Christy Edwall’s story, “The Sea around Us,” appears in the spring 2020 issue of The Southern Review. Here, she discusses drawing inspiration from Rachel Carson, her obsession with Florida, and the speed with which human beings incorporate disasters.
Preety Sidhu: Your story features a couple on a “working honeymoon” aboard a private yacht, anchored over the ruins of a storm-sunken city in coastal Florida, with only a quietly opinionated South African captain and nearby boats of fishermen and looters for company. In what order did these elements come to you, as you were developing the story?
Christy Edwall: As far as I can tell from my diary, the elements of the story, or some version of them, came together pretty quickly. The seed came from a passage in Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (from which I’ve looted the title) describing a piece of lost land in the North Sea. She evokes a haunting image of a drowned world which has always appealed to me (Atlantis, Ys, Lyonesse, etc.). I thought about setting the story in Oxford, where I was living at the time, and where I could imagine drowned spires and bridges and sunken masters’ gardens. But because Oxford seems to deaden stories (at least for me) and because I’ve been obsessed with Florida for five or six years, I thought I’d see if it could be set on a piece of coast not unlike the place my grandmother lives, a retirement home for wealthy Christians. I was afraid this bizarre kingdom would become a setting, not a story, so I wondered how a couple I’d just met—a filmmaker who went to sea for months and a Maths teacher, though neither of them like Ruth or Ben in temperament—might take to it.
PS: The ease with which your characters accept the reality of the sunken city suggests this story takes place in a speculative near future when such losses might be the norm. In your mind, was the storm that wrecked this city an isolated incident or part of a broader trend? In what other ways do you envision the world these characters inhabit to be similar to or different from our own?
CE: These are good questions, although I’m not sure I have a good answer. I suppose it felt like a conceivable present: the Florida coastline seems to be sinking at a startling rate each year. And in terms of the distance of the dead from the living— the characters’ ease in accepting their setting—I think humans have always been able to adjust to radical changes or incorporate recent disasters with startling speed.
PS: Were you consciously setting out to write climate fiction with this story? If so, what are your thoughts on cli-fi as a genre? What would you hope readers take away from such stories?
CE: I didn’t intend it to be read within a particular family of stories. As a reader, I’m inclined to avoid anything I felt had palpable designs or themes. For me, it comes down to an inherent urgency in the concept— something more to do with the way the sentences or images rub up against each other. I write (I think) because I’m interested in finding out something rather than because I have found it out. This is exposing in several ways, not least because I might be fairly accused of profiteering from borrowed experiences, in addition to parading my ignorance.
PS: Ruth herself functions as a sort of gently troubled camera within the story, wanting to bear witness to the lost lives beneath the boat but with no available means for doing so other than her imagination. Meanwhile Ben, the actual cameraman, pointedly avoids all relics of human civilization, finding them categorically uninteresting. What does this tension between seeing and not seeing signify to you? Does it matter to the dead if they are seen? Does it matter in other ways?
CE: That’s a lovely idea. I hadn’t thought about Ruth’s imagination as a corrective lens. I suppose I was mostly interested in the awful but maybe inevitable separateness of intimate relationships, and the failure to communicate the oblique way in which our imagination makes us sympathetic to— or at least curious about—other lives.
PS: Despite the horrors that lie beneath, the Coracle seems like a pleasant enough place to be—sun drenched, lazy days of reading and napping, evenings of romantic dinners and wine. Was this contrast something you drew out intentionally? If so, what were you hoping this effect would convey?
CE: I think this can be blamed on my infatuation with Florida, which is such an odd juxtaposition of natural extravagance and human interference. Also, it’s probably the result of reading William Bartram’s Travels and (I can’t recommend this enough) Joy Williams’s The Florida Keys: A History & Guide.
PS: What are you working on next?
CE: I am trying to finish a novel I’ve been working on for several years. After that, I expect heavy redrafting and so hope for new leads and small curiosities. At the moment, a diary feels like the most important work, trying to track a reality which (I hope) will someday feel fictional.
Christy Edwall was born in South Africa in 1985. She has a DPhil in English from New College, University of Oxford, and her stories have been published in Granta and The Stinging Fly. She lives in West Sussex, England.
Preety Sidhu is an intern at Electric Literature. She holds an MFA in fiction from Louisiana State University, where she worked as an editorial assistant at The Southern Review. You can find her on Twitter at @_preetysidhu.
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