REBROADCAST: Author Lauren Groff on her novel ‘Matrix’

Author Lauren Groff retreated to the middle ages for her latest novel. After her book “Fates and Furies,” received wide praise, and in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Groff found solace in writing about the life of nuns cloistered together in 12th-century England. We talk to Groff about her latest book, “Matrix,” in front of an audience of students at Leodis V. McDaniel High School in Portland.

This event is a partnership with Literary Arts.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We are coming to you today in front of an audience at McDaniel High School in Northeast Portland. It is an hour with the writer Lauren Groff. Lauren Groff has published four novels and two short story collections since 2008, becoming one of the most celebrated American writers working today. In her novel “Fates and Furies”, she told the story of a modern marriage from but wildly different perspectives of the wife and the husband, creating an indelible, twinned portrait of intimacy, creativity, and secrecy, of things said and a lot of things left unsaid. In “Florida”, her story collection that followed, Groff crafted potent narratives largely centered on the lives of girls and women in her adopted state. And in her latest novel “Matrix”, Groff breathed contemporary fire into an epic fictionalized story about a radical French nun who lived almost 1,000 years ago. All three books were finalists for the National Book Award. Lauren Groff, I am so excited to be able to spend an hour with you and the students here. Thanks very much for making time for us.

Lauren Groff: Thank you, I’m delighted to be here. Look at these gorgeous faces out here.

Miller: And gorgeous books around us. We are in the library.

I thought we could start a conversation about writing by talking about reading. Is it possible for you to quantify the amount of your writing time that you’re spending reading?

Groff: Yes it is, because I keep a list every year. My first job as a writer is to be a reader, you’re absolutely correct. I read about 300 books a year, and I do it because often when I go to sit down, I’m often unable to actually write the way that I want to. So I can turn to reading. I read a lot. I read a lot of poetry, a lot of plays, I read a lot of everything.

Miller: Has becoming a prose writer, fiction writer, changed the way you read? Because I imagine you read when you were in middle school and high school. Do you read differently now?

Groff: Yeah, I read on multiple levels now. I’m reading for not only the story, I’m reading for the craft as well. But I think that if I love something enough to be piqued by it, I’ll read it again to really dig down into the craft issues, to really understand the things that the writer is doing at hand. Often, my first meeting of a book is just pure joy, and I want to fall in love with that book. So I’m taking off my writer mind a lot of times.

Miller: Consciously? Or it just happens?

Groff: No, consciously. I’m actually sort of distancing myself from reading as a writer. And then if I love it enough to come back to it, I’ll read it again as a writer.

Miller: What does it mean to distance yourself from reading it as a writer?

Groff: It’s to not be caught up with things that I would have done differently. To not be caught up with anything other than a sense of wonder and awe at what this person has pulled off, because everyone is going to make a different choice than I would have made. Really just letting the work pour over you like a wave, as opposed to trying to fight the wave.

Miller: What kinds of things do you find when you’re reading now with the writer’s brain not turned off? What kinds of things recently have been catching your attention?

Groff: It goes in waves. Right now I’m really thinking about structure, because I can’t structure my own book that I’m working on right now, I’m having a really hard time. So every text that I’m working with, I’m looking at the deeper architecture, the way that the writer pulled off building this book or this story. I’ve gone back intentionally to Alice Munro, who I’ve read 100 million times, but I’m looking at her work in terms of sheer architecture, the reasons why she chose to build the story this way.

Miller: Let’s take a question from our audience. Go ahead, what’s your name and what’s your question?

Eliana McCall Petke: I’m Eliana McCall Petke, and I was wondering is there a specific way you found inspiration on multiple occasions for different books, like a process you go through? Or is it just spur of the moment?

Groff: I love this question because my job is mostly failure. I have OCD, which makes writing actually quite difficult, because it means that I want everything that I do to be absolutely perfect. So I figured out a way of going around that by just my process of working. My process is I do it every single day at a certain time, and I do very very fast, messy, longhand drafts. Everything that I write, I write in longhand. And I do the first complete draft, throw it out, start over again, throw it out, and I don’t reread the things that I’ve done, because what happens is, if I stop to write on a computer, I will fix the same paragraph for 500 years and I’ll never finish anything. But if I’m building the story in my mind, I’m open to what the story wants me to do, I’m open to listening to a different structure, a different kind of storytelling, a different kind of writing that I want to do? And the beautiful thing is, if I get a few drafts into this process of writing, throwing out, writing, throwing out, suddenly I start to think in very different ways about the story that I’m writing.

