I’ve been wanting to write a newsletter series on the creative life and creative inspirations for a while, and I finally sat down to organize my thoughts on something I’ve been thinking about for over a year now: the TV documentary series Growing Floret. It’s a long one, but I hope you find some inspiration along the way.
For most of my life, I considered myself a plant-killer. Everything I tried to grow shriveled and died within a few months: herbs, flowers, succulents. Then, early in our relationship, my partner bought me an orchid—for some, a notoriously difficult flower—and, by some stroke of luck, it lived.
Soon my collection of orchids started to grow from the standard phalaenopsis you might find at a grocery store to include a chocolate oncidium (it really smells like chocolate!) and a dendrobium which, after five years, I’ve finally figured out how to get to bloom consistently. Then in 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, I took a series of virtual gardening workshops through a local organization, which offered free plants to participants—potatoes, lettuce, strawberries, tomatoes—and I was completely hooked.
I love the smell of the dirt. I love seeing things flourish. I love growing a bit of my own food. But more than that I love the creative aspects of gardening. I love the planning and problem solving. I love finding new plants to try and experimenting with them over and over to get them to work in my garden. To be honest, I still kill a lot of plants, but now I see these failures not as reflections of my ability but as experiments that lead me closer to what grows best for me.
After my first couple years of growing food, it didn’t take me long to start growing flowers as well. First to attract pollinators to my fruits and vegetables, and now simply because I think they’re beautiful.
And that’s how I found Erin Benzakin of Floret Flowers and the Magnolia Network documentary series Growing Floret.
Growing Floret, which is also streaming on HBO Max, has two seasons, each documenting a year in the life of Erin, her husband and co-founder Chris, and their team at Floret Flowers as they tackle some of the biggest projects on their farm: expanding their acreage, developing a rose collection, breeding new varieties, education and outreach, and more.
I know there’s a huge gap between farming and writing, but as I watched Season 2, hearing Erin talk about herself and her projects, I found myself so inspired. To me, the way Erin describes herself—and the way others describe her—echoes so much of how I think of myself and my art too.
Season 2 Episode 2, “Growing Resilience,” begins with Erin’s voice-over: “I love problems. I honestly do not care what’s going smoothly. Tell me what you hate. What’s not working? Tell me what’s broken. I love the puzzle of it, the challenge. Allow me to get in there and understand it, wrestle with it, solve it.”
I mentioned that one of the things I love about gardening is the puzzle of it, and it should come as no surprise that that’s also one of the things I love most about writing. Every book is a new puzzle. Every story is a new challenge. I did eight point-of-view characters and three timelines in The Reader (2016)? Okay, now I’m doing fourteen point-of-view characters (one of them in second person) in We Are Not Free (2020). Not enough? In Kindling (2024) I’m doing an ensemble cast of seven point-of-view characters, all of them in second person.
What can I say? I like the challenge of it. I like that it’s hard. Writing isn’t easy for me; it’s never been easy. And I don’t make it easy, either. To paraphrase Markus Zusak in an interview I heard him give years ago, “I only want to write the books I’m not sure I can write.” I look for that exact feeling with every new project. I don’t think I would be satisfied otherwise.
Later in Episode 2, Erin says, “I’m not here to have a good time. This doesn’t have to be fun. That is not what I’m here to do. Like, I don’t even have to enjoy the ride. That’s not the point. I want to do something that matters, and I know it’s going to be difficult.”
I’ve said before that writing doesn’t often make me happy. Day-to-day, it’s difficult, thorny, often frustrating work… But my worst day writing is better than my best day doing anything else, and that has held true again and again and again, because, to me, writing is also deeply, profoundly satisfying. I like diving into the problem of a novel. I like figuring out how to write it. Give me a puzzle. Give me a challenge. Give me a knot to untangle. Give me a mountain to climb.
For me, loving a good challenge means writing challenging books. I wrote about this for the launch of Kindling, wherein I describe my work as “different and ambitious and challenging,” “unusual and unexpected and strange.” I say, “I want to be bold. I want to make art that matters. I want to take big swings.”
All of this also means I write books that aren’t necessarily easy to read. They might not be comfortable. They might not be understood. They might never go viral. They might struggle on the shelves. But that’s the only kind of book I want to write.
