Talking Location With …Kathleen Furin: MARTHA’S VINEYARD

4th November 2026

#TalkingLocationWith … Kathleen Furin, author of The Loneliness of Glass: Martha’s Vineyard

As someone who absolutely loves the beach, I was thrilled to be awarded with a Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing fellowship in June of 2021. At that time many of us were still coming out of those rough months of COVID lockdowns, and most of the conference took place online that year. I was part of a small group of writers who were able to travel to the island in person and participate in amazing workshops, share our writing with each other, and discover the beauty, wildness, and magic of Martha’s Vineyard. My short story “The Loneliness of Glass” was born on (and is set in) this intriguing place. I was trying to capture the mood and tension of my experiences on the island through this particular piece.

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The first thing I did upon arriving was rent a bike — I have a sunrise practice, and I wanted to be able to bike down to the beach to watch the sun rise in the mornings. That week it didn’t rain at all, and I managed to catch the sunrise every single day. Those sunrise trips were integral to the story I ended up writing, about a bitter, lonely woman whose greatest wish is to die and be freed from her grief.

There is something powerful and magical about watching  the sun rise, especially when you are alone. Biking down in the dim light I could feel the spirits of the island who dared not stalk the day begin to lift and shimmer into the oncoming brightness. There is a kind of energy in the shift from night to day that is palpable, and for me it was especially palpable on the island. It wasn’t a scary energy, necessarily, but it wasn’t friendly either. While I was there, sitting alone on the beach with a type of hopeful prayer in my heart, I had a sense that I was being observed, judged, measured by something much greater than myself.  There was history on that island, people with stakes in what happened in this place, and I was nothing but a stranger.

I did not know much about the history of the island — I still don’t — but I could feel a heavy sense of historical presence and energy there. There was so much beauty, but underlying that beauty was a rugged tension which I think my story tries to encapsulate. This sense of history living in the present moment is found in the indigenous names which are still used; indeed, the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head lived on what we now call Martha’s Vineyard for millennia, and have had federally recognized land in Aquinnah since the 1980s.

There is also a strong Black community in Oak Bluffs which celebrates a rich cultural heritage on the island. Before arriving I assumed Martha’s Vineyard was an island for the affluent (and it is), but there is so much else happening there too — everything to me felt ancient there, a kind of ancientness that transcended contemporary events.

I was gifted with the seeds for this story on my daily morning bike rides. Each morning as I rode down to the water I would see a dead animal on the road — and each morning as I rode back to the house where we were staying the animal would be gone. That may seem like a weird way to enter into a story, but I kept wondering what had happened to the dead animals. My character, Claudine, a woman who is obsessed with death (and embeds pieces of the dead animals she finds into the jewelry she creates) was born. She collects dead animals and harvests pieces of them for her own creativity, in ways that are so reminiscent of the colonial aspects of that place, a constant taking with no regard for energy or community. She despises the tourists on the island even as she relies on them. She is connected to, or thinks she is connected to, some of the spirits that haunt the island. She “sees” things, but are the things she sees real?

What stood out to me about Martha’s Vineyard was the idea that beauty coexists with both danger and pain. Even the wealthiest tourists are suffering in some way, even the “happiest” people have something to hide. In some ways my story is about how life coexists with death and suffering, and what it means to want to die, to be unable to bear the pain of living and loving, to want to enter into the frigid waters of loneliness that contain all the things we want to forget — and perhaps the things we want to remember, too.

Kathleen Furin

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