I’m trying to write a fractal story, I’m trying to write a story where the overall story is actually replicated by the things that are happening sort of in a minute way at the same time. And I don’t know how to do that until I’ve gone through a few drafts. I don’t really know what I’m thinking until I’ve gotten to this point where I’ve thought it through multiple times.

So yes, the beautiful thing about this job, especially since failure is my number one goal, is that through failure, I find out kind of weird new ways of going to my subject and dealing with my subject. And this is something that I would love to say to anyone in the room who is thinking of writing at all in the future, let failure be your friend. Let failure guide you to where you need to go. Not in terms of your classes. Don’t fail those, definitely pass those. But allow yourself to not be perfect, because it’s only through the imperfection of the work that we have that we actually learn what it is that we know.

Miller: It almost seems like failure is not even the right word for what you’re describing, right? You’re talking about drafts and iterations and working towards something that you feel is right.

Groff: It’s coming closer to sort of the platonic ideal that’s sort of hovering over my head. But it is failure, because I claim the word failure, because failure has such a negative connotation to it now that people do anything possible to avoid it, but I’m actually courting it. I really want it. I really want to get to the end of this draft and be like “wow, that was a disaster, what I just did.” The disaster teaches me where I need to go for the next draft. It is failure.

Miller: Have you failed in a way that taught you this way to approach writing? Have you always written in this way?

Groff: No. My first semester in college, this was on the cusp of laptops, and I’d never had a laptop in high school. We had computers, but I didn’t have one at home. And for the first time I was writing on a laptop, and I brought it to one of my professors and he looked at it. I got a low grade, and I was crying because I’ve never gotten anything but an A at that point, and he’s like “this is obvious you wrote it on a computer, this is really bad, but if you rewrite it by hand and bring it in, I will consider giving you a different grade.” And that was the thing that taught me how to write this way, that taught me how to write by hand in drafts, and not be obsessed with every line that I’ve already made.

Miller: Let’s take another question from the audience. What’s your name?

Meredith Gifford: My name is Meredith Gifford. You’ve already spoken about how much you loved to read. And I was wondering if there’s one book that really inspired you recently?

Groff: Recently? Yeah! I actually went back to the source of western storytelling. I was reading Greek plays over the course of the summer, the Greek tragedies. And they’re amazing. They’re full of everything. They’ve got mothers killing their children in Medea, they’ve got the Oedipus sequence. I think they’re just spectacular. And since they’re plays, they’re spectacular works of condensing, efficacy. Everything is very, very tight and needs to be where it is. And they’re so surprising, and they’re amazing. I think going back to those was incredible for me.

Miller: Speaking of going back, I had read that there are a couple novels that you re read over and over, including the Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard and Middlemarch by George Eliot. I’ve read that you said you might read once or twice a year for two decades. And I brought my copy of Middlemarch because I’d love to have you read a paragraph. But before we get to that, I’m just curious what a book needs to give you for you to keep going back to it?

Groff: It’s being carried in a sensibility that feels more capacious, and more wonderful than my own. It’s being enveloped by this mind that seems to bleed into my daily life as well. And George Eliot, who was a woman, was so brilliant, she’s so philosophical, and she’s so far-sighted that whenever I read Middlemarch, I feel swallowed by this warmth and this beauty and this love of humanity. And I think there’s not enough love of humanity happening these days. So I like to go back to it to touch that live wire.

Miller: I was hoping you could read this paragraph here that I just isolated this one of my favorites in this book. And for people who haven’t read, I don’t think you need to know too much. But one of the main characters, Dorothea, has just made a disastrous choice in marrying this full of himself, but also misguided academic guy named Casaubon. And the narrator says basically that no one’s gonna feel sorry for her for making this decision, because a lot of people make bad decisions like marrying the wrong person. That’s where this paragraph takes up.

