Kathleen Furin is the author of the new story collection The Loneliness of Glass. She is also an editor and consultant, and she is based primarily in Philadelphia.
Q: Over how long a period did you work on the stories in your new collection?
A: Almost 20 years! Some of these stories are quite old so it is exciting to see them finally being published.
Q: The author Jonathan Vatner said of the collection, “The Loneliness of Glass casts an incandescent gaze on women on the fringes of American society, struggling with disappointing husbands, execrable jobs, messy desires, and the specter and lure of death.” What do you think of that description?
A: It is an apt description, and I really appreciate Jonathan’s perspective and willingness to engage with my work.
One of the things I try to explore in my writing is the idea of desire and how so many women are taught to deny our own desires, or pretend to not even have desires, at least in the world that I was raised in.
It is fascinating to explore how so many women so often try to pretend like we don’t want things that we really, really want. I think this is a function of a patriarchal system which teaches us that our value lies in service to others rather than in taking care of and developing our whole selves.
Generally, in the dominant culture in which many of us live, neither women’s ambitions or desires are respected, and women who are ambitious or open about their desires are often disrespected and treated with disdain. Therefore we end up lying to each other about what we want, and often we even lie to ourselves.
Would things be easier if we just owned up to what we truly wanted? Maybe. I’m not sure, but there is a kind of honesty in that which might make us much less stressed.
Desires can be messy in and of themselves, and our natural responses to the ways our desires are demonized make those messy things even messier.
I also think we are taught to desire things that are socially acceptable or useful, and so this whole issue is not just around pretending to not have desires, or suppressing our desires. Some women pretend to want things we actually don’t want.
My story “Sanctuary” is probably a good example of that. The protagonist in that story thinks she wants sex, but does she really? She was just socialized into thinking that she is supposed to want sex, that wanting sex makes her a certain type of woman, a type of woman she thinks she should be but is not really who she is.
I love complicated women who want messy, unexpected things, and I think this shows up in my work.
Q: How did you decide on the order in which the stories would appear in the book?
A: I did take some time with this; I know my work can be heavy and intense. I knew I wanted to end with “The Loneliness of Glass,” and because “Animal Control” had been recognized as a “Coolest American Story” I thought I should start with that. Everything else just kind of fell into place.
My editor suggested moving “The Cookie Jar” because it is just so weird, and she thought people needed a few stories before that one to get used to my voice and style. I agreed with her!
Q: How was the book’s title--as you noted, it's also the title of one of the stories--chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I am terrible at coming up with titles. I work as an editor and book coach and people often want help with titles. I do have some strategies I was taught in terms of thinking about titles that I share with writers, but this is not one of my strengths.
This title is a line taken from one of the stories, which at the time I wrote it was my favorite story. I liked the story because it was just so weird and magical, but also because of the process of writing it — it literally just flowed through me.
I wrote that story during a fellowship at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and I can tell you how I came up with the idea, but I can’t really explain how that story just sort of fell out of me, fully formed.
One of the characters in the story is an alligator who swam north after her daughter died because she wanted to die, too. She could not live with her grief and she thought for sure that she would freeze to death almost immediately, but somehow she manages to survive.
I am really fascinated with characters who want to die, and ideas around what it means to live versus what it means to survive. We live in a society in which the dominant culture tends to be hyper-focused on violence and death in some ways and yet does not really honor or accept death as a natural, inevitable outcome in other ways.
The alligator in the story hides herself from people because she knows that no one will kill her — they will “save” her, put in an exhibit somewhere for people to come to stare at, under fluorescent lights on a harsh tile floor…. For that character living like that would be torture, and she would rather just be dead, but she doesn’t trust anyone to grant her a death, dignified or not.
When I was writing from her POV she described being in that type of enclosure and ended her description of that kind of life with a line about “the loneliness of glass and tile.” And that line just stayed with me. I think it speaks to a kind of sanitized disconnection that would be hell for many people, or creatures of any type.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am having the best time right now writing a psychological thriller/mystery novel! It’s set in Havana, and it focuses on students from a dance school in the USA who travel to Cuba for a salsa retreat. When one of the students disappears, everyone becomes a suspect.
It’s unlike anything I have ever written before. Every single character is unreliable — I am at the point in the writing process where I want to spend every free minute I have working on that book!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I feel hopeful that readers will see my work as an invitation into spaces of discomfort in which we can explore issues that really matter in ways that elevate growth and grace. I love characters who are getting it wrong, like mine are, because they may offer an impetus for us to try harder to get it right.
I think my hope is for my work to be a reflection of collective racism and what society is like at this time. It is so easy for those of us who are white people to be casually racist, to not think about race, to not do real work around it.
I think stories which don’t show white fragility and saviorism and cooptation are not honest reflections of who and where we are. It’s like an all-white sitcom which suddenly adds a Black character with no discussion of racial realities.
It’s just sanitized BS and I think we can do better and be better in terms of showing up honestly, and I hope my work is an invitation for more conversation around these issues, which are really important to me.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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