Live from Word of South: Lauren Groff talks Time 100, her new bookstore, and Florida!

[00:00:00] ANNE BOGEL: I love short stories. I just don't actually read them.

LAUREN GROFF: Okay. Yeah. Well, then you don't love them.

ANNE: Hey readers, I'm Anne Bogel and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that's dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? We don't get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read.

This week we're sharing our third of three wonderful live events from my recent travels to the southeastern U.S. Today is my conversation with Lauren Groff at Tallahassee's Word of South Festival.

Readers, if you love being among book people, then you are going to love today's episode, and you'll also love our Patreon community. We create weekly bonus episodes that keep our patrons close to the pulse of what's happening in the book world.

[00:01:00] May is Summer Reading Guide Month, and we have tons of bonus bookish goodness related to this year's guide there, like great books I didn't include in the guide and why, and a dedicated mini matchmaking session that pairs patrons with their perfect Summer Reading Guide titles.

When you join Patreon, you also unlock our historic bonus episodes. Lauren and I cover a lot of ground today. If our conversation about writing about the intersection of humans and nature sparks your interest, you might especially enjoy a few of our Patreon bonus episodes from our team's passionate outdoor adventure readers, like my husband Will, and team member Holly.

In fact, Will just shared a bonus episode earlier this month featuring his current favorite outdoor and adventure books. In response, our patrons loaded him up with so many good suggestions for what he may enjoy reading next.

Patrons support our show with monthly or annual subscriptions. You may have heard the podcasting industry is bonkers right now. It's hard for podcasters. And we are so grateful to our patrons for financially supporting the work we do here.

Your subscriptions make it possible to pay our team, and we are so grateful. Thank you for making it possible for us to do what we do through Patreon.

[00:02:05] If you're curious, if you enjoy our show, we invite you to check out our Patreon community at patreon.com/whatshouldireadnext.

Readers, today I'm excited to share my recent live conversation with Lauren Groff at Word of South. Lauren's books are regular favorites on this podcast, and I know many of you were excited to hear about her new bookstore, The Lynx, that she just opened in Gainesville, Florida, which was inspired in part by the increase in book bans in Lauren's home state.

Word of South was uniquely timed to catch Lauren at a big, big moment. She was just back from the Time 100 dinner, her Gainesville bookstore was opening the very next day, the Taylor Swift song, Florida, dropped the week before, and we talk about the Florence Welch connection.

Those milestone events are fascinating to hear about. Plus, we explore a whole host of scintillating readerly topics in our conversation, like the intersection of music and writing, to learning to love art, to exploring stereotypes in real life and on the page.

[00:03:03] We hear Lauren's perspectives on poetry, short stories, and the novel. Then we dig into Lauren's writing process and why she's been so inspired to write stories that investigate our relationships with nature and the feminine.

Of course, we talk more about The Lynx, the book she's recommending lately, and Lauren's goals for her new independent bookstore. I think you'll love listening in. Let's get to it.

LAUREN: Hello! I just have to say before we start, Happy Independent Bookstore Day! [inaudible 00:03:40] reader is fantastic. I want all of you to spend all of your money there. So, we love our independent bookstores. They're the heart of the city. We love them. All right. Sorry. I just hijacked the whole thing. Go for it.

ANNE: You're opening a bookstore. You can't be sorry for Independent Bookstore Day.

LAUREN: You're right. I'm actually not sorry.

ANNE: All right. I feel like we should break out the glitter cannons, except we'd never be invited back. But we are really casting you at a moment.

[00:04:10] So I'm going to quote something profound that you wrote on Instagram. "This week has been fire." Okay, that was a week ago, but seriously, this is a moment.

So we could talk about any number of things, like your brilliant works, we have so many to choose from, your poetry writing, your prestigious posting you just finished in Berlin, like lots of things. But we're going to talk basically about what's happened extremely lately and right now. It's going to be great.

LAUREN: Oh yeah, great. Go ahead.

ANNE: Let's start with the Time 100. So you just did some really fancy stuff. I hope Red, if not, find it later, and packed its introduction of you. Welcome to the Time 100. You just went to New York to do all kinds of fancy things. But now you're back in Florida with your people and we want to know all about it.

LAUREN: Okay, well it's super fun. So Dua Lipa was there and she brushed by my husband's shoulder and he almost fell down. I almost fell down too because I love her.

