What Does it Mean to be Peninsular?
By Matt Kliewer
In what might be my favorite poem, Grace Nichols opens Hurricane Hits England with the two lines:
It took a hurricane, to bring her closer
To the landscape
So many of the characters in Lauren Groff’s Florida are separated from their landscape. They are walking, running, dreaming of a way away from where they come. Across the span of about 300 pages and 11 stories, we encounter a variety of Floridians, particularly women (and only occasionally men) in their 30s and 40s, unsatisfied, isolated, but powerful in their internal monologues. In these stories, often the plot device to force characters into action is this fall’s theme, the weather. Rarely do our protagonists encounter unrecognizable scenarios, and rarely does their development move them far past waiting for another moment, another year, another storm. Groff’s characters aren’t often called to action, there are no real changes to their patterns, and they don’t often reach out and break the spell of their loneliness. At so many points in this book, I found myself leaving a story asking, ‘what must it feel like to feel so stuck?’
While some stories resonate more than others, this book does remind me of that moment when the temperature drops and there are choices to be made. There are always, in these stories, choices to be made. And it’s in these choices that perhaps the preciseness of Groff’s stories can be found, specifically in the relatable concerns of her characters. Often we see characters preoccupied with thoughts of money, the interest (or often pronounced lack of interest) of their romantic partners, and a general feeling that there are far too many dangers lurking in the swamp for one to feel stable. One wrong step, one small deception, and a snake lurks underfoot. Even in the calm moments, readers feel like they are just in the eye of the storm. Like many young landlocked viewers watching an approaching hurricane, I’d find myself urging the characters to leave. It’s just never that easy.
Ultimately, I love Groff's specificity of character across her short stories while she maintains the same question across the vast emotional and global spaces of her settings—What does it mean for one to be peninsular? Long walks at night, adult caretakers for aging and dying parents, a woman concussed and unable to speak, an ungrieving widow, and more than a few expats and vacationers incapable of adapting to their new chosen homes–to have three sides exposed to the world is to be both vulnerable and weathered.
It’s no real mystery why Lauren Groff’s Florida made it onto our list this fall. It often takes a hurricane, literal or metaphorical, to bring her characters out of their haze, sometimes by breaking down walls and sometimes by exposing a simple, dangerous truth, that another storm is coming. Across all of these intertwined narratives, we see discussions of motherhood, aging, death, and the claustrophobia that carrying your homeland with you everywhere can bring.
Maybe readers in the High Plains Public Radio listening area might struggle to imagine a wall of water bringing a sort of internal clarity with it. Maybe we struggle to imagine the weather of others at all. At the same time, I find myself returning to Grace Nichols and her hurricane, in those final lines,
Ah, sweet mystery,
Come to break the frozen lake in me,
Shaking the foundations of the very trees within me,
Come to let me know
That the earth is the earth is the earth.
Originally from Cimarron, KS, Matt Kliewer is a Professor of Humanities at Austin Community College in Austin, TX. Matt is a scholar of Native American and global Indigenous literature, film, and media, and he holds an MA in English from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD in English with a certificate in Native American studies from the University of Georgia. His scholarly writing has appeared in The Georgia Review and Transmotion. Additionally, he served as an editorial assistant for the anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry.
