Lauren Groff on The Lynx Books

Highlights from a Violet Online interview with Lauren Groff

I had the pleasure of interviewing Lauren Groff earlier this year as part of Heart’s Ink, my series for Violet Online which explores the joys and obstacles of owning an independent bookstore with the women who run them.

The Lynx Books, opened in April 2024, champions the work of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors, with an emphasis on literature that is banned or challenged in Groff’s adopted home state of Florida. The bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Matrix, and most recently, The Vaster Wilds, possesses a unique perspective on the issue; her own novel Fates and Furies is among the nearly sixty books banned in one Florida school district.

“I want to change things in both tangible and intangible ways,” says Groff. “I want to ensure that the people who desperately need to see themselves reflected in books have the ability to do so.”

I’m excited to be sharing an excerpt from our conversation below.

To read the interview in its entirety, click here.

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Lauren Groff photographed by Octavio Jones

You’ve said that The Lynx is not just your store—it belongs to anyone and everyone who feels threatened or marginalized; it belongs to those who are seeking a sense of community. You want it to be a lighthouse for readers. Where was your lighthouse as a young reader?

I'm from a tiny hamlet in upstate New York, Cooperstown, and I had a truly idyllic childhood. My parents are extremely hard workers, but they let their kids have a free-range childhood, and I spent all summer roving around the woods, camped out in the gorgeous fieldstone public library only a few blocks from my house, or up in a tree, reading. My exterior life was full of sun and dogs and swimming and love, and my interior life was peopled thickly with characters from the many, many books my parents gave all three of their children the freedom to read. This is excellent parenting. I believe firmly that we need to let children read everything they want to read, and if there are things in the books that they choose that are challenging to our own belief systems, we, as good parents, should have the necessary conversations with our children.

I let my kids read 'Tintin', and we have awesome conversations about colonialism, racism, empire, and attitudes from the past that are no longer countenanced, for good reason. If you don't like something in a book, it's good parenting to talk to your child and situate the book within your moral system. It's an absurdity—it's authoritarianism at its very worst—to forbid other people's children from accessing books that offend you. Literature was my lighthouse as a child, and I want literature to be a lighthouse for all children.

What has been the biggest surprise so far with running the store? What has touched you most in the last few months?

I'm so profoundly touched on a daily basis, honestly. We have received so many letters from people who fled Florida because of its retrograde attitudes toward transgender and gay people; we have had so many messages from people across the country who have despaired about the Sunshine State and have found a glimmer of hope in our stance. We are here to spread love. We're here to give people tools for upholding common sense, empathy, and kindness. We will be giving away so many banned books to Floridians now that our 501c3 has been approved. Getting those contributions and planning with community nonprofits to give out those books has been such a joy.

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“Book bans are both a distraction so that authoritarian creep can eat away at our rights and the beginning of far darker, far worse things to come.”

—Lauren Groff

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The Lynx opened in the eye of the storm as far as challenged literature in America goes. PEN America recorded 3,362 book bans in the 2022–2023 school year—1,406 of those book ban cases were in Florida schools. That was last year; the numbers have now increased. Your own novel, 'Fates and Furies', is among them. You’ve mentioned that technically it’s a very small group of people behind the banning—that “the will of the minority is being enacted upon the majority."

What would you say, mother to mother, human to human, to the people backing the book bans? Do you feel a rational dialogue can even be had at this point?

I do think that there can be a rational dialogue because book bans have come and gone throughout the history of the United States and because they are so deeply unpopular. 85% of Floridians find them absurd. We see them for what they are: a distraction to enable other extreme assaults on the general populace. If the people challenging books really cared about the well-being of children, they wouldn't ban books; they'd ban the things that hurt and kill children every single day—they'd ban guns. It's telling that there's zero political will from that side of the aisle to ban guns.

Book bans are both a huge distraction designed to cover many other extreme assaults on our rights—like the right for people with uteruses to control their own bodies or the right for all people to have access to fresh water and air and shelter and medical care and education—and at the same time, they're also the very tip of a huge and dangerous authoritarian wedge. All genocides in recent memory have begun with the attempt to erase people through the erasure of their literature. Heinrich Heine said in 1829: "In the places where people burn books, they will one day burn people."

Book bans are both a distraction so that authoritarian creep can eat away at our rights and the beginning of far darker, far worse things to come.

I loved what you said in another interview and want to include it here: that reading “is the best technology humans have ever made. We’ll never make anything more beautiful than the book.” As someone who intimately understands the importance and power of the written word, can you summarize what the magic of literature is for you now as not only a writer but as the owner of a bookstore?

Literature is magical. Books are a way of transplanting a human soul into another human soul. We walk around the world with the voices of geniuses ringing in our heads. Art, music, and literature are the best of humanity, and we have found a way to distill this goodness and bestow it on other people as a pure gift. If the impulse to make art still exists in the world, there is hope for humanity.

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“Literature is magical. Books are a way of transplanting a human soul into another human soul. We walk around the world with the voices of geniuses ringing in our heads.”

—Lauren Groff

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How do you hope The Lynx and the space it holds will influence and change the literary landscape in Florida?

I want to change things in both tangible and intangible ways. I want us to give away as many banned books to Floridians as we possibly can. I want to celebrate and promote the writers of books under attack in Florida. I want to ensure that the people who desperately need to see themselves reflected in books have the ability to do so, whether it means putting the hard-to-swallow history of slavery in the United States in front of the eyes of children whom the state of Florida is currently failing in this regard (there are history school books approved here in which the "positive" aspects of slavery are being taught) or making sure a little transgender girl can see transgender heroines like her in the books she reads. I want to make large literary changes through our nonprofit arm—The Lynx Watch, Inc.—and to make vast, less tangible waves, to radiate tolerance and ideas outward, to celebrate the literary history of Florida, and to signal to the rest of the country not to give up on Florida, and that even though we are at the moment being run by authoritarians, there are plenty of smart, good, community-minded people here who are putting up quite a fight.

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Visit The Lynx Books at 601 South Main Street in Gainesville, Florida, or support them through their website, thelynxbooks.com

To read the complete interview, visit Violet-book.com

Interview by Emma Leokadia Walkiewicz