[00:05:11] ANNE: Just so you know, these are the details for the book.

LAUREN: These are the details. No, I thought so. Yeah, it was a very weird event. I mean, it was kind of great, but it was also very strange. I mean, we were up in Siberia with all the unfamous people, and all the famous people were down next to the stage. So it was great because we were looking down from the gods, right, into the celebrities. The pit of celebrities was amazing.

No, I love being a writer at these things, because you're sitting next to other writers and activists, and you talk amongst yourselves, and you say the most amazing things. It's really fun.

ANNE: What is Time 100 [inaudible 00:05:43]?

LAUREN: Oh, it was really lovely. That's about it. I got to buy a great dress.

ANNE: That's not nothing.

LAUREN: That's not nothing. Who knows? I mean, it's really for the bookstore and so I really felt that I was accepting it on behalf of the whole effort and community that went into making the bookstore. So many people were part of the Indiegogo. And I'm grateful that every single one of them.

[00:06:08] So many people in my community have actually donated their time and expertise to help build this bookstore. I feel like I'm the figurehead of this juggernaut that has very little when they have very little to do with me, and it's there in order to spread the light of tolerance.

We have a mission which is to fight against the spread of authoritarianism by celebrating and uplifting the books that are being challenged and banned in the state of Florida, by loving the people who write these LGBTQI incredible books that are now being squelched, by loving the teachers and the librarians who are being chilled.

One of my greatest friends is this fifth-grade teacher in Gainesville, and she used to teach the Holocaust by teaching the Art Spiegelman book, Maus, which is such an amazing book, and now she's afraid to do it. She's afraid that some Karen is going to come in and make her lose her job.

[00:07:10] So it's not just the books actually actively being challenged, it's the sort of freeze and the spread of terror that's happening and contingent. And we want to push back against that.

ANNE: We're gonna talk more about the full story.

LAUREN: Okay. But first.

ANNE: The great week continues. So we are here at Word of South, which is a really unique event in that it brings together artists and musicians, and there's this interplay between the written word and music that you don't see in a lot of places, which brings us obviously to Florence Welch.

In light of a very popular album that came out last week, there was reason for you, again, here I am quoting Instagram, to write a little ode to Florence Welch on Instagram last week. You told her that she was your personal... No, yeah, yeah, yeah. You said of Florence Welch, "my personal queen, whose music has been my companion for many years."

[00:08:10] So Lauren, we know you as an esteemed writer who champions and celebrates the work of other artists. I just want to invite you to say more about Florence Welch, but also like who are the musicians who inspire you, who are your companions, and what do they mean to your writing life?

LAUREN: So just to contextualize, Taylor Swift had this great album out last week. Some songs are amazing. One of their most amazing songs is called Florida!. Florida, exclamation point. And in it, Florence Welch just blows everyone out of the water with her extraordinary voice. She's Florence the Machine, and she's really the machine.

We have a mutual friend who's given her all of my books. And I knew that he was doing this because I would sign them for her. But I didn't know she actually read them until about last week when that song came out.

ANNE: You didn't know?

LAUREN: I didn't. I didn't really know.

ANNE: Did you die?

LAUREN: Well, let me say it, and then I'll say I died. Yeah. So she put on Instagram that when Taylor asked her to be on this track, she thought of my book. And it's a short story collection, which like, you know, you're told nobody ever reads, and it was so glorious that someone actually read it, and it was her. So I really did that.

[00:09:29] Then it came back to life, and I wrote about it on all social media, which is one of those.

ANNE: That's the only possible option.

LAUREN: Right? I know, yeah. So I do, I love her. This past summer, I listened to her last album, which is called Dance Fever on repeat. It's such an amazing album. It's good to dance to when you're feeling sad. But I listened. So when I'm writing, I can't actually listen to anything with words that I understand, because they make it into the work.

I listen to a lot of Arvo Pärt, who's this incredible Estonian composer. I listen to a lot of Sigur Rós, who are these Icelandic people who sing in this angelic pseudo-language. It's amazing. And I listen to a lot of classical music.

So I really like the formal conventions of classical music because I started as a formal poet. I really enjoy the way that structure happens in classical music. And you can sort of sense it and you can watch it unfolding in a really incredible way. So these are the things that I like to listen to when I'm actually working.

