The WD Interview: Lauren Groff

[This interview originally appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Writer's Digest magazine.]

One week after our conversation, I had the pleasure of seeing author Lauren Groff speak at The Mercantile Library in Cincinnati, Ohio—a private library nearly two centuries old, nestled on the 11th and 12th floors of the historic Mercantile Building, a stone’s throw from downtown’s Fountain Square. Delivering the library’s 2025 Innovation Lecture to a sold-out audience, Groff spoke about engaging with art amidst authoritarianism, fiction’s transcendent power of inserting one human consciousness into another, safeguarding her time to write, and the freedom to fail radically.

Indeed, revelatory failure is central to her success. Take her writing process: Her drafts are written fully in longhand, and as she moves through each draft, she doesn’t refer to the previous one, and she repeats this process until the narrative, at last, steps from behind the veil. In her words, this allows for everything that doesn’t matter to be excavated from the story that wants to be told. 

But knowing what doesn’t matter informs what does. When you read Groff’s work, there is a sense of history behind the words, a feeling that if I were to see one of her sentences in three dimensions, every previous discarded sentence would be right there underneath it, offering support and stable ground as it lifts buoyantly off the page. She talks of writing as an art form and a kind of magic, and she wields her pen as both a practiced artist and skilled sorcerer masterfully.

Groff is the author of five novels and two short story collections, including the instant New York Times bestseller The Vaster Wilds, the National Book Award nominated Matrix and Fates and Furies, and the Story Prize–winning collection, Florida, also nominated for the National Book Award. She returns with her third collection, Brawler—nine sprawling stories that span decades and geography, explore the difference between isolation and independence, and give credence to the eternal human endeavor of being well and doing good in the face of our flaws.

The allure of the short story is where we begin our conversation.

I’m always encouraged when an author publishes a collection, because I know it can be difficult for writers to have their stories collected if they aren’t already established in the industry. I interviewed an author who said he basically had to sneak a collection into his contract wedged between two novels. What is your perspective on the state of the short story in the publishing industry?

It’s such a fascinating question, right? Because I believe short stories are in some ways harder to write than novels. Novels are “loose, baggy monsters,” as Henry James famously said, and the short story needs to be taut like a drum. I know that my first short story collection, Delicate Edible Birds, was only published because I did sneak it into a contract. [Laughs] And I’m very, very grateful for that, because I love the short story with my entire soul. I think it genuinely depends on what editor, what publishing house, and what kinds of stories people are writing. I think the short story in America is the strongest that it could be in the entire world. I honestly don’t know of other cultures that write as many short stories and have them published in as many places as well. So, in that sense, we’re really strong. And of course, MFA programs train through the short story, which I love. It’s like training for a marathon by making people do lots of sprints. It’s true that if you have had a big novel, it’s easier to publish short stories, but I know plenty of people who started in the short story and then eventually have expanded into novels.

What is it about the form that continues to draw you in personally?

I started as a poet, and when I write short stories, I’m drawing on the poetry brain and not the novel brain. I think they’re radically different. I love formal poetry in particular, which was what really knocked my socks off when I was a college student. And there’s something very highly structured and architectured about the short story. Especially when you think about the many small ways that you can create the foundations for short story—the way that it’s a fractal art form, where the material—the matter that you’re talking about—has to be replicated in the way that the story is told, or else there’s almost a dissonance within the story. Sometimes that dissonance can be really interesting. Oftentimes, if you choose the wrong way to tell this story, possibly the story is not as successful as it could be.

In a novel, there’s a lot more looseness and leeway. With a short story, it’s really about selection. It’s about choosing how to tell the story as appropriately as possible for what it is that you want to say. And sometimes it takes many years to get to the point where you actually know how to do that, where you’ve figured out, Oh, this is the structure that’s going to make this story actually sing.

I’ve heard you talk about the breadth of time it takes for a collection to reveal itself among the many years of writing stories, so I’m curious: When did Brawler start to reveal itself to you as a collection?

Only within the past year. I wrote probably 20–25 stories in the span of time since Florida that could have been in the collection. It was only after sitting with the idea of a collection for a while that I began to be like, Oh, well, of course it has to begin with “The Wind,” and of course, it has to end with “Annunciation”. Then tracking the emotional arc between beginning and end, I was able to pluck out the stories that actually work the best for that overall arc.

What’s the decision process like for choosing the title story?

Believe it or not, that wasn’t the title story for a long time. It was actually my agent, Bill Clegg, who is just the best reader on the planet. He said, “You know, in this time with this story collection, I know you want the title to be this other story’s title, but honestly, Brawler is awesome.” And, you know, you kind of want a brawler in your life right now. I need so many brawlers! I need the people who will fight for me, you know?

It’s interesting you say that because something I noticed in the collection was this theme of isolation for the characters, whether that’s literal, physical isolation, or more emotional, self-preserving isolation. Was that throughline intentional, and what is it about aloneness that attracts you from a narrative perspective?

