By Catherine Dunwoody

When I finished reading Matrix shortly after it published in 2021, I closed the book, then immediately purchased everything else Lauren Groff had ever written in one fell online shopping swoop. No other writer has ever prompted me to do that. As a reader, I usually graze and digest, rather than order and devour the entire menu.

I tell Groff that during our interview, and though she laughs, I doubt it’s the first time she’s heard that just one sample of her writing can make a lifer out of any reader.

Groff’s New York Times bestselling novels include The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and the aforementioned (and game-changing, for me) Matrix; her best-known book, Fates and Furies, is Barack Obama’s favorite (he wrote to Groff telling her so). Groff’s short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida are also highly acclaimed. She has won the Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is a three-time National Book Award finalist.

Florida-based Groff is on a whirlwind publicity tour for her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds, which was released in September. Among the stops is a return to our city, with Groff set for an appearance at Vancouver Writers Fest in late October. She was last at the Fest in 2021, knee-deep in pandemic times, to chat about Matrix; she looks forward to “seeing people at events again, and not seated six feet apart, which was so disheartening.”

The Vaster Wilds is a survival story set in 1610 Jamestown, the first English colonial settlement in America. Since Groff is brilliantly skilled at researching and writing historical fiction, the reader is plunged palpably into an era known as the “starving time” from page one. The Powhatan people have the invading English colony under siege, and most of them are sick, desperate, or already dead.

A servant girl runs for her life towards the winter woods at the book’s start, with only a few items she’s stolen before escaping; a hatchet, a pewter cup, two lice-ridden blankets, and a pair of boots taken from a child who’d just died of smallpox. Known simply as “the girl,” the protagonist has a strong sense of faith and desperate drive—but the frozen forest she is about to call home is ruthless, offering her every danger imaginable.

Groff addresses colonialism, survival, patriarchy, feminism, and quite literally the agony and the ecstasy of body, mind, and spirit in this work. I ask her about what I call the graphic grossness of several scenes: the girl must survive by eating bitter grubs, possibly poisonous mushrooms, raw fish that has her vomiting or exploding with an upset stomach, and baby squirrel kebabs.

Groff laughs. “Yes! I had that baby squirrel image in my head from the very beginning,” she says. “It had a vividness.”

As the reader, you will find yourself whispering, “but she had to” many times while witnessing the girl make heartbreaking life or death snap decisions. It’s the essence of survival.

Human’s so-called ownership of the planet is a topic that Groff has addressed in previous writings, and she revisits it in The Vaster Wilds. A scene where the girl witnesses a bear in seemingly complete wonder watching the moonlight and a waterfall illustrates Groff’s view that “humans are a very thin thread in a very intricate thick weave, and we have put ourselves in the very centre for a very long time.” So, she adds, “the idea that a creature like a bear can feel awe doesn’t seem like a stretch of the human imagination. Of course a bear can feel awe. One of the things this book is seeking to do is to step back from the idea of God and humanity, and understand nature as a beautifully intertwined thing, with humans being just one small aspect of the greater awe.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hernan Diaz told The New York Times that Groff was “one of our finest living writers.” I ask Groff if she has her eyes on the Pulitzer as well.

“Prizes are so fascinating because you try really hard not to think about them, but if they come it is beautiful—you feel gloriously happy and get to say in public how much you love certain people who helped make the book,” she muses. “Prizes can be a welcome distraction from the work you are writing that day. Obviously, the author in me is a ravenous beast, but the writer in me doesn’t think about prizes at all. And the writer is the part of me I like better than any other part.”

Lauren Groff comes to the Waterfront Theatre for the Vancouver Writers Fest on October 20.