[00:10:30] But art is this extraordinary thing because the more art you take into yourself, the better your own art is going to be. It just enriches even the stuff that you think that you don't like. If you sit long enough with it, if you pay it enough attention, and of course attention it's often love, if you come at it with an open heart and generosity, then it will feed you in ways that you don't even know.

So everywhere I go, when I'm on the floor, I try to go to a museum because I want to take beauty into myself and I want to take ideas into myself, I want to change the way that I think, I want to change the way that I am. Everywhere you go, you can find art. And it can be graffiti. It can be, you know, $8 billion, you know, Monet artwork, right?

It doesn't have to be high art. But as long as you're constantly paying attention to the way that humans are responding to their world and to other people with attention and love and passion, I think that that will feed the work that you do.

[00:11:37] ANNE: I'm reminded of how you were talking about Gainesville's art scene this morning.

LAUREN: Yeah. When I first got there 18 years ago, it was a much smaller town, but I also was a recluse and I never left the house. So I didn't really know how extraordinary Gainesville was and how it's really a punk town, right? It's really iconoclastic, it's really oppositional in the best way. And so there is art everywhere there.

Some of it, I had to learn to love, right? Some of it, I didn't respond to it in an aesthetic way whatsoever. And I probably still don't, but I'm much more open to it, I think.

ANNE: Yeah. Okay, so Florence Welch in your book, Florida. Tell us about Florida.

LAUREN: Wait, Florida the state?

ANNE: You know, that's a good question. I asked it and I wondered. Yeah, tell us about Florida state. Let's back up and say this differently. I mentioned that you just had that position, that posting in Berlin. So you've had the experience recently of being away from your state and coming back to see it perhaps with more perspective. But you tell us.

[00:12:47] LAUREN: Well, yeah. I had this beautiful hosting for six months at the American Academy in Berlin. It was magnificent, and I got to take my family, which is so fun. The only thing that I was required to do was give a lecture, and that was just one lecture, and then I could just gallivant around and go to nightclubs that I was way too old for, which is so much fun.

So we did. We were gone for a while, and we did come back. I would have assumed that Gainesville would have felt much smaller after Berlin, but actually, weirdly it didn't, because I know so many more people. And it's really about the people you know and the universe of the people that you know that matters.

And so I did feel as though I was coming back into maybe a slightly more expanded universe, even though we have one-millionth of the museums and the symphonies and all of the things that one would think culture is. We have a different kind of culture. I was so appreciative in a way that I've never been before.

[00:13:48] Also, as soon as we got back, we started planning for this bookstore, so maybe that's part of it, too. I haven't slept in six months whatsoever.

ANNE: I know that Florida isn't one thing. Florida contains multitudes. And yet I imagine that you can perceive the new Florida, and perceive what people get wrong about the state in the outside.

LAUREN: Yeah, well you live in Kentucky, what do you think about that?

ANNE: Oh, that's not where I thought that was going. I was thinking that... Y'all, I mean, of course, people make the jokes about wearing shoes, but to me, I feel like I come from a place also where people get us wrong and understand us as a monolith. I'm interested in hearing about your Florida.

LAUREN: Okay. Oh no, so you just turned it back on me. I'm from the North. I'm from Cooperstown, New York, which is a very tiny little village, very isolated, even more isolated when I grew up there because my mom wouldn't let us watch TV. And we didn't have a movie theater. It was a one-stoplight town.

[00:15:00] We had to take a bus 30 minutes to go, you know, do anything.

ANNE: I'm from Kentucky and this sounds like a country song.

LAUREN: Yeah, it's kind of a country song. It's also the most perfect place to grow up if you want to be in an idol as a child. We didn't lock our doors. My parents kept it to the ignition. I mean, it was very idyllic. Except for when the Billiards fans came and then they camped out on our lawn and that was no fun. Because, you know, [baseball league]? is there.

But anyway, so my impression of Florida before I got here was incredibly stereotypical. I thought it was Disney and Spring break, basically. And then old people in Miami Beach. That's it. That's all. Those are the impressions that the media feeds to people.

[00:15:52] Then as social media started coming into its own, you start to get the weird stories. The Sunshine State laws have been very deleterious to our states because basically anyone who does anything wrong and gets arrested for it, it goes in the newspapers.

