Lauren Groff and Rachel Kushner Talk Prisons, Prairies, and Power

Listen to this conversation—which originally took place in November 2018, at The Archive Project by Literary Arts.

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John Freeman: You both moved from one place to another at a significant stage in your life. Rachel, you moved from Oregon to California when you were about eleven. Lauren, you moved to Florida relatively recently, which you can see in this book [Florida]. I wonder if you could talk about how these landscapes affected your imagination as writers, and with that, how they changed, if at all, what you thought was dangerous.

Rachel Kushner: I am from Eugene, Oregon. Eugene was an incredibly sweet place to be a child. There was no anxiety about poverty there—I mean, there was some, but not the way there is now for marginalized, vulnerable people. No one had money in Eugene. It was a very free, open world in a small place that didn’t have many dangers, and then I moved to San Francisco at the age of ten. You insightfully gathered that the book had something to do with that shift, which was, in a way, a trauma, but an excitement in the way that everything dark that you symbolize in your life produces some kind of energy that can be used later for fiction.

I moved to a big city, I went to giant public schools, I brutally had my ass kicked on the first day of school and that was normal. There were levels of race humiliation there like nothing I had experienced in my life previously had prepared me to understand. I still don’t entirely understand. Part of it was just seeing physical violence between people which i think makes a huge impact on kids, at least it did for me. The first time I saw two boys fighting at school, the amount of blood that was left from this fight—I was in sixth grade, I was eleven years old—it shocked me, and some of writing a book [The Mars Room] that partially takes place in the memories of a woman from my neighborhood in San Francisco was an opportunity to try to reckon with some of that material.

JF: Lauren, you come from Cooperstown, which obviously influenced Monsters of Templeton and some of the stories in your first book. The stories in your new book are mostly set in Florida. What changed for you in your imagination and what you thought was dangerous upon discovering Florida personally?

Lauren Groff: I am from the Northeast and I believe that landscape has a profound effect upon character. I think the temperature and the geography that we look out and see on a daily basis do something to the soul. I grew up in this tiny little town of 1900 people famous for the Baseball Hall of Fame and the Opera, having a huge number of tourists come, and yet my parents just let us be feral in a lot of ways. I swam all day in the lake that was just really beautiful and wonderful, so I had this idyllic childhood.

I moved to Florida twelve years ago because my husband took over a family business and as soon as that happens, you can never leave again. I felt trapped, and I am trapped, emotionally trapped, in this place that I didn’t want to be in, this place that’s incredibly humid, very hot, and full of disgusting bugs and alligators. My parents-in-law have lost three dogs because they live on a pond where there are alligators! So it’s this place where, at first, I was afraid to go outside. I was afraid of loving it, I was afraid of getting comfortable there because it didn’t correspond to who I thought it was. So for five years I resisted it and hated it and slowly, reluctantly, it grew on me like a mold. And now I feel Floridian, and it would take two hours to unpack what that means, but I do, I feel like a Floridian.

JF: You mention a word that comes up in both of your books, “feral.” In a number of your stories, the narrator often sees these wonderful feral children, usually boys, and she’s protective of them in that state. Similarly the narrators themselves are feeling a bit feral, but feeling they need to control that. And Rachel, since your book takes place in the criminal justice system, which is a system of control and punishment, there are a lot of directives about how to behave. At what stage is your book asking questions about who has the right to be in control and what gets controlled?

RK: Maybe I can partly answer by saying that I come at it from a slightly different angle, which is to say, I don’t so much think about who has the right to be in control as much as I try to ruminate on my own feelings about institutional logic, what it is and how foreign it feels, and what it does to people. There’s a great book by the famous American sociologist Erving Goffman called Asylums. He talks about the cultures in prisons, in hospitals and ships and psychiatric wards, as all having similar ways of stripping people of their identities and forcing them into modalities of behavior that are distinctly institutional by framework, and I’ve always chafed at that. I’ve spent a lot of time in prisons in California, so I’m familiar with the way that women and men are controlled, and in writing the book I was interested in links between the inside and outside of prisons, and the parts of that institutional logic that are particularly invisible to middle class people.

JF: One thing Rachel points out in the book, which is wonderfully discursive and full of anecdotes and facts you wouldn’t know unless you read the book, is that the prisoners who are working for 22 cents an hour in the shop class in the prison are building podiums for courtrooms.

RK: That’s absolutely true, and it was me who discovered that on my own tour. I went on a major tour of mostly California men’s prisons with criminology students who were planning on getting jobs in corrections, because the California Department of Corrections is always hiring, and I went as a “continuing education” student. And now I’ve gotten in big trouble for talking about this publicly and the California Department of Corrections has banned me from their prisons, so I don’t give a fuck if I talk about it anymore. But I was taken into many of the prison industry association’s projects—there are different prisons that are quite proud to show you what they’re doing—and one of the first places I went to was a textiles workshop, where they’re making prison uniforms for that prison and other prisons. The guy running it said they learn all this stuff about textiles and it trains them, so that when they’re released they can seek good jobs, but I noticed they weren’t sewing fabric, just gluing it. I asked what kinds of things they’re learning in here, and he said this isn’t about the actual skills you acquire, it’s about learning to work, which was an amazing moment for me.

Down the hall from there, they were making the safety goggles they wear for prison industries—that was one of the prison industries—and down the hall from that, they were making boots, for the prison industry. So it’s this bizarre tautology where the prison is making itself all the time, and it’s not about profit—prisons cost the state of California an enormous amount of money and they’re mostly public. I know people are freaked out about private prisons, but that’s a tiny percentage of people in prisons and money that flows to prisons. So it’s a public thing, and what the prison is spending money on with their infrastructure and these jobs is the incapacitation—it’s like a factory where the prisons make their own incapacitation.

