Andrew Furman, whose story “Crawling” appears in issue 73, is a Florida writer. He’s lived in the state for thirty years, writes widely about its people and its environment, and is (among many other things) the author of the memoir Bitten: My Unexpected Love Affair with Florida. But he’s also a Jewish-American writer—see the novel Jewfish—as well as an environmental writer, a sports writer, and a scholar of American literature. These categories, he tells me, do not exist in opposition to one another. And why should they? He is, he says, “simply a writer.” In this way it feels appropriate that “Crawling” is a story about motion, and productive restlessness—one which begins on water, and ends on land. And while Andrew composed the story in Florida, he conceived his answers to my questions while swimming the very stretch of Maine coast which inspired “Crawling” in the first place.
In the conversation which follows, we discuss “small and seemingly unpromising” beginnings, the present landscape of Jewish-American literature, quietude, and, naturally, the state of Florida.
INTERVIEWER
How did this story begin for you? With an image, a phrase, the first line? More generally, do your stories tend to originate in similar ways?
ANDREW FURMAN
“Crawling” started for me when I imagined the main character, Veronique, and her place in the world, this wintry backwater in Maine. Character and place (and maybe setting, more generally) are almost inextricably connected for me. I can’t really say that one element comes before the other in my creative process. I also knew that she would be a swimmer. I had this image of her wrapped in layers, tromping along a snow-crusted sidewalk on the way to a pre-dawn swimming session at her local Y. That’s all I really had.
INTERVIEWER
In our emails, you mentioned that this story is “pretty close to you”. Of course, as writers, we hold all our stories and characters close, but it’s true that some feel more dear than others. Is there something about this one that makes it especially so?
ANDREW FURMAN
This was an email, so I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking at the time, but I’m a dedicated swimmer (as you’ll be unsurprised to learn) and this is the first story I’ve written that imagines a swimmer, and by swimmer I don’t just mean someone who swims but someone for whom swimming increasingly shapes the dailiness of her life and her identity, and not in uncomplicated ways. So I was probably thinking about the swimming theme. But on a deeper level—though I can’t remember whether I was thinking this at the time of that email—this story is especially close to me as I found myself in deep sympathy with the protagonist, and even with her husband, as I was drafting it. It’s a feeling I get in my gut sometimes when I’m writing the stories I consider my strongest. When I get drawn into this zone, so to speak, it feels almost as if I’m writing from inside the story. It’s something that’s difficult to achieve and even more difficult to teach; it’s pretty unpredictable when it might happen for me. I could have what I think is a great idea for a character, place, and story, and I just never really “feel it” and end up abandoning the story, or, as in the case with “Crawling,” I can start with something very small and seemingly unpromising–this idea of a white woman in middle-age in a frosty backwater in a long marriage who takes up swimming—and during the drafting process something just clicks and I find myself drawn into absolute sympathy with her. This feeling in the gut when this happens while writing isn’t so different from the feeling I get when I’m reading a story or essay that really works for me. In this sense, I don’t see writing and reading as so distinct from each other. I realize that this all may sound pompous, and that my actual stories probably don’t live up to all this, but it’s the closest I can come to describing the way it feels when I’m drafting my strongest stories, or the stories I feel are my strongest, anyway.
INTERVIEWER
It’s been said in various ways that the opening gambit of a short-story should contain the story in its entirety. I feel “Crawling” does this, quite subtly, in a manner that reveals itself continually from one read to the next. So much of the story, from the title on down, seems to gesture at this notion of learning, and re-learning—learning to walk again, but in the water; “training” oneself around the essential questions of breath, motion, arrival, departure; how not to drown, and how to do more than not drown. And then, so beautifully, the story ends with a walk, and a revelation. At what point in the drafting process, if at all, do you become conscious and in control of these larger thematic movements? Was there a point, or were there several points, at which you realized what this story was “about”? And, if someone were to ask you what it was about, how might you answer?