So suddenly, all of these things are searchable, and Florida has become the butt of the joke. It's a weird place where people underpasses each other's faces. That was one. So Florida Man is happening. I think I internalized a lot of this snobbery. Like every other bias that I grew up with, I internalized this, and I reflected it back to Florida. And I didn't like the state for the first number of years that I lived here.

But of course, the job of someone who does the work that I do is to try to take what could be on the surface stereotypical and try to sort of blow layers into it and try to find a way to make it go from this to like something very expansive and different and unusual, shadowed, subtle.

[00:17:09] So when I started actually paying attention to Florida, I started reading books by Floridians. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was the first person who taught me to love Florida, actually, even though she was kind of a carpetbagger as well.

But she loved Florida, and she loved the nature, and she wrote so spectacularly about it that I found myself moved. I would go for these long runs in Paynes Prairie up in Gainesville, and [liking?] me at the sight of the [inaudible 00:17:43] and really... Who doesn't? They're really beautiful. Hey, yes.

Like the alligators, right, everything, like the nature of the state began to sort of feed me. And then we started building a community. You know, I see all of the stereotypes in this place. Some of them are true because stereotypes don't come out of nowhere, they come out of something.

[00:18:07] But I think the job of people who live in places like this and try to make art about it is to kind of blow those stereotypes up or lean in so hard you get to the other side of them, right? So that's what I've been trying to do in my work about Florida. So I love this place, yeah. It's very rich for the creative writer for sure.

ANNE: Good material.

LAUREN: Good material, yes.

ANNE: Okay. So with that as context, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the collection.

LAUREN: On my own collection?

ANNE: Your own collection.

LAUREN: Oh, I like it.

ANNE: On Florida. Okay, so, of all your work, Florida was the one that I had not yet read because Lauren... that's a short story collection.

LAUREN: I love short stories! No, don't say that.

ANNE: I love that. What do you love about... I mean, I love short stories.

LAUREN: Okay.

ANNE: But you can read them anytime, you know? Like, they're always there waiting for you, accessible. So they never get read in my house.

LAUREN: Okay.

[00:19:09] ANNE: So thank you all for giving me a reason. I enjoyed visiting it so much. The ones I hadn't already read and out was like the New Yorker. So this is fresh in my mind. It's not freshly published for you. So now 2024, how do you describe this collection to people when they ask?

LAUREN: Oh, nobody's asked. I love short stories and we're going to have a fight right now.

ANNE: Let's just fight. What do you love about them? I love short stories, I just don't actually read them.

LAUREN: Okay, well, then you don't love them. I just spent two years reading for the big anthologies. Last year I read for the O. Henry Prize anthology. This year I read for the Best American Short Story anthology. So I don't know if anyone has read more, other than Heidi Pitlor, and my beautiful friend, the O. Henry Prize, has read more contemporary short stories than I have in the past two years.

[00:20:14] My eyes are spinning with the short story. I'm going to now embark on a rousing, rousing defense of the short story, for me. The short story can do many, many things that the novel cannot do. It is much, much tighter.

The novel is famously Henry James' loose-bagging monster, but the short story is on a small canvas. So everything has to be taught as a drone. Every word has to make sense. So in some ways, it's closer to poetry than it is to a novel, which is more of a flow of, you know, refrain music.

The short story is sung in a minor key. The novel is sung in a major key. So I think sometimes when people resist them, they don't want to feel the minority aspect of it, but it's musical. It's a musical difference between the short story and the novel.

I love the short story because you can experiment profoundly with them, and they are far more experimental, I think, than the vast majority of literary fiction novels that are in the world because of the thickness of the space.

[00:21:22] So formal engagement, in terms of poetic engagement or sculptural engagement, is so much more apparent and deep in the short story. So, this is all, this is it. My particular collection, Florida, is my second collection of short stories, and I feel like every one of those stories came out of... it was an eruption in a certain way.

A novel for me is something that is written out of patience and daily application. It's a marriage, right? It's sort of something that you wake up with and live within. A short story for me lives in the back of my head for years if not decades, and then one day it'll fall in front of my eyes because it's hit something else and I have to write it. So in some ways it's much more urgent, it's not my daily companion. It is my... like a passion. It's a passion thing.

[00:22:21] For me, this question I look at it and I see individual shining points of maybe a constellation, whereas in a novel you see just sort of the whole riverine sweep of the thing, right, so this dark water sort of flowing by.