Groff: I have to say, this is one of my favorite paragraphs in the history of literature. I love it so much that I might actually start to cry when I’m reading it here. This is about maybe a third of the way into the book.

“Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new, real future which replaces the imaginary is not unusual. And we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the course emotion of mankind. And perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow, and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

“Die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence” is unbelievable. So good.

Miller: What is it about that paragraph that moves you so much?

Groff: It’s a very profound idea that, if we only paid close enough attention to the people around us and the absolute wonder and awe of being alive and being present in this world, it would be almost too much for us to bear. It would be too much for us to bear, to actually consider another human being in front of you in the depth and the profundity that they deserve to be considered, it’s grand, it’s a kind of wisdom that we protect ourselves from by not allowing ourselves to do. It’s almost a paradox in some ways. It’s this beautiful idea of acceptance and love and awe. But we can’t do it all the time because if you do it, you would die of it. I think that it’s very very beautiful.

There are moments though in our lives when we all do this. We are touched by something greater than we are, and it astonishes us, and we have this moment where we’re close to the divine or the mystical.

Miller: And then we close our eyes to some extent and move on, because otherwise it’s unbearable.

Groff: It’s unbearable. And you cannot live like that all the time. And I think maybe only Buddha ever has, I don’t know. I think it’s a beautiful thing to aspire to, but knowing that we cannot, it’s only because we’re human, not because we’re failures.

Miller: So, I want to hear this in your voice for a couple reasons. One was because it moves me deeply and has for years. But also because of what this paragraph, and so many others in this book, say about narration, how narration works in this. The narrator in this book is almost like a character, this all knowing, kind, sometimes funny, sensitive being that guides us through and tells us sometimes better ways to think about what’s happening, an interesting way to think about what’s happening, in a way that feels very different than most narration today. People don’t write books like this anymore, at least with such a present narrator that says “this is the way the world is.” Do you think it could work? What would narration that aims to be like this written now, how would it hit?

Groff: I think people do like this now, you know, I would say probably Marilynne Robinson does, and there are a number of other people that I’m not remembering right now.

I think that the difficulty is that, at the time George Eliot was writing, 99% of people living in England at the time were Christians, and believed, at least on the surface, in the idea of Christianity, the sort of the shared sub-language of Christianity that was happening at the time. And the idea that there was God, and the God of the New and the Old Testament was everywhere, was sort of suffused in everything that people were doing at the time. I think we’ve become, as a society, much more secular. There’s a lot of questioning of the omniscient, God-like narrator, the feeling that perhaps it’s not as close to life now from the 21st century as it would have been in George Eliot’s day. A lot of people do it, and in some of my short stories I play with this sort of omniscience and I’m following in George Eliot’s wake, there’s still an understanding in the 21st Century Reader that they’re reading from this place of a more secular idea of the world.

Miller: Let’s take some more questions from our audience. Go ahead, what’s your name, what’s your question?

Taja: Hi, my name is Taja. I was wondering, have you ever tried to incorporate another writer’s writing style into your own work?

Groff: Oh, this is amazing. Yes. Okay. So not incorporate. You want to be very careful about plagiarism. And I feel for you right now, because you are on the cusp of the AI revolution, and I don’t know how you’re going to deal with that. I mean you can use it as a tool, but you don’t want to plagiarize ever.

I often, sometimes when I’m having a really hard time finding the music of the piece of writing that I want to do, finding the exact way that the story wants to be told, I’ll go back to a writer that I think does it, that sings in the same sort of tone. There are times when all I can do everyday to get closer to the story I want to write is to go back and take the first part of Lolita and rewrite it in my own handwriting. Try to hear the music that’s happening underneath that. I often read Emily Dickinson, she was the person who made me into a writer, because she writes these really elliptical, very strange, very beautiful poems that are very simple. So the 12 year old me was like “I can do that.” And I would try to write an Emily Dickinson poem, and by imitating my betters, I would come closer to telling the story or the poem that I wanted to tell. I think imitation is a wonderful tool, as long as it doesn’t tip into plagiarism.

Miller: We have another question. What’s your name?

