Lauren Groff

The three-time National Book Award finalist discusses her new short story collection, Brawler, and the necessity of failure in writing.

- MICHAEL WOODSON

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 Prizewinning collection, Florida, also nominated for the National Book Award. She returns with her third collection,