I can't actually compare because I actually think they're not similar in terms of artistic intention whatsoever, and the short story collection is far closer to the poetry collection than it is to the novel. Everyone read short stories. Can I just say one more thing?

ANNE: Yeah.

LAUREN: Okay, so I did read tens of thousands of short stories over the past two years, and I love them, but I do have to say, 90% of the short stories I read were in the first person, right? First-person, which is fine. It's one of the three that we have.

[00:23:22] But there's something about society that's making this happen over and over again. And I have two hypotheses. They're not theories because they can't be proven. But the hypothesis one is solipsism, right? Like we're all just like deeply engaged in our own navels. But that's cynical and I don't actually believe that.

I do believe that there has been such an erosion in authority and our desire to believe in authority with the media, with the secularization of society, with all sorts of ways that authority has been dissolving, that the only authority that we actually now feel confident in is the authority of the self. This is the one thing that we can actually pinpoint.

That said, if you read tens of thousands of first-person stories, like everyone is saying... there are tens of thousands of people singing, all right, and it's like it's impossible to sort of parse one voice from the others. Even the most experimental and interesting ones somehow get a little bit lost in it.

[00:24:35] So I just want to encourage if there are writers in the room, maybe play around with a third person, a little bit more. Or the second. That's fine. I don't want the second person. It'd be a relief to read a second-person story.

ANNE: That's fascinating. What in the world?

LAUREN: I know. Who knows?

ANNE: I love your hypothesis.

LAUREN: Yeah, thank you. It can't be proven. Who knows why this is happening? But the first person's great. Just find a way to make it new. Find a way to make it novel. Find a way to sound not like anyone else. Like, blow up the expectations that come from the first person's story, and that's an interesting story.

ANNE: I just realized why I don't read short stories. No, I didn't mean that. I just meant I realized that they're not as useful to me in my work.

LAUREN: What do you mean?

ANNE: Maybe they're not... This is what I do, recommend books all the time. Not as many people want them.

LAUREN: You can recommend short story collections.

ANNE: I'm about to start, I think. I keep buying them. They're all there waiting for me.

LAUREN: Okay, great.

[00:25:37] ANNE: All right. All right. Thank you, Florida, for getting me on a roll. I did have the pleasure of visiting this connection recently, and gosh, some of the language you chose just really stopped me cold. Like, I always think of your Spanish moss being gorgeous and elegant and... You compared it to armpit hair.

LAUREN: But it's just like in the streets, right?

ANNE: Discuss... Oh, it's perfect. It's perfect. Which is another reason I went... Talk to me about choosing words to describe your... I mean, the world that you wanted to convey obviously contains so much and so many contradictions. Also just really... I didn't know what I expected until you gave me something else.

LAUREN: Good.

ANNE: Yeah.

LAUREN: I think, and this is another hypothesis, I'm full of them, right? And I can't prove any of them. But another thing that I think about... the reason the South is looked down upon is because it has primarily feminine or stereotypically feminine characteristics. It's sultry, it's hot, it's becomes, it's damp, right? And so a lot of the things that we describe it as... we also describe women in a bad way, in a misogynistic way.

[00:27:07] So I actually think that maybe our reaction to the South, through the sensual nature of the South, the somatic nature of the South, is slightly tinged or mutually tinged with misogyny as well. I think in some ways, I was trying to sort of reach for the feminine aspects of the world that I was writing about, the Floridian world that I was writing about, and actually make it sensual, like make it physically there.

I'm a writer who is in love with a pathetic fallacy in a very real way. So John Ruskin, who's this great art critic and writer from the 19th century, sort of identified the pathetic fallacy as a writer using nature to talk about the emotional aspects of what's happening in the characters. And I do that a lot.

But one of the ways that I tend to lean on the pathetic fallacy when it comes to Florida is bringing in these details that sort of bring everything back to the body, and particularly the feminine body. And so if you look at Florida, even if you look at the Delicate Edible Birds, which was in my previous collection also, everything is circling around this idea of femininity.

[00:28:28] In that book, it's slightly different. But in this one there are a lot of stories about being a relatively young mother and being very angry. And the world itself is angry in that book.

ANNE: You mentioned nature. That's been a huge theme in your work for a long time. Oh gosh. Nature is out to get you in that collection. The way you write about the weather is stunning.