Rames: Hi, I’m Ramses. I have a backstory of this. So I read Enunciation and Watershed, and I thought they were really good at surprising the readers. I was wondering if you would ever consider writing a horror novel?

Groff: A horror novel? Wow.

Miller: I should say these are the two short stories.

Groff: Yeah. One of them was from Delicate Edible Birds, which is my first story collection. And Enunciation will be in the next story collection, someday, if I finish the stories.

I’ve never attempted to write anything other than literary fiction. And what is literary fiction, but like the largest umbrella, you could possibly put over anything? It doesn’t actually mean anything, it just means a story that pays a great deal of attention to both characters and language, I think. Do you have a different definition?

Miller: No, no. The dichotomy, that many people think is meaningless or offensive, is that there’s literary fiction on the one side and genre fiction on the other. And the genre could be mystery, or horror, or suspense, or whatever. But when people make that dichotomy, there’s an implied difference in quality, right?

Groff: Right. And I would never say that there is. I don’t actually think that there is. When I say that I write literary fiction, I just want to give myself space for one day writing a horror story if I wanted to, or one day writing a mystery if I really want to. This is a question somewhat about the commerce of writing in some ways too, because people declare you are one thing. It’s often really hard to break out of other people’s definitions of who you are. I really just want to be… don’t tell me I’m anything. I just want to do anything that the story suggests that it wants to be.

Although I have to say right now, I’m trying to write a horror short story. And it’s not going super well. But maybe one day it will.

Miller: You mentioned that recently, you’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from Greek plays. It did remind me a little bit of the Greek chorus of sorts that you put in brackets, sometimes a word, and sometimes a paragraph in “Fates and Furies.” For people who haven’t read that novel, can you describe this mechanism that you came up with that feels like a chorus?

Groff: Yeah. This sort of bracketed interdigitation of this higher voice, this different voice came to me because I had actually written “Fates and Furies” as two separate novels. There was Fates and there was Furies. And the first time I wrote it, meaning after 100 drafts, I had intended it to be like M.r and Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, where you could read either book in any direction and I would tell a different story. And so it’s actually a more ambitious project than what ultimately Fates and Furies ended up being, because it didn’t work.

Eventually I was told to put the books together, and they became sort of a microcosm of a marriage. There’s a male voice and female voice in this particular marriage. And it was held within the covers of a book. I had come up with this idea of sort of a third bracketed voice, the Greek chorus, in order to tie the parts together, that there was there was a way that the stories were being threaded through, very loosely, with red thread all the way through so that they would stay together, because they’re told in very, very different styles. Lotto, the first part, the Fate part, is dependent on a lot of narrative tropes that have been traditionally the realm of men in literary history. There’s all sorts, from medieval romance all the way through to plays. But Mathilde very much draws on the tradition of écriture féminine, which is feminine writing, which came up in the middle of the 20th century by writers like Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras. It’s writing from the bodies, writing in fragments, writing in really vivid little pieces.

In order to make these very disparate books come together, I found this darning thread all the way through.

Miller: I imagine it also gave you the chance to be a version of the omniscient voice we were talking about before. And there are other bits of it you play with time in fascinating ways. There’s a short story, Dogs Go Wolf, it’s sort of this claustrophobic story about these two girls who were left on this island in Florida. And then out of nowhere near the end, I don’t think this gives anything away, but there’s a flash forward decades into the future, which is breathtaking. And then we go back to the island. What’s it like to be God like that?

Groff: Ha ha, oh no.

Miller: To play with time in that way, and to be able to step aside from what you’re creating to be the ultimate creator of these worlds?

Groff: Well, the beautiful thing when one is a writer is that one is working with the bluntest human instruments, words. And the most capacious human instrument as well, which is time. We’re making sculptures of words and time together. That’s what a work of literature is. So you have the leeway to do anything you possibly want to do when it comes to both words and time. And I love these flash forwards, and these flash backwards, at very discrete moments because it does sort of spin the reader out of this one plane that they think that they’re in, to a totally separate different plane. And so now the text is sort of singing in two voices, like a Tuvan throat singer. And that’s what you want to do, you want to sing in multiple voices. I want to sing in multiple voices.