JF: These two books demonstrate the capacity of fiction to deal with very broad and urgent problems—the prison-industrial complex, climate change to some degree—but through very intimate ways. Lauren, this is your fifth book, and like Fates and Furies, this touches gently on the pressure points of marriage, and as Rachel was speaking about something that creates its own incapacity, you can look at marriage as a vertically integrated control system. In Fates and Furies and in Arcadia and in other works of yours, you ruminate quite a bit on the ways that marriage is a contradictory, closed system that contains both positive and negative pressures, and I wonder if you could talk about how that operates in this new book.

LG: I would’ve tweaked your original question, which I thought was brilliant, to expand into the idea of domesticity and not just marriage; not just this feeling of being in control, but the feeling of what domesticity is and understanding what it means to be a domestic person while also longing to be the opposite. What does wildness mean? How can one live in a place like Florida, which is so liminal, where you pass from one state to another without understanding where you are? Often when I’m inside the house, so is nature. I’m a writer, so all I do is sit in the house all day long.

My feeling is these tensions are in all my stories and all my books, almost like the tension on the surface of a soap bubble. That’s how I see it, a constant pushing outward, an oppositional force against these constraints and these dictates that are imposed somewhat invisibly upon my characters, and within marriage or a longterm partnership, there are these invisible constraints that sort of push in—particularly on the women, let’s be honest—in the way that the outside world perceives the intimate relationship but also the way that it develops in this utopian community of two. So what I’m really interested in is this very fine, molecular level of opposition between the air and the internal force. And that’s what I feel like each of these stories tries to do, is to identify what that bubble is and how far you can push it before it pops.

The idea of landscape in this country is so tied up with the idea of dominion, because it was partly the idea of dominion that allowed us to claim lands which were not ours.

JF: I think what this book does, among other things, so beautifully, is capturing the strangeness of the natural world, because it just is. We can come at it with all sorts of projections, such as a marriage or a person or a friend, but it will just remain in its own state. I wonder if you could talk about writing about the natural world so that it doesn’t only symbolize, and then maybe you can read from one of the stories.

LG: I think my feeling for the natural world comes from my daily runs. In Gainesville, where I live, which is in the middle of a swamp, there’s this giant prairie full of wild bison and the descendants of the conquistadores’ horses. Coral snakes and all sorts of poisonous, dangerous things. I run there miles and miles every morning as the sun’s coming up and it does multiple things for me. One, it reminds me to get out of my head and to actually live in the world. And two, it reminds me that we are all animals even if we believe we’re somehow distinct or separate or above other animals.

In understanding this and seeing over the past twelve years, in a really granular way, you can see the way climate change is affecting the prairie, and it breaks your mother-loving heart on a day-to-day basis. You can feel like an animal, feel like a human, understand the way we live within this larger web than we are able to comprehend, and see the way we are affecting that web. We pretend we don’t have to be the voices of the voiceless, but it’s our job as humans to stand up for nature, I believe. It’s filled my work for the past twelve years with a sense of the injustice and profound immorality in the stance that humanity is somehow above nature.

JF: That idea, I think, is defined as dominion, which comes in some part from the Bible. The idea of landscape in this country is so tied up with the idea of dominion, because it was partly the idea of dominion that allowed us to claim lands which were not ours. In one of your stories, Lauren, one of the characters is imagining what an early Quaker explorer would’ve made of Florida, and she thinks, “a damp, dense tangle, an Eden of dangerous things.” Similarly, in The Mars Room, one of the inmates who knows Romy, the main character, is from Apple Valley, and this inmate says, “it feels so good to have a place to put your anger, to punish someone like you’ve been hurt.” Since women are at the heart of both of your books, I wonder if you could talk about the ways that women are the site of and resist punishment.

RK: Oh gosh, what do I say about that? I’m distracted by Apple Valley, which is a real place in San Bernardino Country. I was just there recently, because a friend of mine, a transgender man who is serving a life sentence in a women’s prison in California, wanted me to go and find his mother, who lives off the grid in Apple Valley. They hadn’t spoken in twenty years. He was convicted for a gang killing, never snitched on the other people involved, was not supported at all by the gang when he went to prison, which tells you about a gender dynamic with people who come from the so-called problematic layer of society from which the prison populations are pulled. If men go to prison and have done honorably by their gang, they are supported while inside: people put money on their books, help them out in various ways. Women get no support at all from the gang, and later on get no support from their families.

In California when they were in their prison-building frenzy between 1980 and 2012, when a new prison was sited in a small town in the Central Valley, which is where they’re all pretty much sited, where we grow food for the country—if a men’s prison was going to be built, the local community, primarily Republicans live in Central Valley, people would come out and protest, and a lot of what they were concerned about was this unsavory population that would come to visit their family on the weekends. And when women’s prisons were built in small towns in Central Valley, no one was concerned about who was coming, because nobody was coming.

To come back around to my friend in prison, this person has no support on the outside, and I thought, I’ll go to visit the mother because I’m the only person willing to do it, and I thought I knew what I wanted to say to this person’s mother about—her daughter, as I put it (I wasn’t going to hit her with a lot of different kinds of news at one time; I like to meet people where they’re at)—I wanted to let her know that her daughter is someone I met through human rights work that I do, and is someone I admired and learned from, and I thought about this for almost a year as I mentally prepared to go speak to this woman. But what I hadn’t understood was what the impact would be on this woman, who had learned to live without a daughter who was serving a life sentence, and frankly had decided to forget about her and had formed a life without her, and I was suddenly confronted with her trauma in the situation and what prison does to families. I hadn’t considered her feelings, so it was a deeply humbling moment for me.

Archetypes are not static; they’re not things that only repeat what we know. I think they can be used to expand the limits of what we’ve believed in the past.