LAUREN: Well, no, nature is cathartic, right? The weather creates the big uproar and the spiritual change that needs to happen. I don't actually think it's out to get you. Yeah, no.

ANNE: It might kill you sometimes.

LAUREN: Well, I think that there's always this fear. There's fear and dread. And the fear and dread are coming from macro and micro directions. So it's hurricanes, of course, and the heat. The heat will kill you first, right? That's a great book.

But it's also the small things. We can see the termites coming out through the houses that will eat the houses. It's the cockroaches that will kill you because you have a heart attack in the middle of the night.

[00:29:37] My friend Laura Vandenberg is an amazing Florida writer. She has a great, great book coming out in July. She tells this story. She grew up near Orlando. And she tells this story where she went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and she... nothing felt right.

And she never usually turned on the light, but she turned on the light and she found like an eight-foot snake coiled in her toilet. And that's just Florida, right? I mean, she's like, "This is great. This is really exciting." Where did it come from? I don't know.

I do call it an Eden of dangerous things in the book. And I think it is. It's both things all at once. It's gorgeous. It is perfect. It's also going to eat you and kill you.

ANNE: Both things all at once. And it made me feel like an animal reading it.

LAUREN: Good.

ANNE: But I am just...

LAUREN: My job is making-

ANNE: I have no illusions of being higher on anything-

LAUREN: Oh, that's my job. That's what I want to do. This is my program. This is my project in all of my writing recently. And it's a response to climate change, to be perfectly honest. Can I talk about this? Because I'm really excited about it.

[00:30:50] Especially in The Vaster Wilds, this is my last book, I'm working really hard against the anthropocentric nature of narrative. And especially narrative as handed down from the Old Testament Bible, in which men are closest to God's ear and everything else is sort of in a cascading hierarchy down below it.

I think that this is an incredibly poisonous way to think about the world because it means that we are dominating, even when we try to enact dominion, right? And even in Genesis we are given dominion, Adam's given dominion over the fish of the sea, and [the birds of?] the air.

So recently, I've been trying to collapse the hierarchy by bringing my character's expectations and understanding of nature up to the force that it's immediate and bringing the human back down into the animal, which is what we are. We are animals, whether or not we fool ourselves into believing that we are animals.

[00:31:56] So if we see ourselves as equal to the whales, as equal even to the cockroaches that give us heart attacks in the middle of the night, then we could not possibly do to the world what we're doing to it. There's no way that we would be treating ancient forests the way that we're treating them if we saw them as our equals.

So this is very much in my every project that I've been doing recently, because it's imperative and it's urgent. And if we don't change the narrative, then we are doomed. And I have children and I know I'm doing it.

ANNE: Thank you. I love it. You have referred to your poetry writing several times.

LAUREN: Oh god, yes.

ANNE: What's that place in your life right now?

LAUREN: Oh it's private. I started as a poet and I really love formal poetry because I like the way it makes me have ideas I didn't know I have. Sometimes with prose the feeling when you're writing prose is you're getting deeper into ideas you already knew you had.

I mean there's this stuff that there's no surprise, that the surprise comes from going deeper as opposed to unveiling. Both poetry, especially formal poetry, because you're forced into these forms in these lines, suddenly you're given wildly disparate ideas and it's just a gift. It's a gift out of the form.

[00:33:22] I still write poetry. I'm not a good poet and I know it. I try really hard and I think I know what good poetry is because I read a great deal of it and I really admire poets. I put some poetry into the world that I think is good enough to be published but I would never put my own name on it. Because I'm a different person when I write poetry. I also don't want anyone knowing that that poem is mine. But I think it's good enough to be in the world.

ANNE: So you're not going to give up that pen name is what you're saying?

LAUREN: No.

ANNE: I love that for you. We experiment in our own ways.

LAUREN: Oh yeah.

ANNE: And you're doing it with a pen name.

LAUREN: It's all experimentation, right? It's all failure in the best way. If we look at our work as failure upon failure, it doesn't matter if it ends up succeeding at the end. Because what we're doing is we're intentionally courting the failure and we're letting the failure teach us to get to the point where we learn something, or we push against what we know, or we overcome our own fallibility and our own failures.