So something that I get out of reading Greek stories especially, not just Greek plays, but the mythology, is this idea that there are multiple planes of time existing all at the same time. So there’s the mortal plane, where people live, die, they get a spear thrown into their eyeballs, and they’re sent down to Hades. But there’s also the timeframe of the gods, which is much longer because they’re gods. They’re sitting there up there and on Mount Olympus, putting their fingers in the human pie and then watching their beloveds die.

But then there’s a third layer, and the third layer is the reader’s layer, which is beyond even the gods’ layer, because we’re coming at it from millennia later. And we’re able to be there in these separate realms of time. But the writer’s time is one step further than the reader’s time, even. So the writer’s watching the reader, the writer is watching the gods, and the writer’s watching the mortals, and we can just spin all of these different layers together and make a sculpture out of that.

Miller: Let’s take one more question, What’s your name, and go ahead.

Aiden: Hello, my name is Aiden. One of the things that I noted about your writing is that you use very unique and specific descriptions of people, situations, actions, and things. Some examples are: from Delicate Edible Birds is “fleshed with a layer of smooth lard, firm and handy as a steering wheel.” Or “head as ugly as a buckshot pumpkin.” I guess my question is, where do you get inspiration from to form these extremely unique and sometimes oddly specific descriptions of things?

Groff: Thanks Aiden. I think often when you get to the final draft, you’re doing your best to rid yourself of as many cliches as possible, or you’re doing your best to to surprise the reader, because that’s one of the great beauties of being able to write is taking these moments and then having a metaphor or a simile or something that that actually shocks the reader out of complacency. And my hope would be there’s at least something on every page that sort of makes readers sit up straight and be like “what is happening here?”

Some narratives you do want the pour over, you want the feeling like you’re entirely enveloped in this writerly consciousness. I’m thinking of Ernest Hemingway here, where you’re just sort of carried along. And then sometimes you want more of a Faulknerian experience, where every other sentence you’re sort of thrown out of it by the weirdness of what’s happening. And I think you want to tailor the sentences to the story being told. So if it’s somewhat of a weird story, then maybe you want weirder sentences or weirder similes and metaphors.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our amazing audience here. What’s your name?

Nathaniel Tripp-Folsom: Hi, I’m Nathaniel Tripp-Folsom, and it’s really cool to hear that you’re reading around 300 books and writing every day. But that brought me to the question, what’s the most controversial thing you wanted to write, but you couldn’t publish?

Groff: That’s an amazing question. By the way, you can’t see, but Nathaniel’s wearing the most amazing hat. It’s very, very cool.

Okay, so this is a fascinating question. Ostensibly, as an artist, you don’t necessarily want to censor yourself. But you have to live in the world, and you can’t actually hurt people. It’s immoral to hurt people. So I have written multiple things that I have looked at after I’ve written them, and thought “oh God, this could never go into the world or else I will be the subject of a lot of hate mail.” I do have to say that early on in my career, I wrote some things that were family stories, and I wrote about people that I loved, and I was not kind. And I hadn’t actually checked with them before I did it. So I hurt them very badly. And I think that that’s a line that we all tread when we’re writing from personal experience. And in the beginning I thought “well, I’m a writer, I’m allowed to do whatever I want.” But I actually am not allowed to do whatever I want. I can’t hurt my people. I can’t make them feel bad. I can’t write something that’s so offensive that I’m going to be boycotted and picketed. It’s not okay to do that. There are deep morals in writing.

So I let myself write whatever I want to write, no matter what it is. I don’t have to publish that. I think the censorship comes in at the publishing angle. And I genuinely do not publish even 90% of what I write, so it’s totally fine for that to go back into the compost heap.

Miller: How have you come to think about the ways to take elements of your life and the lives of people around you, and use real things that have happened, and tweaking them? I’m wondering how much tweaking you think is necessary if you are going to use your own life and the lives around you has some version of fodder?

Groff: Yeah. A lot of tweaking, I think. It comes later, it comes in the editing process or in the self-editing process. I can also give the people I love the stories that are about them, and see what they think and if it’s okay.

Miller: Do you do that?

