Waiting for lunch to digest so I can go work on the driveway while the temp is over 10 degrees, I’m reading my weekly Literary Hub newsletter. And what to my eyes should appear, but them saying today is National Florida Day! I’d still rather not be in Florida (too humid for my sinuses,) but the idea is pretty good, in and around the doom and violence in some of the day’s events. There is all sorts of stuff on this page, including Dave Barry, but skip to following pages for better bits of escape. I’m going to post a snippet about FL literature (yes, literature comes from FL, too, and it’s darned good! I love Carl Hiaasen!)
Snippet:
Today, January 25, is National Florida Day.
Despite being the epicenter of contemporary American book banning, Florida has a lush literary history, and is the subject of ongoing fascination for both writers and readers across the country. To celebrate the literary pedigree of the Sunshine State, and to combat the winter weather that is burying pretty much everyone else this weekend, we present to you a Florida reading list. This is by no means meant to be complete, of course. Just a little something to get you warmed up:
Joy Williams, Ill Nature
Amy Hempel on Ill Nature: Joy Williams lived for years in Florida, in the Keys, and was lucky to have known parts of it that no longer exist. This is one of the occasions on which her anger is also a form of mourning. “Neverglades” chronicles the destruction of an enormous percentage of this singular ecosystem, leaving it “a horror show of extirpated species.” Of Big Sugar’s role in its destruction, Williams suggests we “think of the NRA with a sweet tooth.” “That the Everglades still exist is a collective illusion,” she writes, “shared by both those who care and those who don’t.” She describes the state as “attuned to growth, on autocatalytic open throttle.”
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
Richard Deming on Dust Tracks on a Road: Hurston’s hometown, Eatonville, located outside Orlando, was one of the first towns in the United States to be incorporated and run by African Americans. She described it as “a pure Negro town— charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all.” Zora’s handsome father, John Hurston, a rugged, physically commanding Baptist preacher with a gift for lyric turns of language—perhaps the one gift he passed down to his daughter—would even become a three‑ term mayor in the town.
Eatonville had been a defining place for her, and although she would be forced to leave it as a teenager, it stayed with her for as long as she lived. The town and its habits, its inhabitants, all pressed knowledge and lore into the topographic folds of her mind. On benches and apple boxes and milk crates sat people at Joe Clarke’s store, the “heart and soul” of the town. When it was really humid, they gathered on the porch, shirts loosened, shooing big Florida flies, and fanning gently their foreheads. Inside and out, people talked and gossiped, telling tales large and small, real and invented.
Lauren Groff, Florida
Grace Flahive on Florida: Some books are books. Other books are places. More than any story collection I’ve read in my life, Lauren Groff’s Florida feels like tearing through the page and stepping into a fully realized portrait of the state, living and breathing and dangled with Spanish moss, as panthers pass through the shadows. In “The Midnight Zone,” a mother staying in a remote cabin with her two young boys falls from a stool and hits her head and finds herself traveling outside of her body, amongst the thick of the trees. In “Eyewall,” a woman hunkers down as a hurricane slams her home, and when the storm passes, a miracle is revealed: a single, intact chicken egg sits, gleaming, where the front steps had been.
These stories are rich, at times hallucinogenic, and unforgettable.
Carl Hiaasen, the whole oeuvre
Neil Nyren on the works of Carl Hiaasen: The books are all set in Florida, because of course they are. Besides being the place where Hiaasen was born and raised, and lives in and loves, it is a place utterly unique in both its natural beauty and its level of venality. “Every pillhead fugitive felon in America winds up in Florida eventually,” muses a detective in Double Whammy (1987). “The Human Sludge Factor—it all drops to the South.” Another detective in Skinny Dip (2004), who is originally from Minnesota, concurs: “[In the upper Midwest] the crimes were typically forthright and obvious, ignited by common greed, lust or alcohol. Florida was more complicated and extreme, and nothing could be assumed. Every scheming shithead in America turned up here sooner or later, such were the opportunities for predators.” Tied to that, gloats a crooked (and entirely uncredentialed) plastic surgeon in Skin Tight (1989), “One of the wondrous things about Florida was the climate of unabashed corruption. There was absolutely no trouble from which money could not extricate you.”
Dantiel W. Moniz, Milk Blood Heat
Grace Flahive on Milk Blood Heat: Each of the stories in Dantiel W. Moniz’s collection are the type you experience twice. First, you inhale the story (Moniz’s spellbinding prose doesn’t offer any slower option). Then, each story lingers within you, as your mind digests the inflection points, the double meanings, the emotional dynamics that Moniz has laid bare.
Set primarily in Jacksonville, Moniz’s stories trace the contours of her characters’ inner lives, including private pains and unspeakable secrets, showing us ordinary people with extraordinary things broiling just beneath the surface. Each protagonist grapples with something too dark and unwieldly for one person to carry—girlhood grief, the loss of a pregnancy, hate spun from faith, and a near-death experience, just to name a few. But Moniz’s characters find agency in the impossible—in “Tongues,” a young girl defies her community’s hypocrisy, and in “The Hearts of Our Enemies,” a mother delivers a delicious act of retribution. The collection’s title hints at the visceral stories within, and the prose delivers—as well as milk, blood and heat, this is a fully embodied world of sweat, tears, ocean water, and tiny, haunting limbs. As a reader, I let myself be swept away. As a writer, I was taking notes on Moniz’s endless skill.
Read more here.
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