At some point today, author Lauren Groff will walk out to her office behind her house in Gainesville, Fla., switch on an ancient, clattering window-unit air conditioner, then sit down in front of a black computer screen.
Even if she just writes the same sentence over and over, she’ll keep going until a world begins to introduce itself.
That is how “Arcadia” began, a new book about life on a commune in the early 1970s that has already received critical praise. Groff will be in Atlanta on Tuesday, as the kick-off speaker for the spring edition of Savannah College of Art and Design’s Ivy Hall Writer Series. Begun in the spring of 2009, each quarter the series has brought in up to half a dozen writers, from Margaret Atwood and Colson Whitehead to Will Pearson, founder of Mental Floss magazine, and Joel Cohen, writer for “The Simpsons.”
“Arcadia” is Groff’s third book and second novel. Her best-selling first novel, “The Monsters of Templeton,” was shortlisted for an Orange Prize for New Writers, and explored family secrets in a small town. Make that a small town with a monster in the town lake. Yet, it was no horror story.
With “Arcadia,” Groff looks again at family, but this time the huge “family” is a commune in the early 1970s in upstate New York. It is told through the eyes of Bit, the commune’s youngest member, a little boy who Groff readily admits is a lot like the younger of her two sons. And if there are any monsters in this story, they take the form of doubt and disillusionment that creep into the psyches of the book’s characters.
Here Groff talks about doubt, hippies and the healing affect of Twitter.
Q: Reading “Arcadia,” I was reminded a bit of “The Hours,” for the sense of melancholy, though beautifully told. Where were you emotionally when you wrote this book?
A: I’m the kind of writer who writes about what I long for most. And when I was about to write this book, we’d just moved to Gainesville. I was pregnant. I didn’t know anybody and I’d waddle down to Starbucks just to see a human face and have people around me. I wasn’t a calm, radiant, pregnant lady. I was a neurotic mess. It was a dark time. I had just read “The Road” [by Cormac McCarthy], the very worst thing I could have read at the time. And there was all this anticipant anxiety because my first book, “The Monsters of Templeton,” was about to come out. So eventually I thought I’d better start researching happiness. And by the time my son was born, I was much more healthy.
Q: You didn’t grow up in a commune, so what inspired you to set this novel in such a place, and then what research did you do to write about it so convincingly?
A: Everyone who comes out of an extreme situation, even if that situation seems perfect, they are survivors of an extreme way of living. I did a lot of reading and talked to a lot of people who knew that life. And then my cousin knows kids who were raised in a commune that fell apart when they were young. Some turned out to be punks. Some turned out to be goths. Some weren’t. There was just an incredible diversity among them. I also visited two places, the Oneida Community [Mansion] in New York and the Farm in Tennessee. People still live there at the Farm, it’s just not like it used to be. So even if we fail at making something beautiful, it’s the attempt that sheds light on the world and that is what’s worth it.
Q: Your last novel had some illustrations in it. In this one I was almost expecting to see some recipes using tempeh and soy cheese, because the world you created was do vivid and so detailed down to the ingredients of their vegan meals. How do you construct such a world?
A: I do a 10-page outline of their lives, then I draw detailed maps about where they live, what their landscape looks like, I draw relationship maps. So I build it tactually. And I am a vegetarian, though not a vegan.
Q: Do you write every day? I have a hard time imagining that a wife and mother of two young kids would be able to do that.
A: Yes, I write every day, even the weekends. I’ll sit there and for 10 minutes even if the only thing that comes out is “Lauren, you can’t write,” I’ll keep going. I believe in showing up. If you show up, the work will show up. It’s a war of accumulation.
Q: Where does this war take place?
A: There’s a dark little workshop in the back of the garage. It has an old, used air-conditioning unit that can never get cold enough. I know it sounds sad, but the life I live here is just as vivid as the life I live in the house.
Q: What led you to become a writer? Your work is so lyrical and there are some paragraphs that made me wonder if there is a poet lurking in there.
A: I was a skinless little girl, so timid, so shy. Really, I was so sensitive and confused all the time. The only time I could understand the world was when I was reading, and I read a lot. I started as a poet, and I’m really not a good poet, but I read a lot of poetry. I think fiction writers should. It has a unique sense of architecture and discipline of using the exact right word in the exact right place.
Q: Have you developed a writers’ community there in Gainesville?
A: I don’t have a great community. I look to Twitter for that. It’s filled with people whose work I love and have read. Two times a day, when I need a blanket of writing friends, I go on. Colson Whitehead, Jami Attenberg, Jennifer Gilmore. I’m such a Luddite, but Twitter just seems real to me.
Q: Does your husband read your work before anyone else?
A: My husband is an early reader of my work, but even he doesn’t know what I’m working on for years.
Q: Why not?
A: Maybe I’m just superstitious, but I believe that if you talk about something too early, you kill it.
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Book Reading
Lauren Groff
6:30-8 p.m. Tuesday. Free. Ivy Hall, 179 Ponce de Leon Ave.
Spring Ivy Hall Writer Series
● Andre Dubus III, National Book Award finalist and author of “House of Sand and Fog,” will read from his memoir, “Townie.” 6:30-8 p.m. April 12. $10. Ivy Hall, 179 Ponce de Leon Ave.
● Carol Wallace, author and spring 2012 Writer in Residence at SCAD, working with students in its writing program. Wallace will read from her recent work “Leaving Van Gogh.” 6:30-8 p.m. April 26. $10. Ivy Hall, 179 Ponce de Leon Ave.
● Sandra Beasley, poet of the collection “I Was the Jukebox” and author of “Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales From an Allergic Life,” a cultural history and memoir of food allergies. Beasley will read from “Birthday Girl” and other work. 6:30-8 p.m. May. $10. 1 Ivy Hall, 179 Ponce de Leon Ave.
● Augusten Burroughs, best-selling author of “Running With Scissors” and “A Wolf at the Table.” Burroughs will read from “This Is How, Help for the Self: Proven to Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterdom, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude and More. For Young and Old Alike.” To be released in May, “This Is How,” takes a hard look at the idea of the self-help book. 6:30 -8 p.m. May 12. $10. SCAD Atlanta, 1600 Peachtree St.
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About the Author
