Lauren Groff on Work and Love
This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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Photo by Mark Olsen on Unsplash A California Towhee bounced across the deck, its brown feathers tufted like a baby chick’s, proud and naive-looking all at once. I sat very still, fingers poised on my keyboard, silently watching, not wanting to spook it away. I knew its name—towhee—because I had recently become obsessed with birds, despite growing up in New York City and not knowing much beyond the neighborhood street pigeon. Over a year into the pandemic, my partner and I were isolated from friends, perched in our apartment in the Berkeley Hills, with only our dog and the trees and the birds for company. I latched onto the latter with an uncommon fervor. I set up a bird feeder on our deck and each day, I waited for them to come. As I worked, a brown finch (or was it a sparrow? I was still new to this game) landed its small claws on the edge of the feeder, pecking at the seed inside. Suddenly, a scurry of feathers: a larger Scrub jay swooped in, the neighborhood bully, scaring its smaller competitor off, eating messily, tossing birdfeed to the floor. Meanwhile, hawks soared menacingly, elegantly above, red tail gleaming in the sun. I was mesmerized. The birds calmed me when the world was in turmoil, my day job as a reporter keeping my mind hovering in grief over the pandemic, nearby wildfires, racial justice protests cracked down upon by violent cops. The birds slowed me down. And as I worked on my debut novel, they snuck their way into my book. In A Fire So Wild , a wildfire approaches Berkeley and three families are forced to reckon with the cracks in the lives they’ve built and the injustices teeming under the city’s surface. Two of the main characters—fed by my obsession—became amateur birdwatchers, high school students passionate about the climate, seeking out an elusive Spotted owl, mourning baby birds frantically leaping from their nests to escape the suffocating smoke. On the page, my bird friends became literal canaries in the coal mine of our world on fire. […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