In Season 2 Episode 1, “Preserving the Old,” Growing Floret details the process of adopting roses from both Friends of Vintage Roses, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving historic roses, and from Anne Belovich, who in her lifetime amassed the largest collection of rambling roses in the world. Of these roses, Erin says, “[T]they’re very rare, and they’re kind of… difficult. The farm to me feels like sort of that island of misfit toys. Like, give me your freaks, give me the weird ones, give me the ones that nobody wants, the forgotten ones, the old ones, the difficult ones, the ones that get diseased, that only bloom once. They’re like the outcasts. Those are the plants that I want, because I feel like that’s what I am. Misunderstood. Or a little too much in one way… and maybe not enough in another.”
Misfits. Freaks. Weird ones. Outcasts. When I heard Erin describe these roses—and herself as well—I thought, Ah. That’s my work too. That’s me. I’ve always felt a bit like a misfit. I’ve always felt like I didn’t quite belong. I’ve come to realize that’s part of my nature. I don’t like swimming with the current—in fact, I often find myself resisting it. If too many other people like something, I shy away from it. Instead, I prefer the unknown things, the rare things, the things nobody else knows about. I want to go where nobody else goes. I want to write things that are unusual because they’re unusual, because nobody else is really doing them.
At one point in Episode 1, Erin reflects on Anne Belovich and her massive collection of “ramblers,” climbing roses that grow to enormous (some might say preposterous) heights. In describing them, Erin says, “I do think it’s funny that Anne chose ramblers, because they, as a group of roses, are so intense and so much themselves… just like Anne. Anne was very much herself. She was a very intense person. I haven’t seen that really ever. I always feel like I’m too intense and too much, and I’m taking too many notes, and I’m thinking about too many things. And Anne was too much… but she owned her too much and she used it and it served her well.”
And that scene, that moment, made me think of myself too.
If you know me personally, or through my work, or just through this newsletter—1,200 words in—you probably know that I’m too much. I’ve always been too much. One time in my senior year of high school, one of my peers described me as “annoyingly happy,” and although that backhanded compliment has stuck with me for decades, I also don’t think it’s entirely wrong. I am a lot. I’m high energy. I’m enthusiastic. I’m relentless. I’m ambitious. I’m intense. It’s too much for some people, and I know that.
But it has served me well.
I think, like Anne and like Erin, I’ve turned that “too much” into curiosity and drive and perseverance. I’ve turned it toward learning and growing and improving my craft. I think it’s made me a better writer. I think it’s produced bold, challenging books that were worth all the time and frustration and doubt it took to write them.
Quoting Gregg Lowery of Friends of Vintage Roses, considered to be one of the most comprehensive multiple-class collections of old roses ever assembled, Erin says, “‘I may have tried to do too much, but I did really good things.’” Continuing, she adds, “I love that. Like, I try to do too much. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s okay if you’re really trying your best.”
If you look at any of my books, I think you can see that I always try to do too much. A sweeping fantasy epic that’s also a metafictional love letter to the written word. A historical novel with not one but fourteen main characters. A fantasy folktale road trip that’s also a feminist commentary on what it’s like to be a girl in America right now. It’s… a lot. But I tried my best. I gave it my all. And I’m proud of what I made with all my energy, my curiosity, my intensity, my drive. I think it’s what I’m good at. I think it’s what I’m meant to do. I think it’s the best way I can make a difference with the limited time I have on this earth.
I’m not entirely sure how to describe why Growing Floret, these two episodes in particular, had such an impact on me. (At least, not yet.) But I think it has to do with the idea of being seen.
When I listen to Erin’s words on herself and her projects, I feel seen. I feel like I’m not alone as a creative soul, like there is someone else out there who thinks they’re weird and intense and ambitious… and who embraces it, who makes it work for them, who is following their instincts and tackling huge projects and doing things nobody else is doing.
And that feeling is invigorating. It’s emboldening. It makes me think, “Well, if Erin can do it, so can I.” I can follow my creative instincts. I can write these weird, challenging books. I can do things nobody else is doing because I want to and because I can—and maybe, because if I don’t, no one else will.
So I will.
To close, I’ll leave you with this quote from Erin in Season 2, Episode 2: “When I look back on my life, I want to say that I was brave enough to go for what I really wanted to. Like, I stayed true to myself. And that I used all of the intensity I was born with to leave the world a better place.”