6.5 Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath (SW)

Just days before the release of her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead Books, 2023), three-time National Book Award Finalist and The New York Times-bestselling author Lauren Groff sat down to talk to critic Laura McGrath and host Sarah Wasserman. Although Groff admits that she wants “each subsequent book to destroy the one” that came before, writing is always for her an endeavor of focus, ritual, and most of all, love. Whether they retell foundational myths about the nation, as in The Vaster Wilds, or rethink the relationship between faith, nature, and desire, as does Matrix, Groff puts love for her characters, for the planet, and for the process of writing at the center of all her fiction. She discusses an anticipated triptych of novels beginning with Matrix and continuing with The Vaster Wilds that covers 1,000 years of women, religion, and planetary crisis and care. The Vaster Wilds tells a kind of anti-captivity narrative as it follows a servant girl who has escaped from a colonial settlement in 1609. The novel asks what it means to love the wilderness even when it is hostile to human survival. Groff and McGrath explore how the novel offers a cautionary tale about the intertwined ills of colonialism and climate change without shame or condescension. Constantly rearranging “the detritus of the actual world” into stories of faith and love and care, Groff relies on the rituals of daily life to discover the formal architectures of fiction.

Mentioned in this Episode:

By Lauren Groff:
The Vaster Wilds (2023)
Matrix (2021)
Florida (2018)
Fates and Furies (2015)
Arcadia (2011)
The Monsters of Templeton (2008)

Also mentioned:
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian Magazine article on the Jamestown
Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
John Williams, Stoner
Kate Marshall, Novels by Aliens

Listen and Read:

Audio: Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath

Transcript: 6.5 Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath

10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW) – Novel Dialogue

Can a novel with a singular voice also be a chorus? Can it reject the conventions of the novel and still be a novel? Poet, essayist, and novelist Billy-Ray Belcourt tells critic Matt Hooley how his desire to write a novel that “would sound like something else,” led him to produce A Minor Chorus, his experimental debut novel. Together they consider how Billy-Ray’s vulnerable, first-person narrator makes room for other voices, or more precisely, how it becomes “a voice that could focalize the desires of a community.” Billy-Ray discusses how his influences— queer theory, indigenous novelists, and contemporary autofiction—harmonize in his search for a new form. While author and critic trace the circuits of grief and melancholy that run from Roland Barthes to Billy-Ray, their conversation is joyful, reminding listeners that romance and intimacy sustain us and that beautiful sentences matter. His answer to this season’s signature question attests to the way that even the classroom can be refashioned, like the novel, into a chorus. Mentioned in this episode By Billy-Ray Belcourt: A Minor Chorus A History of My Brief Body This Wound is a World Also mentioned: The Summer Day “Arundhati Roy Sees Delhi as a Novel” Rachel Cusk, The Shakespeare and Company Interview “The State of the Political Novel: An Interview with Édouard Louis” “100 Things About Writing a Novel” Mourning Diary Ann Cvetkovich Joshua Whitehead Mourning and Melancholia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1. 10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW) 43:57
2. 10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP) 46:37
3. We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí 47:03
4. 9.5 Who Owns These Tools? Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW) 48:58
5. 9.4 “That In Between Time,” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT) 52:05