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 collection, 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 collection was maybe the first collection 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.