ANDREW FURMAN
First, I must thank you for this incredibly sensitive reading of the story, which articulates the interconnected themes and elements of the story more cogently than I probably could. To answer your question, then, it’s tough for me to describe at what particular point of the crafting process that I felt “in control,” as you put it, of the thematic movements, or if I ever felt totally in control. What I can say is that I was definitely not in control at the outset, that I didn’t foresee, for example, that final walking scene, or some of the small surprises (that they would be childless, and that this would be important, or that Tom would be navigating emotionally complicated terrain of his own, which involves another woman, and that this would be revealed during that walk), but at some point probably in the middle of the drafting process, I did latch upon the larger, metaphorical significance of the title, “Crawling,” and all the ways that it could pertain to both of these characters, as you describe so eloquently. I don’t like to have too much figured out about a story and its characters at the outset of writing. I think I’m at my best as a writer when the process of writing the story, itself, becomes a journey toward figuring out the character and why I’m imagining him or her at this particular place and stage of their lives, which sort of brings us toward your final question. While I think this story, like most stories, can be about more than one thing, for me I realized pretty early on that, at its most essential level, it was about a person in middle-age crawling (literally and figuratively) toward a deeper, more essential understanding of herself, the place she has occupied and hopes to occupy in the world.
INTERVIEWER
I hate to ask such an impossible and frankly inconsiderate question, but I’m so curious, I have no choice. Do you think Tom and V will stay together? If uncertain, do you find yourself hoping in one direction or the other?
ANDREW FURMAN
Ha. Well, I suppose that the very fact that the story leaves you curious is gratifying to me. I may have had Grace Paley’s wonderful story, “A Conversation with My Father,” in mind when I crafted the ending, during which a writer-protagonist and her aging father argue about what makes for a good story and what the ending of a particular story she has imagined within the story means. Paley’s story, as I understand it, essentially argues for indeterminacy and possibility (over tidy endings) when it comes to imagining characters, and this is where I wanted to leave Veronique and Tom. Will they stay together? I’ll confess, I sort of hope they will. But I didn’t want the story to hinge upon this plot-point. I realized at some point that I wanted to leave these characters in a place where they were simply communicating with each other, or at least trying to communicate honestly with each other. In my view, this is a triumph for them, whether or not these characters will end up staying together in the lives we might imagine for them beyond the final page.
INTERVIEWER
“Florida” seems in many ways a literary genre all its own. Is that a fair characterization? I’m thinking naturally of Zora Neale Hurston, alongside Thomas McGuane’s early Key West work, Padgett Powell, and, more recently, writers like Karen Russel, Lauren Groff, and Ashleigh Bryant Phillips. Are these, or other “Florida writers”, sources of inspiration to you? Are there shared or essential characteristics in a piece of “Florida prose”? And how, if at all, might you situate yourself in this particular literary tradition?
ANDREW FURMAN
I do think that it’s a fair characterization, and I do consider myself a Florida writer, at least partly. The fact that “Crawling” is not one of my Florida stories is in some ways still germane to this conversation. As I’ve mentioned above, place is very important to me as a writer. I’ve lived in Florida for almost thirty years now (time flies!). It’s the place I know most intimately and I’ve set out to know it even better in a lot of my writing. But I’ve been visiting Maine for the past ten years and have been entranced by its unique environment and people, so I’ve recently been writing a lot of fiction set in Maine. I only mention all this to say that I believe there’s value both in writing about the places you know, writing from the inside, so to speak, and writing about the places you don’t know as well but that you’d like to know more deeply, which may take more research, but that both sets of eyes can yield interesting results.
