Cary Griffith is an award-winning Minnesota author who has written eight books.
Raised in eastern Iowa on the edge of Cedar Rapids, Griffith had a Huck Finn-like childhood, his youth a throwback to the innocence of yesteryear, a time when life wasn’t so complicated.
“I spent most of my summers without shoes on, fishing and spearing carp, catching frogs,” Griffith says.
“My parents were very indulgent. They let me keep snakes in the basement, among other things, and this is all where my love for the outdoors originated.”
Over time, Griffith eventually stopped housing toads, but he always possessed an innate curiosity, and that was further exacerbated when he picked up The Raft, an adventure story that exposed the young Griffith to an entirely new form of creativity.
“I was really intrigued by that survival story,” he says of the much acclaimed The Raft, a book that highlights a World War II airman navigating the unpredictabilities of the Pacific Ocean while on, well, a raft.
In fact, Griffith was so moved by this story that when he later penned his first book, that non-fiction work centered around surviving in northern Minnesota’s hallowed and merciless Boundary Waters, a place that Griffith still visits every year with his lifelong pals.
“Every year, me and my group of friends still go fishing at Lake Vermillion,” Griffith says.
“Of course, I love the inspiration that I draw from being up there, but I also appreciate the camaraderie with my friends.”
After high school, Griffith headed west and spent a couple semesters at a university in Utah, but too much partying left the Iowa native clamoring for a reset, so he went back home and enrolled at the University of Iowa.
“I majored in English,” Griffith bluntly says, and then we both laugh because you cannot walk into MedTronic, flash your liberal arts degree, and then secure gainful employment, but you can build a nice vocabulary, learn how to effectively communicate, and if you’re lucky, develop the skills to write stories readers find compelling.
That’s something Griffith discovered while on the Hawkeyes campus.
“My sophomore year is really when the reading and writing bug hit me,” he recalls, reminiscing on the past in between bites of his chocolate croissant that are chased by sips of Starbucks’ blended hot cocoa.
As an undergrad, icons like Hemingway gripped Griffith, their prose enough to captivate and make a young man dream that he too could one day craft a narrative that would appeal to audiences.
“With Hemingway in particular, the emotion and his ability to convey a story in a riveting manner was fascinating. I wanted to figure out how to do that,” he explains.
“In many ways, I feel like I’ve been trying to capture that same magic ever since.”
Eight books later, one may assume that Griffith has mastered the art of authorship, but despite his impressive oeuvre, Griffith admits that there are still times when he battles with the inherently conflicting nature of such a challenging medium.
“Many times I ask myself why am I doing this,” he points out.
“It probably would be easier to go and get a job as a sales consultant at Grussing Roofing,” he then says with an amiable laugh, his eyes moving to the logo emblazoned on my puffy winter jacket.
But a consummate professional such as Griffith knows that writing isn’t about the tangible rewards one may hope to receive in return for enduring the intense process of putting thousands of cohesive words on paper.
It’s also not about attracting the affections of women, or the adulation of the general public.
Instead, writing is self-development disguised as storytelling, and that helps explain why when Griffith was younger, he was willing to flip burgers and pump gas, all while sending countless drafts to the gatekeepers of the publishing industry.
Even when his manuscripts would go unnoticed, and he was forced to get an applicable master’s degree and consequently a “real” job, Griffith kept chiseling away at his long-term aspirations.
“Once I began working in Corporate America, I still would wake up early in the morning and start writing,” he shares.
His persistence eventually resulted in him landing paid gigs that consisted of writing about innovations in legal technology.
His first few years doing that, he netted $6,000, a sum that was considered quite sizable at the time.
“Those writings were esoteric, in that only a small percentage of people would even want to read about that topic,” Griffith says.
“It really wasn’t the type of writing that I wanted to do, but I did it for about a decade.”
An indirect path to reach one’s desired destination.
That’s not a journey most would be willing to take, but as Griffith continued to refine his own fiction and non-fiction, crumbs of success would slowly find him.
In time, manuscripts were indeed picked up by traditional publishers, who offered him advances ranging from several hundred dollars, to several thousand dollars.
Again, it’s all a grind.
It would be false for me to then imply that Griffith later ingratiated himself to those literary giants in New York, the ones who wield the power to alter the trajectory of a writer’s career with the click of a pen.
“My books haven’t done great,” Griffith calmly but not solemnly reveals.
“They’ve done well enough so that publishers want to continue working with me, but it wasn’t until the last six months or so that I looked at my body of work and thought that I had achieved something significant.”
Recently, Griffith has been asked to speak and attend conferences to talk about his writings, gigs that have brought in additional revenue beyond the sales of his books.
In 2024 alone, Griffith estimates that two-thirds of his income can be attributed to speaking engagements.
Yet through it all, the business side of writing is not what fulfills Griffith.
Rather, the joy comes from the actual writing.
Any readers who commend his work is just a bonus.
“Who typically reads your books?” I ask, because although people pay to come listen to Griffith speak, he is not without his detractors (as evidenced by the keyboard warriors running amok on the reviews section of his books’ Amazon pages).
“The people who read my books,” says Griffith, who for his part does not hide from the pundits, nor the criticism Griffith himself believes is sometimes valid, “those readers, they relish northern Minnesota.”
“They really know what they’re talking about when it comes to nature and the vast wilderness of our great state. Many of them have firsthand experience of what it’s really like out there, and that’s why they come out to hear the backstory behind a lot of the work that I do.”
Adds Griffith, eight books in, but with two more slated to be released in 2025:
“Once you go hiking in the boundary waters, you can really empathize with the characters in my books, and that adds a whole new level of intrigue to the stories.” QS
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