[00:34:39] So I love messing up. I think it's great. It's a good thing. I try to tell my children this, but they both do things that they don't really like. They don't like to be bad.

ANNE: I hope it helps that you try.

LAUREN: Well, I think I probably. No. I'm not... no, no. I force them to clean their rooms and things like that.

ANNE: We can commiserate about that later. I'm wondering if that attitude towards failure is that... gosh, I wish we had an hour to talk about your writing process because I know that there's a lot connected to that here. Is that something innate for you? Is that something you have to work your way into?

LAUREN: Okay, so for context, my process is very strange. I would never make anyone else do it or even suggest that you do it. But the way that I've worked with my own inabilities as a human is I write everything longhand, every draft until the very, very end. And then I write really fast drafts that get progressively slower and more interesting and intricate as I go along.

So for most of my novels, the first drafts will take place over the long hand of the course of maybe a month, maybe to four. One to four months. I spit it. I never reread it because I can't read my handwriting. And then I go, and then there's a gap, right? There's a gap between the end of that draft and the beginning of the next one. And in that gap, everything changes.

[00:36:03] All of the ideas that are alive live from one draft to the next. All the ideas that are dead are cast away with that draft. And then I do this again with a better understanding of the characters and the structure and the images that are going to live. And I do it as many times as necessary until I finally, with the last draft, can pay attention to the language, which is what I got into writing to do.

But until then, if I'm trying to juggle every aspect of the story all at once, then I will never write a book because it's just the overload and the tension and the pressure of getting everything right at once. By the time it gets to end, all I have to worry about is the words, right? And that's the best part of it. That's the desserts, right? That's the joy. All the rest has been built already.

So I began to do this because I have OCD. And if I write on a computer, I will never finish a page. If I write expecting the whole thing will be perfect as I'm writing it, I'll never finish anything either. So this is a way of intentionally breaking my own mind in order to get to something more interesting.

ANNE: I love it. Thank you for sharing.

LAUREN: Oh, sure. Of course.

[00:37:26] ANNE: All right, we got to talk about The Lynx. Okay, so tomorrow is a very big day.

LAUREN: Yes.

ANNE: Opening day for the store. First, I want to know, the idea of you opening a bookstore, I can imagine that perhaps this was inevitable. This was always going to be your story. I can see that maybe, times being what they are, it was circumstantial. Perhaps the answer is something else entirely and more interesting, but do tell.

LAUREN: Yeah, it's kind of both. So, my husband, his family had a bookstore since 1932 in Gainesville. It's called The Florida Bookstore, and anyone who went to UF probably bought their books from it. When I met him, it wasn't that the bookstore made me fall in love with him, but it didn't hurt. He grew up in a bookstore. He grew up selling books.

So when we came to Gainesville, we lost Goerings, which was a great independent. And we have a couple other small independents, including Third House, which is really small, and she works really hard, and she's moving to a non-brick and mortar.

[00:38:34] But I really wanted a place with tons of events, tons of ideas flying around, everything that an independent bookstore can give you, including book clubs, including just a wider reach into the community and a feeling like it was the nexus of multiple contradictory communities, right? That's what an independent bookstore is.

We talked about it and talked about it for years and years. Poor Mitchell Kaplan at Books & Books in Coral Gables has been fielding my questions for 10 years. But it wasn't until the book ban started happening. And I was watching from Germany where they're like, Oh, don't let this happen. They know what a book ban slides into.

There's this amazing quote by [inaudible 00:39:17], which is a... he's a poet from the 1820s. And he says, in places where people burn books, they will one day burn people. And that is absolutely true. And his books were banned by the Nazis. So this is a warning shot across the bell, and we need to stop it now. Now.

[00:39:47] So I'm very alarmed by this upwelling of authoritarianism here. And so it was that that really galvanized us to actually make good on this promise we had made to Gainesville for the past 15 years.

ANNE: I'm so excited for you. Can't wait to get down there.

LAUREN: Thanks.

ANNE: Tomorrow is opening day.

LAUREN: Yes.

ANNE: What?

LAUREN: And yet I'm here.

ANNE: And yet you're here. We are so glad you are. Also, I'm still in awe of that. What words do you have to share with your team who's put the store together, your Gainesville community, and the broader Florida community as you open tomorrow?

