Exploring Lauren Groff: Stories Should Ask Difficult Questions
LIT5-10-Tue1
Marlene Hobel
This course will take place virtually on Zoom. Participation in this course requires a device (ideally a computer or tablet, rather than a cell phone) with a camera and microphone in good working order and basic familiarity with using Zoom and accessing email.
September 10 - November 12
Writer Lauren Groff said, “Fiction—reading it and writing it—is the greatest, most beautiful exploration of humanity that I know.” Groff combines powerful, lyrical language with engaging characters facing difficult questions in vivid, complex worlds. She details the moments, decisions, and connections behind pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury. President Obama named her novel, Fates and Furies, as his favorite book of 2015, and her novel, Matrix, as one of his favorites of 2021.
In this course, we will explore Groff’s talent through selected short stories from her two collections, Delicate Edible Birds (2015) and Florida (2018), and two more recent New Yorker stories. I am a Lauren Groff enthusiast, not a scholar; each session will be a facilitated discussion with the group exploring the stories and learning from each other. The course website (https://sites.google.com/view/exploringlaurengroff) details the assignments and background for each session.
“The only purpose I have as a writer, as I see it, is to try to tell the truth as much as I possibly can, in a way that's as beautiful as I can make it,” said Groff. She sees her reader’s engagement with her stories akin to a musician bringing a symphony alive, “…just the way that a concert musician doesn’t actually create the work, but expresses it through themselves. Without them there is no music. The right reader creates the work with the writer.”
So, how about it? Let’s be “right readers” and explore/create some of her short stories together.
More facilitated discussion than lecture.
Course texts: Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds, Hachette Books, 2016 (paperback), ISBN 9780316317771; Lauren Groff, Florida, Riverhead Books, 2018 (paperback), ISBN 9781594634529; and PDFs of two recent stories, as well as other information posted on the website.
We’ll read one short story per week, and students are encouraged to read each story at least twice (first for the gist, second for a close read and analysis). Some other brief articles and videos. Roughly 2-3 hours/week.
Marlene Hobel began her professional life teaching English to first generation college students at an open admissions college in South Carolina. Next, she taught reading to youthful offenders in prison, where she felt like she was incarcerated daily. She escaped into the corporate world, and had a long career in marketing and business communications, culminating in many years as vice president of corporate communications for a global environmental engineering firm. She has a BA and an MA in English Literature and an EdS in Counseling. She joined BOLLI in Spring 2017. Marlene has led study groups exploring the short stories of Lorrie Moore, Lauren Groff, Nancy Hale, Edith Pearlman, and Hilma Wolitzer, as well as the theme of motherhood. She is a frequent moderator of the New Yorker Fiction Salon.