meditation, and when he got out of prison he became an activist. It was an unforgiving environment, but he turned it into a beautiful feeling: “I take control of my decisions.”

I like the idea of ​​changing our author form like OK, I’ll take over the narrative. Sometimes we do this because we realize that life is short and we don’t want to regret it. Have you regretted it, or do you feel like you will? I try to live without regrets. That doesn’t mean I won’t be around, but it does mean I’ll do everything I can to repair my relationship with the people I’ve hurt. Part of that is forgiving others and myself. And even forgiving those who do terrible things in this country, even though they probably don’t deserve it. If I don’t forgive, I carry that with me, which doesn’t help anyone.

One thing that helps me get rid of the regrets is opening our bookstore, The Lynx, which I’ve been dreaming of for a long time. I did it to take a stand and be a politician because Florida is a very right-wing state. Every day, we make decisions at the bookstore to strengthen the community. Many of the things I regretted didn’t improve, but I’m constantly working to make things better.

What you describe is a kind of duality – between regret and reparation, between what has been done and what can be done now, between individual and collective responsibility. Do you also experience duality in your writings? For me, it’s the understanding that nothing I do is finished. What I create is given to others to do as they wish.

I live in a state of acceptance that my work is its own living entity that changes, moves and lives beneath the surface, whether I see it or not. This allowed me to welcome the fact that it would always be in between. It is always in progress for another person to complete. Each new reader changes it, moves it, and makes it different from what I imagined beforehand. It’s beautiful that art is infinitely malleable, never static.

You said you became a writer because you were a swimmer. What is the connection between swimming and writing? When I trained as a competitive swimmer, it was like formal poetry because I was given a rigid structure that allowed my mind to free itself. The structure was going back and forth, back and forth, for hours, forcing my body to do its work, and the release was that it made my mind do something radically different in my writing.

During the periods between states – and swimming is a great example, when we are literally in a suspended state – we have the opportunity to see things in a new way. That seems to have been very true for you. Totally. Swimming was active daydreaming, whatever I was writing at the time, a moment where my mind was free and allowed to float in any direction. I honestly feel like I wrote a bunch of novels underwater.

Is swimming still part of your life? When I was pregnant it was the only thing I could do because it was really hot in Florida and I got sunburned. I would go swimming in these outdoor pools like a giant manatee. But I don’t swim anymore.

We have a small pond that is full of newts and the water is very dark. In the summer I lie there like a newt, very still, floating. I go to the lake as much as I can to fill myself with the magic it holds. There is some kind of spirit there that I love and that speaks to me.

The days of competitive swimming can seem very far away. They do, especially because, like my writing, I want to get away from it.

Towards the gőte lake. it is so. Towards joy and beauty.