Absolutely intentional. This is my favorite thing about short story collections, because every story is very different, right? But it has to be cohesive as well. So, it’s really about figuring out what the thematic elements are and then drawing them throughout the collection. So, yes, isolation is absolutely one of them. Isolation, loneliness, solitude. And on the other side, because it’s not all a negative idea, independence. Ferocity. The fighting spirit. Which maybe keeps you separate from people, but also is something that’s courageous. It’s really love of self and love of the world meeting in the same person.

I really wanted to have that theme, absolutely. There are lots of others. I mean, every woman in this is fighting for something, even the ones where the men are the main characters. There are thematic elements of familial violence throughout, in the way that violence of the society reflects itself within the family unit, which is a really intimate space. The way that we are undermined by the stories that we tell about ourselves and about other people in a very real way. And then of course, on the very, very top surface level, there’s swimming in almost every single one of these. [Laughs] Deep immersion.

I love how you use point of view. Like with “The Wind,” that story is off and running before we really know for certain who’s telling us the story. There’s a sense of giving point of view time to bloom on the page. As a reader, it’s a great example of how fun point of view can be and also how, as writers, we can harness it to strengthen our stories. When does point of view come into play for you in the writing process?

It all depends. That story in particular took me over 20 years to write. I tried to write it many, many different times, and I just couldn’t get it right. You know, we all learn to listen to the bell of the platonic ideal in our head, and we know when we haven’t built a story that comes close to it. I would write these stories that might have been OK stories on their own merits, but weren’t ringing at the frequency and the resonance that I wanted them to. So, I’d put them to the side and start over again a few years later when I thought I’d have a better structure. In terms of that story, it took 20 years to find the point of view. It really took 20 years to understand that the point of view and what the story was about—the violence that runs in the blood, the deep misogyny, all of that stuff that we don’t necessarily question—that is deeply tied to point of view. It’s very much tied to family stories and family horrors.

That story took 20 years to write, and in those 20 years, you’ve published so much. I think something special about short stories is how a short story has the potential to live in conversation with another story, or even something larger, that a straight-up sequel can’t always. I’m thinking in particular about your debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton, and the story “Lucky Chow Fun” in Delicate Edible Birds—what’s going on in those separate stories doesn’t affect one another, other than they both exist in the fictional world of Templeton. And that just feels like a reminder that short stories can act as different vantage points on one thing. What do you see as the job of the short story? Is it different than the job of the novel?

Oh, I love this question. This is so exciting because we’re coming to the very crux of what I think makes for literature. Literature is always written within the context of other literature—literature of the past. We’re creating a runnel into a vast, very deep river that we can all play in. But when we add our stories, our novels, into the river of literature, we are always with other people, and a lot of the people come from the past. That’s what literature is. It’s being a deep student of, a historian of, the art in which you choose to swim, and then responding to it on a level through the work. All the books that I love, that I would consider good literature, are always in conversation with other incredible works—or even works that the author resists on an allergic scale. That, too, is a conversation. You can always push against, but as long as you’re engaging in the conversation, what you’re doing is creating literature. If I were to teach undergraduates, I would say you cannot write well unless you’re engaging with the work that has come before and is coming concurrently as well.

The beautiful thing about the short story collection is that you don’t have to speak back to the same literature. From story to story, you can float among other literature. In one story, you can push hard against a predecessor, and then the next, you can embrace it fully. It’s this more porous way of engaging with literature as opposed to the novel, which, to be cohesive, must remain in some ways facing the same direction the whole way through.

You came to speak at my college while you were touring your novel Arcadia. You were asked about sentimentality and emotion, and your advice was to put the hard moments on the page and not hide them between the lines, because it’s more poignant to face them. Can you talk a little bit more about that philosophy?

I think you want to put everything on the page, and then you peel it back. I think in the service of trying to be subtle, sometimes we’re over-subtle. I’m a big believer in writing a bunch of junk first, getting it out onto the page, making sure that everything that this story wants to be is spoken. Putting words on the page is magic. It’s summoning a reality into the world. So, put it all on the page, don’t be coy. And then in retrospect, in rethinking the work in editing and rewriting, that’s when we can say, “You know, sometimes what we need to do is take this obvious truth and then talk about it without actually talking about it—talk about it as though you’re talking about drawing negative space.” Sometimes that’s more important and affirmative for the story at hand. I think often for first drafts, we do want to just put it out there. Make sure we know it, that the story knows it, and then we can back away from it and make it more beautifully subtle.

Speaking of first drafts: You said something in your interview with The Atlantic for The Vaster Wilds that I loved, and it was about the importance of “inserting chaos into the process as much as possible.” Can you talk a little bit about the importance of having those messy first drafts?