LAUREN: Oh, no, this is just a pure emanation of love. We are doing it because we love the kids who can't see themselves in the books that they desperately need in their lives. We even love the people who are doing the book-banning. We love them enough to engage with them and expose them to ideas and change their minds, right?

[00:40:48] All we want to do is spread the light of tolerance and the freedom of expression in Florida and perhaps become a beacon and perhaps maybe change the national narrative of Florida as a disaster site. I mean, every time I go... I just went to New York City and I sat at a table with some really wonderful, powerful people.

Like E. Jean Carroll is amazing. She's like, "You're opening a bookstore in Florida?" I was like, are you going to get shot? The impression that people across the country have of Florida is really dire. So I would like to maybe help to change the narrative, help to make sure people remember that Florida is full of really amazing people who are doing really incredible things. And sometimes you don't see them because they're lost in the overwhelming news of the bad parts.

We are full of good people, and the good people are working really, really hard. So I just want everyone to remember that and to help to shine the lights of tolerance and freedom of expression. Thank you.

[00:42:00] ANNE: This floor is filled with books, and I imagine you get to have a role in choosing them. If y'all have heard Lauren talk about books, I've read quite a few that you have enthusiastically recommended that I would not have picked up otherwise. Like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?

LAUREN: Oh my god.

ANNE: I didn't know that I should be reading that until you said it.

LAUREN: Anita Loos, she's amazing. Oh my gosh.

ANNE: Shirley Hazzard.

LAUREN: Transit of Venus.

ANNE: Would never have picked that up. But when Lauren talks about a book, you want to read that book. Splews of poetry that I wouldn't have read otherwise. What books are you excited to recommend and put into readers' hands at The Lynx?

LAUREN: Well, right now, we're really focusing on the banned books. In this state, there are over 3,000 books banned, including the dictionary. So right now, I'm really thinking Rubyfruit Jungle, for instance, which is this great... I almost said seminal, which doesn't make any sense. Lesbian text.

[00:43:05] Believe it or not, Rita Mae Brown was at UF in the 50s, I think 60s, when there was a whole legislative group put together that ended up kicking her out for suspicion of being a lesbian. So that's really interesting.

But the books that are really close to my heart, I gave [inaudible 00:43:27] here A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter, and Light Years is really amazing too. These are books that I don't think most people know about them. Amazing, amazing.

There's this writer named Ian Carson, who I think is one of the great early geniuses. And I've been pushing the Autobiography of Red because it's about a queer creature from the Bible... or not Bible. From the Odyssey, from Homer, from Greek mythology. It's fantastic. It's fantastic. It's so brilliant. It's like a novel and a book of poetry at the same time. I'm just really excited to push every book that I love onto people.

[00:44:09] One book that every single person I've ever given it to has loved is The Summer Book by this Finnish-Swedish author named Tove Jansson, whom you know because she did The Moomins, because The Moomins are amazing.

This Summer Book is the most astonishing book. It's about a grandmother and a granddaughter on an island and it's about death. And it's about existential dread, and it's fantastic. I love it so much. You all need to read it. It's not a children's book whatsoever, but my kids have read it because I forced it on them, and they loved it.

ANNE: I just read that for the first time.

LAUREN: It's so good, right?

ANNE: Yeah. There has to be something like staff picks or Lauren recommends it.

LAUREN: Oh, god, yes.

ANNE: Right.

LAUREN: Yes. My husband got one, and he chose Vaster Wild because it's laze. He's very cute.

ANNE: Ma'am, I love that.

LAUREN: It's very luxurious. Yes.

ANNE: All right. Lauren, this has been a pleasure. Thank you for coming to us in your very, very busy week. We wish all the good things for you in your store at your opening tomorrow. And we hope you get some sleep.

LAUREN: Thank you. Thanks, everyone.

[00:45:31] ANNE: Thanks so much. Hey readers, I hope you enjoyed my discussion with Lauren today. Visit her new bookstore at thelynxbooks.com and connect with Lauren on Instagram @legroff.

We've got those links and the full list of titles we talked about at our show notes page at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.

We love connecting with listeners on Instagram. Find our show's page @WhatShouldIReadNext, and be sure to tag us in your summer reading posts and stories with MMDSummerReading.

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Thanks to the people who make this show happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by Will Bogel, Holly Wielkoszewski, and Studio D Podcast Production. Readers, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading." Happy reading, everyone.