Groff: I do do it sometimes. I do have to say there’s someone in my life very, very dear to me whose story I had been struggling to tell for 25 years. And it was their story. It wasn’t my story. And I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do it until I made it into my story also. And then I eventually showed it to them, and they were okay with it. But I think often people feel almost a little bit as though you’ve murdered their soul, if you take them wholesale from life and you replicate them in fiction.

Miller: I’m reminded that there is a scene in Fates and Furies that’s sort of like this, where one of the characters, the husband, I take him at his word, I think he truly forgets that a sad story that happened to his wife, he thinks it happened to him. He tells it in a radio interview. And she is furious, for good reason.

Groff: If you ever do end up living with a fiction writer, they will steal your stories and call them their own. I’ve done this to my own husband many many times. I’ve been telling a story and I’m like “Oh wait, actually it was Clay this happened to, 20 years before I even met him.”

Miller: Do you find that the people in your life, because of the history you’re talking about, that they’re wary of you in some ways?

Groff: Oh, for sure. My children are wary of me. I have a 14 year old and I have an 11 year old. The 14 year old refuses to read anything that I’ve written. The 11 year old, he glories in the idea that he is in my work and he will read it. The 14 year old, he can’t bear it. It’s the worst thing that could happen to him.

Miller: Because it’s humiliating to have his life bared, potentially?

Groff: Yeah, I think it’s really intimate. It’s intimate to be written about. And I’ve never said anything terrible about him. In fact, he comes across as a very beautiful person, which he is. But it’s almost too much. He’s a very delicate human. He’s almost skinless in some ways. And so I try very hard not to write about him anymore because I don’t want to hurt him.

Miller: Let’s take another question. What’s your name?

Hayden Hardy: Yeah, I’m Hayden Hardy. I know working in the arts, you receive a lot of criticism. I know that as a musician. It could be from parents or friends or people close to you, your mentor, your Master Oogway. And I was wondering what has been the most important piece of criticism that you’ve received for you?

Groff: This is a great question. You know too that if you’re working in the arts, you have to build a second self. And the second self is the one that is okay with the criticism. There’s the artist, who is as vulnerable as a slug. And you have to keep the artist that vulnerable in order to make the art. And then there is the person who’s public facing, and that person is very different. That person has to be tough, tough, tough.

So the best piece of criticism I ever got. I went to grad school in my mid twenties to write fiction. It was a creative writing course, an MFA. And before then I had written three novels, thousands of short stories, nothing ever worked out. I finally got to grad school and I have this incredible mentor, her name is Lorrie Moore, she’s a great writer, very funny, you would all love her work. And I was writing at the time ersatz Lorrie Moore stories, I was writing worse renditions of her own stories. And I did not want to give her one of these, because it was embarrassing. So I wrote this story that was in the opposite direction. It was a piece of historical fiction. I gave it to her, and she doesn’t like historical fiction. So she told me “this is great! Now put it away and write something else.”

And I believed in this story. I believed that it was good enough to be seen by the world. So I think the best piece of criticism was actually the one that made me realize that I have these bells in my head, and I have to listen very carefully, because the bells tell me when the thing that I’ve written is good and worthy. It’s a little bit of a subversive lesson that I took from that, that maybe not even people that I worship don’t always know if my work is good. But I have to know.

Miller: What gave you that bravery or sense of self, that backbone? You were young, and you were getting this feedback from somebody you really respected. It takes a lot to say I respect you still, but I believe in myself, and I believe in this thing I made.”

Groff: You know, I had failed so many times. And again, I’m reclaiming the word failure because I actually think it’s very, very healthy for an artist to embrace that. I’d failed so much up to that point. You learn slowly why the things that you’ve done are not quite up to scratch. And I started to get more of a sense why it wasn’t approaching the platonic ideal that I was working toward. I think that it wasn’t so much backbone as I had worked all I had worked very hard for a really long time, and I understood. I understood that it was good. And I wasn’t believing in myself, I was believing in the work. I think that’s the difference. That’s also another thing about taking criticism, is that the work is the thing in the world, not me. The work is the thing getting the praise, the work is the thing, getting the criticism. I have to be okay with that because everything I do is different. The next book is going to be different, and I’m not going to judge that work by what had happened before.

Miller: Here’s another question from our audience. What’s your name?