I have OCD. No matter what, it’s a struggle. Especially if you’re a fiction writer, which is dependent on a lot of chaos. Unless you’re the kind of writer who writes beautiful, perfect sentences, but that is not the way that my brain works. I can’t think that way, and we all have to know the way that our brains work. So, because I have OCD, I find if I need to be perfect too early in the process, I just take away all the oxygen to the work, and it just dies. I intentionally seek failure. In our society, failure is seen as a purely negative thing. But failure is the way that we learn. We can only learn as human beings through failure. When you watch a toddler learning to walk, they have to fall. It’s because they’re just not used to moving their bodies that way. The way that kids understand the scope of the world is through play, and play is low-stakes failure—failure that’s fun. I keep trying to come back to this idea that what I’m actually seeking is not success in the first many drafts. What I’m seeking is that thrill that I used to get when I was outside running after the dog with all of the power of my legs. Sheer joy. That’s what I’m chasing.

Yeah, the process of failure is so important. It makes me think about this onslaught of generative AI and how that is trying to eradicate the process. It’s kind of an uncertain time for artists right now. Do you think the publishing industry is doing enough to protect writers?

Absolutely not. No. And universities are actually feeding students and professors into the mob of big tech. The moral failures on behalf of both publishing and education are so vast, it’s going take a generation to get past it. But to be perfectly honest, I’m not worried about AI. You and I both know that writing is the struggle, it is not necessarily the product. The product allows the struggle to happen again.

I think a lot of people who turn to AI, they’re not actually writing. That’s not writing. It’s not learning from your failures. It’s not understanding the scope of what you can and cannot do. It’s not finding inventive ways around the things that you just can’t do because you’re a human being. It’s not understanding the scope of your own soul. It’s just cheating, to be perfectly honest. And sure, you can make a product with cheating. But what I’m interested in is the human, in the traces of the struggle, the traces of the soul that are manifest in the work. That is the interesting bit. That is why we do the art that we do. It is to summon the best parts of humanity into another person’s spirit. That’s what we’re doing. So, AI … I mean, yeah, people can use it. But in my mind, the real artist is the person who’s always trying to get better, knowing that they’re not perfect, and understanding that and working with that. Anything else—and I’m sort of an absolutist—that’s just not writing and you’re cheating yourself and you’re cheating the reader, and it probably shouldn’t be in the world. 

I want to go back to something you said before. We were talking about aloneness versus independence. And that, combined with this idea of putting the hard stuff on the page, I do think there’s something to be said about suffering sitting alongside contentment and how feeling one doesn’t eradicate the existence of the other. There are a lot of times in Brawler where I get this sense of reluctant hopefulness from the characters. What does inserting that hope look like for you? Or do you even feel that way about your work?   

That’s just who I am. [Laughs] I’m just reluctantly hopeful. Deep down, I’m a utopian. I actually think that people really want to be good. There are some outliers, some narcissists in the world, but most of us are actually good and trying to be good. I do believe that if given the opportunity, most people would do the right thing and would try to make the world a better place. That’s utopian, knowing that we come up against our flaws and our failures. We’re humans, and humans are inherently flawed. You don’t go out into the world in order to make it better because you know that it will probably fail. You go out because it reflects back on who you are as a person and your moral code. You do things not because you’re certain of their success, but because it reflects who you are. I think writing is a utopian act. You can never 100 percent reach your reader, as much as you’re yearning toward connecting with the person. But it’s still going out there as an expression of hope and desire to do better and to make things better.

In the back of the book, there are a few notes on each of the stories, and it briefly gives us an idea of where the ideas may have come from. It got me thinking about the role that inspiration plays in writing. What is your relationship to feeling inspired versus doing the writing?

I came out of an athletic background, and the best training is when you really don’t want to do it. You show up anyway. So, no matter where I am in the world, no matter how exhausted and angry I am, I wake up at five in the morning, and I sit down at my desk, because it’s showing the work that I am willing. There are years, like many years of my life, when I cannot write a single thing that’s good. And I’m sitting there for hours crying or trying and failing, which again, is the process that is writing. It’s not that I don’t believe in inspiration—I do. But I also believe that if you keep yourself as open as possible, things will filter in and things will come to you. Some of the actions of being open are reading as much as you possibly can, observing the world without unnecessary noise, which means, when I take a walk, I try not to take a walk with my AirPods in. I’m really trying to absorb the world. No podcasts, I don’t need someone else’s voice. The super voice is watching all the thoughts go through, and that’s actually much more interesting than someone else distilling, well, lack of wisdom into my ears. So, having quiet time, having reflection time, having meditation time, creating space in which you don’t feel like a cog in the capitalist system. Because art is the antithesis of capitalism. Capitalism is about making a lot of product. Art is about getting better, and failure, as a matter of fact. Allowing space for failure, allowing space for thinking, allowing time into the day, that’s inspiration. And whatever comes and sticks, that’s because you have made yourself deliberately open to it.