Andrew Furman
ORP: What does success as a writer or artist mean to you?
Andrew Furman: To be a successful writer to me mostly means to keep the inspiration going so that I'm always writing something that I'm excited about, whether it be an essay, a story, or a novel. To reach a receptive audience for my work in the form of publication and an appreciative readership is also nice, but definitely secondary to the "successful" feeling of being inside a writing project day in and day out.
ORP: Who do you consider to be your creative ancestors and contemporaries for your art and/or writing? How does your creative work converse with theirs?
AF: I seek inspiration in good writing wherever I find it, both historical and current. I cut my teeth as a critic/scholar of Jewish-American writers such as Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Cynthia Ozick, and their work continues to inspire me. As a Floridian of almost 30 years who often writes about my home place, I also admire the work of fellow Florida writers from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ernest Hemingway, Harry Crews, and Thomas McGuane to Karen Russell, Lauren Groff, Kristen Arnett, Joy Williams, Ana Menendez, Carl Hiaasen, and Jennine Capo Crucet. Other writers I draw inspiration from tend to write what we call "quiet" novels and stories, and include Peter Orner, Elizabeth Strout, Marilynne Robinson, J. M. Coetzee, John Banville, and Kent Haruf.
ORP: Does writing or creating energize or exhaust you? What aspects of your artistic process would you consider the most challenging or rewarding?
AF: Both! The toughest part of writing for me is getting myself inside the head of whomever it is I'm imagining, which is to say my protagonist. What I'm after as a writer is getting into that headspace where I'm in absolute sympathy with my protagonist. I never know exactly how to get there or when it's going to happen, and often I just have to write through various drafts to work myself into this imaginative space, but when I get there it feels somehow very right and true. It feels, in short, that I'm starting to write from inside the story or novel and that's where I love to be as a writer. I suppose the best analogy I can think of for this creative space would be how athletes talk about "being in the zone."
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
AF: I think that some of my best work, which is to say my writing which most artistically evokes the interiority of my character or characters, comes from a place of vulnerability, and I mean my vulnerability here. It takes courage, I think, to allow oneself to be vulnerable anywhere in our big bad world , and this includes on the page. Weirdly enough, I feel that timidity is the enemy here, that to be timid as a writer, at least for me, is to keep my guard up and not allow myself to go to those most vulnerable places where the magic starts to happen in terms of fully realizing my protagonist's humanity and evoking that humanity in words on the page. When I feel my guard going up, distancing myself from my character, I sometimes admonish myself with the mantra, "Feel more."
ORP: What books have you read many times?
AF: Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Willa Cather's My Antonia, Toni Morrison's Beloved, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and, jeez, several by Philip Roth, including Goodbye, Columbus, The Ghostwriter, The Counterlife, and The Plot Against America. I also return again and again to the stories of Chekhov, Malamud, Paley, Dan Chaon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth Strout, Peter Orner, and Anthony Doerr.