Connor Lanusse: Hi, I’m Connor Lanusse. I read your story Enunciation, and I noticed that it was written in paragraphs instead of what I see to be the more traditional paragraph and then it has the dialogue separated. You wrote it with the dialogue into it. And I wondered what made you choose to do it that way?

Groff: This is a great question. This is one of these questions that I get a lot. There’s a tradition in short stories, particularly American short stories, where dialogue is not offset by quote marks. And I think it drives some people crazy, because they’re used to the offset quote marks. I am always reaching for texture when I’m trying to finish a story. The latter parts of the storytelling, when I’m into the language. And I’m trying to figure out what the texture is, and how close I want the reader to hold the story to their face. And I find, without quote marks or offset dialogue, the reader’s impression of the work is much closer to the face. You have to pay more attention. Even when you look at the words on the page, they look different, because the texture is more condensed into a single paragraph. It’s all a textural idea.

I also was a poet before I was a fiction writer. And in poetry, you have to pay attention to space, you have to pay attention to the way that the poem looks on the page. It’s really important to the reading of the work itself. I play with that. That’s just one of the lessons from poetry that we can all steal.

Miller: One of the pleasures of the last two novels is that in each one, one of the main characters is themselves a major creator, in some ways almost a superhuman creator. Marie makes, either with her own labor or her ability to gather people to carry through in her visions, she remakes this entire abbey. And Lotto in the earlier novel, he writes play after play after play in a sort of relentless way. There’s a line about Marie’s exulting in her creations that really stood out to me, this is what you wrote:

“Of her own mind and hands she has shifted the world. She’s made something new. This feeling is the thrill of creation. It jolts through her, dangerous and alive.”

What’s the dangerous part that she’s feeling?

Groff: It may harken back to what you were asking about before about God. I think that there is this feeling when you make something out of your own mind that maybe, is in some ways, sacrilegious, because you’re creating out of whole cloth something new. And so maybe there is a heady feeling of being a mini god. Like a tiny god.

Miller: She’s a nun, although she’s not not really a particularly religious person at first, but she has to be a nun to do what she’s doing. Do you feel that too, some version of the sacrilegious?

Groff: Oh, heck yes.

Miller: Do you think of yourself as religious?

Groff: Well see, this is a big question. I was religious growing up. I was a very devout young child. And then I, through literature, became a very anti-dogmatic humanist. But I believe they all come from the same source, this desire to come closer to the ineffable, to the mysteries, and to what I think people who do believe call God. It’s just a different name for this awe, this wonder, and even this rage. So I do think that there is something very arrogant in creation. And I do think that that arrogance is necessary to make anything. It doesn’t mean that you think that you are God, but it does mean that there is this heady brushing up against the mystery.

Miller: I wonder if you could read from Matrix. This is after Marie has had her nuns in the abbey, she’s the leader of this abbey at this point. And she’s created this ingenious and elaborate labyrinth as one more way to wall off the young women and old women in her care from the outside world, including from men. And after the labyrinth is completed, she goes through it for the first time herself, and she gets lost, and then she finds her way and is excited about what she’s done. There’s more to it, but that’s sort of in the immediate preamble to what you’re gonna read, if you don’t mind.

Groff: “What she does not see behind her is the disturbance her nuns have left in the forest, the families of squirrels, of dormice, of voles, of badgers, of stoats who have been chased in confusion from their homes, the trees felled that held green woodpeckers, the pine martens, the mistle thrushes and the long-tailed tits, the woodcocks and capercaillies chased from their nests, the willow warbler vanished in panic from these lands for the time being; it will take a half century to lure these tiny birds back. She sees only the human stamp upon the place. She considers it good.”

Miller: I was struck by that paragraph because I guess I’ve come to think about the human impact on the world as being so much about modernity and about the industrial revolution and about internal combustion. And I would have thought about human life 1000 years ago as basically being some kind of idyllic prelapse world, where we lived in harmony with nature because we didn’t have the technology to mess things up. What are you getting at in this paragraph?

