Connections to the Land
By Leslie VonHolten
This is Leslie VonHolten out here on the High Plains of Kansas with another Radio Readers Book Byte.
In this day of genre fiction, where we have lanes for romance, fantasy, romantasy, science fiction, climate fiction, speculative—et cetera, you know what I mean—I’m not sure where my current preferences land, label-wise. I like inspiring characters, and bonus points if those characters are women. And I love the natural world with all of its infinite mysteries. Plus, nothing makes me swoon more than beautiful prose.
That is why author Lauren Groff is, to me, one of the greatest American writers working today. Her novels and short stories, including those found in the collection Florida, show us characters within formidable natural landscapes.
Florida is a solid collection, but it is the two young sisters in the short story “Dogs Go Wolf” that have stayed with me.
The adults in the story are sketch—the girls are abandoned in a Florida lake house, and we are never sure where the fathers are, or if their mother is partying elsewhere, or maybe something more sinister has happened. All that we know is what the girls know: They are alone in this strange cabin, and they must fend for themselves. The story becomes one of wild ingenuity. The older cares for the younger, and they survive not by rising above the situation, but instead by getting down into the muck of it: they become like the animals in the wilderness, eating off the land and managing the days and weeks in rhythm with the earth.
This is the type of storytelling author Lauren Groff has been doing lately, and I am here for it.
Her 2021 novel Matrix is set in a convent in medieval France, where the 17-year-old abbess must find ways for her starving nuns to survive in harsh conditions. Her next novel, Vaster Wilds, is a lonely story of a young girl who has escaped her 1600s pre-colonial settlement. Think early Jamestown. It is a harrowing story, but to me an ultimate love song to both the beauty of our planet that was once wilderness, and to the ingenuity and strength of young girls. Groff’s characters are strange but resilient.
Resilient, and so expansive. In Florida, the older sister brings us into the future with her thoughts. This is also how we, the reader, learns that they will survive. As an adult, she considers their weeks of abandonment and starvation, Quote, “It was all so much. Through the years to come, she’d remember these days of calm. She’d hold these beautiful soft days in her as the years slowly moved from terrible to bearable to better, and she would feel herself growing, sharpening.” Although she and her sister are discarded, starving, and pocked with mosquito bites, these days alone caring for her sister are remembered with such tenderness.
Lauren Groff’s Florida stories take place is a state so unlike our High Plains life. Palmetto beetles, panthers, ferns and lush, dense foliage make these stories feel as if they take place in another country. This is the power of literature. I think of survival stories of women and girls here in Western Kansas and the High Plains over the centuries and how they share the grit and tenacity of these two sisters.
This is Radio Reader Leslie VonHolten hoping you will join us in reading Florida by Lauren Groff. Find more at HPPR.org, or Like us on Facebook.
Leslie VonHolten explores and writes about connections between land and culture and particularly on the prairie spaces she loves to walk. Her works have been published or are forthcoming in The New Territory, Literary Landscapes, About Place Journal, Dark Mountain Project, and Lawrence.com, among other sites. Leslie has served as a board member for the Garden of Eden art environment in Lucas, Kansas; was a founding member of the Percolator Artspace in Lawrence, Kansas; and has been a book commentator for High Plains Public Radio in Garden City, Kansas, since 2015. She was honored with a Tallgrass Artist Residency in 2022 Today, she writes about land and culture: ecology, community history, literature, art, and the undertold stories of prairie spaces. Most recently she co-edited Kansas Matters: 21st Century Writers on the Sunflower Statewith Thomas Fox Averill. The book features the work of 35 writers and was published by the University Press of Kansas in September 2025.
