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Even Still, We Run. We Have Not Reached Our Average Of 57.92 Years Without Knowing That You Run Through It, And It Hurts And You Run Through It Some More, And If It Hurts Worse, You Run Through It Even More, And When You Finish, You Will Have Broken Through. In The End, When You Are Done, And Stretching, And Your Heartbeat Slows, And Your Sweat Dries, If You've Run Through The Hard Part, You Will Remember No Pain.

-Lauren Groff

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Even Still, We Run.

Lauren Groff

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Even Still, We Run. We Have Not Reached Our Average Of 57.92 Years Without Knowing That You Run Through It, And It Hurts And You Run Through It Some More, And If It Hurts Worse, You Run Through It Even More, And When You Finish, You Will Have Broken Through. In The End, When You Are Done, And Stretching, And Your Heartbeat Slows, And Your Sweat Dries, If You've Run Through The Hard Part, You Will Remember No Pain.

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Amor Animi Arbitrio Sumitu, Non Ponitur; We Choose To Love; We Do Not Choose To Cease Loving.

I Won't Walk Under Scaffolding Or Under Ladders. I Wear Things Like A Baseball Player Wears Things That Are Supposed To Have Luck. I Am Superstitious About Everything.

I'm An Anxious Person In General, But Something About Being Pregnant And Awaiting The Release Of My First Book, The Monsters Of Templeton, Made Me Into An Insane Anxious Person. I Didn't Sleep At Night. I Ended Up Sleeping All Day. In A Strange Way I Felt Like The World Was Going To End. I Found Myself So Deeply Depressed At Times That I Started To Read About Happiness, And That Took Me Into Books About Idealism And Utopianism. Reading Books About People Who Tried To Build Utopian Societies Of Different Kinds Gave Me A Kind Of Lift.

I Think I'm An Optimistic Person. Ultimately I Believe In People. I Believe They Can Be Robust. When My Collection Delicate Edible Birds Came Out There Were One Or Two People Who Read The Title As Being A Commentary On The Characters Within The Pages, The Women In The Book, Meaning That They Were These Fragile Girls Meant For Male Consumption. But I Had Meant The Opposite - These People Are Tough. Dark Things Happen To Them But They Get On With Life As Best They Can.

Reading About Utopianism, And Eventually Creating Characters With Their Own Utopian Ambitions, Was The Way I Learned To Live With Being A Pregnant Person, To Stave Off The Sense Of Incipient Disaster. You're Bringing A Person Into This Overcrowded World, Knowing They're One Day Going To Die And There's Nothing You Can Do About It.

Parenthood Means Becoming Comfortable With The Fact That There Are Things Outside Your Control, Things That End And Fail, Just As Most Utopias End And By Some Measure Fail. And Just Because They're A Failure Doesn't Mean There Isn't Value There.

Research Is About Following The Gleam Into The Dark. It's Also About Being Sensitive Enough To Know Which Fact Is "the Creative Fact; The Fertile Fact; The Fact That Suggests And Engenders," As Opposed To The Fact That Deadens And Kills A Delicate New Project.

As Soon As You Publish A Book And The Reader Reads It, They're Making An Extension Of Your Brain With Their Brain.

She Would Always Feel This Wild Girl Was The Truest Of Any Of The People She Had Already Been: Adored Daughter, Bourgeois Priss, Rebel, Runaway, Dope-fiend San Francisco Hippie; Or All The People She Would Later Be: Mother, Nurse, Religious Fanatic, Prematurely Old Woman. Vivienne Was A Human Onion, And When I Came Home At Twenty Eight Years Old On The Day The Monster Died, I Was Afraid That The Baptist Freak She Had Peeled Down To Was Her True, Acrid, Tear-inducing Core.

Fiction Is Always A Utopian Task, In That There's An Ideal You Hold In Your Head As You Write Which Inevitably Fails In The Moment Of Creation, In The Insufficiency Of Words To Convey Meaning, Or In The Way The Work Is Completed In The Reader's Head.

The Darkest Period Of My Life, So Far, Arrived The Summer I Was Pregnant With My Eldest Son. The Future Was Growing In Me With All Of Its Terrifying Unpredictability, And I Found Myself Anxious, Unable To Work And Woefully At Sea.

I'm Feminist In That I Believe That There Should Be Equality Between Men And Women. I Get Deeply Frustrated On A Daily Basis By The Enormous Gender Divide In The U.s. Literary World. But I Don't Know How To Deal With It, So I Don't Tend To Say Much About It.

Our Human Impulse Is To Control Everything, But Fiction Seems To Me To Be About Allowing An Element Of Mystery Into The Text.

Childhood Is Such A Delicate Tissue; What They Had Done This Morning Could Snag Somewhere In The Little Ones, Make A Dull, Small Pain That Will Circle Back Again And Again, And Hurt Them In Small Ways For The Rest Of Their Lives.

I Love Twitter. It's Like Having A Closet Full Of Clever Friends That You Can Visit Twice A Day, Then Shove Back Into The Darkness When You're Tired Of Them.

Plays Are Just All Sort Of Playful Asides, And There's A Great Deal Of Reference Here To Greek Mythology, Plays, And Dramas. The Idea Of The Chorus Is Really Important In Greek Drama And I Loved The Idea Of Including That.

I Have A Feeling That Books Are A Lot Like People - They Change As You Age, So That Some Books That You Hated In High School Will Strike You With The Force Of A Revelation When You're Older.

I See Ghosts Everywhere, And That Is Partially A Function Of My Being Incredibly Near-sighted And Reading Way Too Late Into The Night.

