The Tamesis
A family of four escape domestic abuse in the early hours of the morning; a teenage diver bears the pain of her mother; and a tenant meets his landlady while digitizing a social worker’s files on children in crisis. These are just some of the characters in Lauren Groff’s new collection of short stories, brawlerall of whom are imbued with a deep, personal interiority while still being narratively woven together through common human experiences of pain. Grove’s mastery of the novel format is well known—she is Arcadia, fate and revenge, and matrix-but brawler It’s sure to leave you eager to hear more of her unique voice applied to short stories.
This week, Fashion Chatted with Grove about the transition between writing novels and short stories, writing first drafts by hand, owning and operating an independent bookstore in Gainesville, Florida, and more.
Fashion: How does it feel to dive back into the world of short stories?
Lauren Grove: This is secretly, or not so secretly, my favorite genre. I really enjoy being back in this world, but I think sometimes it’s hard for people to accept. I tried to really enjoy the experience of publishing the book, rather than be anxious about it.
Technically, how does your process of writing a short story differ from that of drafting a novel?
Oh, this is completely different. I actually first became a writer through poetry, and I think the short story process is more like writing poetry for me. For a novel, when the initial idea comes, it’s like this gnarly, squirming knot that you want to focus on and endure and unravel for five years, if need be. With stories, I let ideas sit in my head for a long time, and in the case of “The Wind,” which is the first story in the book, I would occasionally take it out and try to write a draft without success over the years. So the story actually took me longer. It’s not an ongoing, day-to-day thing, but when they finally fully come to fruition, it’s because I’ve carried them with me long enough and then something in the world collided with my first idea and it became very, very urgent and I felt like I needed to write the first draft in one sitting. The process is completely different.
Is there a short story writer whose style you think of? brawler Most inspiring?
Everything I do is a tribute to someone’s work. I think literature is just a long, beautiful, deep conversation, and I’m very, very happy to be having that conversation with writers that I really like. So it just depends on the story. I think there’s a very clear Flannery O’Connor aspect to a story like “To Sunland,” because I did an introduction to one of Flannery’s short stories and I really got into her world. For example, in the story “The Annunciation,” I read a lot of Mavis Galante, and that was probably reflected, but a story like “The Wind,” because it’s so personal, it really just grew out of all the conversations I had in my head, and it was more of a thriller. I think my long-standing love of short stories runs the gamut. Joy Williams is a big shot, Lorrie Moore is a big shot, and Toni Cade Bambara’s collection is probably the first collection I’ve read by someone relatively contemporary. There are so many incredible short story writers out there and I love returning to this form.