To get back to Florida, specifically, I’ve read and admired most of the writers you’ve mentioned above. I’m a fisherman so I love McGuane and Hemingway, of course, but I probably feel the strongest affinity for Groff’s stories and with Russell’s Swamplandia!, not so much aesthetically but for the ways in which these works engage with the intersections of domesticity and the placeness of Florida. It’s similar territory, excuse the pun, that I try to explore in a lot of my Florida fiction and nonfiction. In addition to the writers you’ve mentioned, I also admire the Florida fiction of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Joy Williams, Harry Crews, Peter Matthiessen, Connie May Fowler, Kristen Arnett, Carl Hiaasen, Jennine Capó Crucet, Lynne Barrett, Cristina García, Ana Menéndez, and so many others. As I rattle off this list, it occurs to me that the field of Florida writing, as I think you may be gesturing toward above, has grown large and somewhat unwieldy, that the scruffy northern Florida place and characters that Crews imagines is a far cry from, say, Crucet’s Miami. One might argue that south Florida, and Miami even more specifically, constitutes its own universe, literary and otherwise. Yet I think this all just speaks to the increasing richness and diversity of Florida writing, even if it makes it increasingly difficult to pin down something we might call the “Florida” voice or sensibility.
INTERVIEWER
A related question: outside your “Florida work”, you’ve done excellent academic work around Jewish-American fiction, in particular the “Big Three” of the midcentury: Bellow, Roth, and Malamud. Each of these writers, to my eyes, took their own approach to questions of “place”, and its relation to the nature of the so-called “Jewish-American experience”. As a writer whose work—much of it, anyway—is deeply rooted in a particular place, how do you approach themes of exile and return? Are such themes present for you in “Crawling”? More broadly—and I know you’ve addressed this elsewhere, so please feel free to skip—is there such a thing as contemporary Jewish-American fiction? What might that look like?
ANDREW FURMAN
I think I’ll actually tackle the “more broadly” part of your question as the theme of exile and return—at least regarding place—wasn’t foremost in my mind as I wrote and revised “Crawling.” In any case, I do feel that there’s such a thing as contemporary Jewish-American fiction. I still teach a course at my university on this literature and increasingly feature very contemporary writers, such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nathan Englander, Dara Horn, Gary Shteyngart, Nicole Krauss, Joshua Cohen, Molly Antopol, Anna Solomon, Margot Singer, Sam Cohen, and others. There’s still a set of themes and concerns—including the themes of exile and return—that characterize much of this work. Family, marginality, the Holocaust, Israel, the Hebrew Bible, the notion of covenant and redemption, even the immigrant experience once again in the case of Jewish-American writers from the former Soviet Union, these all loom large in the work of our strongest young Jewish-American writers. One thing I’d add, and I’m not the first to notice this, is that the contemporary Jewish-American imagination is more international than ever, imagining not only Israel but all sorts of other current and historical locales in the diaspora. This is all great, but I do worry that young and even not-so-very-young Jewish writers in America—collectively, at any rate—seem to have less and less to say about their home terrain. Readers of all stripes once turned to Bellow, Roth, and Malamud for the news on America, so to speak, and now they mostly turn elsewhere for this. Maybe this is okay. But in much of my work, anyway, I tend to imagine Jewish protagonists living in unlikely American places for Jews—places that haven’t already been imagined and re-imagined by previous generations of Jewish-American writers—whether it’s an orange grove along Florida’s space coast or a fishing boat or in a Maine backwater. Some of this writing, I’m aware, may not seem “Jewish” enough for the current Jewish lit-crit sensibilities that tend to guide these discussions, but this gets us into a whole separate discussion on “authenticity” that may not be useful here. Let’s just say that I’m receptive to including a wide variety of work under the umbrella of Jewish-American fiction. When it comes to my own writerly identity, such as it is, I consider myself simply a writer foremost, but also a Florida writer, an environmental writer, and a Jewish-American writer, and I don’t see these categories in opposition to one another.
INTERVIEWER
And, for the final “literary” question: I would not necessarily call any of the writers I’ve mentioned thus far “quiet writers”. Many of them seem quite loud, even explosive. Yet “Crawling” is a wonderfully quiet story. Who, then, do you consider the masters of the quiet story? Would you say most of your stories tend to fall on the quieter end of the scale?