Groff: This is hilarious because that is actually one of the impulses behind Matrix. I do think wherever there’s humans, there’s climate change. It’s just the nature of human beings that we will change the climate wherever we are. If you build a fire in the wilderness, you are engaging in climate change. Our primordial ancestors, prehistory, were engaged in the process of climate change. This book, and the next one, and a third that I’m working on now, I see in a very loose triptych. Not a trilogy, because they’re very different in terms of time and style and voice. But they’re all engaged with this idea about how we got to where we are now in the anthropocene, teetering on the cusp of absolutely catastrophic climate change. And I would say it has a lot to do with Western religion, and this denial that humans are changing the climate.

For instance, in Genesis there’s this moment where God is telling Adam and Eve “I give you dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the skies.” And it’s a very beautiful moment. But I think we have bastardized this. We have changed this idea of dominion, which is an idea of nurturing, of caring, of creation, of almost maternal care for the earth, into an idea of domination. And this idea of domination means that we have now the Great Pacific Trash Gyre which is the size of Texas. It’s a lack of care, and it’s the denial of humans’ greed and overconsumption. And overconsumption did not happen 30 years ago, it started with humans, and it has spread through religious means, I think.

Miller: How do you see your role as a novelist in something as immense, people have called it a hyper object, climate change, something so big and vast that we can’t fully wrap our heads around it. How do you deal with that? What’s your job as a novelist that you set out for yourself?

Groff: It’s definitely not to be a polemicist. I think polemical art is the worst possible art.

Miller: What does that mean?

Groff: Polemical art is sort of work that says “pay attention to this because it’s really important, and you need to change the world” And I think that that can be a subtext, that could be something that sort of gently threaded through. But I do think our job is to pay attention, and to understand how we got to where we are. Not to answer the questions, polemical art answers the questions. But real art actually asks questions. It’s not to change people. It’s to make people aware, to make people think.

Miller: What role does anger play in your writing process, anger at the way the world has been, and still is in many ways?

Groff: I’m a very angry person, which you can tell, right? My kids will tell you I am. I know I am. I’m full of rage, and full of-what is “rage but disappointment”? A continuous hope that people be better than they are, and continuous disappointment in the fact that they’re not?

I actually find rage to be purifying. I find it to be a beautiful emotion. I find it to be more like a laser than any other emotion that I have. Love is warm and it’s pervasive, it’s like being in a bathtub. But with rage you can actually write harder, and more.

Miller: When you laser, I think of focus.

Groff: Yeah, exactly. It’s more of a focused idea. You can write out of love, and I have many times, and I do also. It’s not one or the other, it’s both at the same time. But rage focuses me very, very intensely.

Miller: Let’s take more questions. What’s your name?

Lucy Shields: My name is Lucy Shields. You said in an interview once “I’ve been thinking a lot about this, in work and life: it’s psychologically easier to live if you believe you have an exit plan.” I noticed while reading Watershed and the Wife of the Dictator in particular, that the female characters are left with no exit plan at the end of their stories. Is this a coincidence, or was it intentional to have the characters live a psychologically harder life with no way out?

Groff: Wow, what a question. Nobody’s ever asked me that before, that’s incredible.

There’s always an exit plan, just to get dark. But I do have to say, when you trap a character into what feels like an enclosed space without any exit, you’re gonna start to get a real sense of who that character is. If you have to write anything ever, just put a few people in an elevator that can’t open up, and you’ll start to see the way that these characters actually are and who they are. In Matrix I have this character who is trapped in an abbey and she can never get out. So what can you do? What is the next step? What is the question that she’s going to be asking herself? And it is, for this character, “fine, then how do I make the world bigger here? How do I make this place actually livable for me here?” And I think that is the question that a lot of my characters are actually asking themselves, “how do I live in this unlivable situation?”

Miller: We can squeeze in one more question, go ahead.

Layla Carey: Hi, I’m Layla Carey. And in some of your work that I read, I noticed that you often don’t name your characters. And I was wondering if there’s a reasoning behind that?

Groff: I’m playing with a number of different forms of writing sometimes. And in fables, almost no characters are ever named. And then in fairy tales, a lot of times characters are not named. And you sometimes want that mythical secondary feeling added to this story, this feeling like this is a story that’s older than the story itself, this is a story harkening back to deeper stranger stories that sort of make up our common understanding of the narrative world.

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