In Terms Of Writing, I Think What Most Fiction Writers Treasure More Than Anything Is The Feeling That They're Living For The Length Of A Book Inside Another Person.

If The Literary Category Of 'mordant Fable' Exists At All, It May Be Because Brock Clarke Invented It. The Happiest People In The World Is Everything We Fans Have Come To Love From A Clarke Novel: Playful And Deliriously Skewed, And Somehow Balancing Between Genuinely Great-hearted And Gloriously Weird.

Sometimes You Have To Let Time Carry You Past Your Troubles.

I Want To Be Identified As A Writer, Not A Southern Writer, Not A Woman Writer, Not A Woman From This Or That Place, But Unfortunately It Doesn't Always Happen.

A Female Writer Does Definitely Get More Attention If She Writes About Male Characters. It's True. It's Considered Somehow More Literary, In The Same Way That It's More Literary To Write About Supposedly Male Subjects, Such As War. You're Considered More Seriously By The Literary Establishment.

I'm Ambivalent About The Orange Prize. I Was Really Proud To Be Shortlisted Alongside The Other Writers, Whom I Admire. That Said, I Don't Know If It's Best Way Of Addressing Gender Inequality Problems.

The Gender Inequality In Book Reviewing Isn't Getting Better. Male Authors Get The Majority Of Review Coverage, And Male Reviewers Do Most Of The Reviewing. It's Kind Of Devastating.

I'm Kind Of A Control Freak. But There Are Others Like Me.

I'm A Private Person, A Shy Person. Sometimes, Reading For Eleven Hours Straight Feels To Me Like The Perfect Way To Spend A Day.

As A Person, I Do Ascribe To A Lot Of Magical Thinking Myself.

Magical Thinking

I've Always Relied On Producing More Material Than I Need. With Each Of My Published Novels I've Written Around Four Times The Amount Of Material That's Ended Up In The Book.

I Had A Series Of Terrible Jobs, Whatever Would Allow Me To Write For Four Hours During The Day. During That Time I Wrote Three Novels - All Of Which Were Extraordinarily Poor. I Decided After That To Go And Get My Mfa.

I Think That Writers Have Natural Canvases, And My Canvas, Even In Short Stories, Often Seems To Be The Scope Of A Life.

The Triumph Of Writing Fiction Is That By Doing So, Writers Can Build A More Ideal World In Themselves.

As With Most Of My Work, I Started From The Abstract, From Research, Building An Intellectual Model That Slowly Became Internalized When The Characters Came Alive. It's Fascinating What Happens To The Model You've So Assiduously Assembled When Characters Are Allowed To Run Rampant: Things You Thought Essential Are Broken And Other Things Are Vastly Improved.

I Can Say That If You're A Writer Who Happens To Be A Woman, You'll Get A Book Cover That Depicts A Woman With No Head, Or A Woman Turning Away, Or A Pair Of High Heels. You Have To Fight To Not Get Stuck With These Covers. In The U.s. Women Are Chick-lit Writers Unless They Prove Otherwise, And That's Frustrating.

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Depressing Thought: My Friends Were The Girls I Ate Lunch With, All Buddies From Kindergarten Who Knew One Another So Well We Weren't Sure If We Even Liked One Another Anymore.

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We Need The Skeletons Of Other Stories To Understand Our Own, Sometimes.

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Song: Heloise And Abelard By Elizabeth Devlin. Beyond The A Propros Subject Matter, This Lady Can Really Play The Autoharp. This Song Sounds Like Something You'd Find On A Gramophone Record.

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Sex Is A Good Starting Point For Everything.

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At Least In My Case, A Very Simple, Regular, Happy Life Makes For Better Writing.

I'm A Writer, Not An Actor. I Want To Write Rather Than Perform. I'm Looking Forward To Disappearing For A While.

Looking Forward

Writing Is The Lonely Sport Of Sad Sacks.

Even Still, We Run. We Have Not Reached Our Average Of 57.92 Years Without Knowing That You Run Through It, And It Hurts And You Run Through It Some More, And If It Hurts Worse, You Run Through It Even More, And When You Finish, You Will Have Broken Through. In The End, When You Are Done, And Stretching, And Your Heartbeat Slows, And Your Sweat Dries, If You've Run Through The Hard Part, You Will Remember No Pain.

I Do Like Twitter. Writing Is A Solitary Pursuit, And It Can Get Lonely. I Like To Go Into Twitter For A Short Period Of Time, Communicate With Clever Friends, And Then Switch It Off. That's Perfect For Me.

I Kept A Lot Of My Thoughts Inside Myself. So, Perhaps More Than Is Normal, I'm Always Questioning My Role As A Writer. I'm Always Stopping And Asking Myself: Do I Have The Right To Tell This Story? Is It A Story That Deserves To Be Heard? And As For Whether I Think Of Myself As A Writer With A Capital "w," I Very Much Hope I Never Do.

It's Wonderful That Nothing You Write Is Ever Going To Be As Beautiful As What's In Your Head, Because That Gap Is Where The Art Can Enter And Begin To Stretch Its Limbs.

My Son Is Actually Named After Beck, The Musician. We Heard Beck On The Radio And Thought That Was A Good Nickname For A Child. We Named Our Son Beckett So We Could Call Him Beck - We Reverse Engineered. And Then After He Was Born And I Saw The Name On The Birth Certificate I Realized Beckett Was A Really Pretentious Name, Way Too Literary. Luckily He's Grown Into It. We Nearly Named My Second Son Dashiell. Can You Imagine? Beckett And Dashiell. It Would Have Been A Disaster Of Pretentiousness.

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