ANDREW FURMAN
It’s subjective, of course, what qualifies as a “quiet” story or a “quiet” writer, which I’m sure is why you also used quotation marks for these terms in your question. So I’d just start off by gently pushing back on whether we ought to see Bellow, Malamud, and Roth solely as loud and/or explosive writers. While it’s true that they aren’t known for the quietness of their stories, or for their stories at all in the case of Bellow and Roth, some of their finest work, I think, is actually pretty quiet. I’m thinking of Bellow’s amazing story, “The Old System,” Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel” or “The Loan,” and so many others. Even those early Roth stories and the novella in his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), seem pretty quiet to me, stylistically, though explosive moments do occur. Anyway, it’s tough to be a Jewish-American writer of middle age and not to have been enormously influenced (or, worse, silenced) by these three writers. I might have tried too hard early on to emulate the audaciousness of Bellow’s and Roth’s prose, the explosiveness, as you put it, over the quieter, more introspective, qualities that speak more strongly to me now. Which is to say that I do feel that my stronger stories tend to be on the quieter side of things, that this is how my writing has evolved for better or for worse. The writer I’d probably start with as the master of the quiet story would be Chekhov, and a story such as “The Lady with the Little Dog.” I think Grace Paley, whom I’ve already mentioned, is an absolute master of the quiet story, too. I wouldn’t necessarily put Raymond Carver in this camp, but I would put his story, “Cathedral,” on a list of “quiet” masterpieces. Moving to more contemporary writers, I’d say that Joy Williams’ stories, while deliciously weird in all sorts of ways, also gain a lot of their power through their quietness. I won’t try to list too many others, but the other working writers who most immediately come to mind for the quiet power of their stories include Peter Orner, Elizabeth Strout, Jhumpa Lahiri, Dan Chaon, Anthony Doerr, Kevin Brockmeier, and Leigh Newman. It’s the “quiet” sort of story, written by these writers and others (and if we extend this to novels and novelists, I’d quickly add Marilynne Robinson, J. M. Coetzee, John Banville, and Kent Haruf off the top of my head), that tend to move me in that visceral way that I’ve tried to describe earlier in this interview.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve written novels, short stories, essays, a memoir, and of course your academic work. It seems the only thing we’re missing is poetry, but maybe you’ve done that as well. What are you working on these days? Any exciting projects you’d like to discuss?
ANDREW FURMAN
Well, I’m not working on poetry now, though I have tried (unsuccessfully) in the past as I do feel that writers should try to exercise as many writerly muscles as they can. Whenever I’ve tried to write a poem, however, the lines always turn into sentences and then the sentences get away from me and, poof, I end up writing a story or even a novel, instead. These days, I find myself shifting between various projects, which include a novel and additional stories set in the same Maine fictional universe as “Crawling,” and a second collection of environmental essays on Florida. I’m crossing fingers that these three separate books will find homes somewhere soon. I’ve also just started to write stories set in southern California, where I was mostly raised. It’s been a challenge but also really exciting to finally turn my attention as a fiction writer to the L.A. of my childhood, which, given my age, is now a faraway historical period!
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Andrew Furman teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author, most recently, of the novels, Jewfish (2020) and Goldens Are Here (2018), and the memoir, Bitten: My Unexpected Love Affair with Florida (University Press of Florida 2014), which was named a Finalist for the ASLE Environmental Book Award. In addition, he has recently published numerous shorter works of fiction and creative nonfiction in such publications as Prairie Schooner (which just named his essay, “Quarantine,” winner of the Glenna Luschei Award), Santa Monica Review, Willow Springs, Oxford American, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Image, Poets & Writers, Terrain.org, Agni Online, Flyway, and The Florida Review. His new novel, World That We Are, will be published in 2025 by Regal House Publishing.
