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Wednesday, April 25, 2007
New Literary Territory
It used to be commonplace to say that Florida
was fragmented: part South (in the north), part Northeast (in the south), part Native America, part Latin America, part Disney.
I think this is less true since the hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, when storms blew across our imaginary borders, crisscrossed
our state’s evacuation destination, Orlando, made mock of attempts to isolate our citrus canker (yes, I’m still
mad that the Dept. of Ag. cut down my healthy lime tree!), showed us our mutual danger and swamped us all in impossible insurance
rates.
We’re all in this together: We share the wind, the
ocean, the power of nature and the fantasy of glass towers, our booms and busts, our crime, our politics, our scoundrels and
heros, our worries and our amusements. We’re a peninsula seemingly apart from the rest of the country, and yet we’re
often at the center of its attention. Rare is the story without some Florida angle, it seems. When you heard about Anna Nicole
Smith, I bet you said, it had to happen in Florida. A death at the Seminole Hardrock Casino, just down the road from tabloid
headquarters, with the Broward sheriff guarding the morgue, at an intersection of Hollywood and the Bahamas: the event had
our territorial complexity and our propensity for stories with abundant plot lines and characters both sad and grotesque.
I’m only beginning to realize the hunger of readers to
understand this place. When I was doing readings around South Florida this winter as one of the contributors to Miami
Noir , everywhere we went I heard the eagerness of questions from audiences: Is there something about Hialeah in there?
How about some ghost stories like the ones my grandmother told me about St. Augustine? The rapidity of our development is
also the high-speed obliteration of our past, and many people expressed their wish that stories be written before they are
forgotten. And lots are being written. Florida books come out in abundance, but nowhere that I know of is the picture they
form being put together. Our trash and pleasure, our serious concerns about nature and politics, all infuse our fiction and
nonfiction, the work of our crowds of crime writers and clusters of poets. Shouldn’t they be read in the context of
the rich history of Florida literature, of Ernest Hemingway and Elizabeth Bishop, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Zora Neale
Hurston, John James Audubon and John D. Macdonald and so many more?
So I said, “There ought to be a website for reviews and discussion of Florida books,” and Susan Parsons challenged
me to create one with her, and: here we are.
Our first reviews
of course just begin to show what we have in mind, but I’m pleased to say that we at least touch on some of the range
of Florida history and genres. We look at books about Florida’s First People and the heyday of Miami Beach and I had the pleasure of reading Bill Belleville’s Losing It All to Sprawl which documents our present losses and future danger. We review new fiction by Chantel Acevedo and Harry Crews and Karen Russell and Ginny Rorby’s young adult novel which has been garnering national awards. We offer a reconsideration of Russell Banks’ Continental Drift twenty years after and an interview with poet Michael Hettich. We’ve posted some links to the bookstores, presses, magazines, and writers’ organizations around the state
and hope you’ll let us know about more we can include.
New
material is being added all the time and I’ll be writing here regularly to talk about the many seasons of our year and
things to read to get you through them.
Please enjoy what’s
here, sign up for our mailing list, link to us, and while you read, think about what Florida is.
—Lynne Barrett
3:52 pm edt
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| (Image from a Florida postcard) |
Weblinks to follow the weather:
www.nhc.noaa.gov - This is the official site of the National Hurricane Center. It's probably the most "official" site on the web,
so if you have trust issues, go here. They've improved over time, most notably with better maps and a new small news feed
at the top. In the past, their maps have been less definitive, with a huge cone, especially for slow-moving storms. Their
text descriptions are also very technical and dense. Plus, the site's not as colorful, and we all like colors, don't we?
www.wunderground.com/tropical/ - This is Weather Underground's tropical weather site. They are good if you want easy access to a wide range of information,
including things like the "historical" diagram which shows how similar past storms have moved. They have a good
variety of computer models (which are lacking on the NHC), and they're very easy to navigate. They're also the best source
I know of for hurricane blogging - Dr. Jeff Masters blogs about tropical activity pretty consistently, although if you're
a complete beginner he may seem a bit jargonish. Plus, they're the best location for hurricane news if you're trying to "one-stop
shop" for weather info at your mansion on Fisher Island, your home in the Hamptons, the Manhattan apartment, the London
flat and the Chateau on the Loire. On the con side, they are a commercial entity, so there are ads around the site.
www.skeetobiteweather.com - These guys have very clear diagrams that show not just where the storm will go, but how strong it will be in different
locations. They're also good for more minor systems, as they show details "investigation areas" that may develop
into depressions, which neither the NHC nor Weather Underground does. Their historical records, however, have not been updated
since 2005. They have a slightly wider variety of computer models than Weather Underground, though you need to visit both
sites to see all of them. They can be a bit slow in updating (they normally have a 45-minute to an hour lag in updating after
the NHC, as compared to Weather Underground's 5-minute lag), but that's because they end up presenting much more information
with their diagrams. They come across as no-frills, with their relatively plain layout and lack of things like "wind
history" that the other two throw in. --James Barrett-Morison
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Winners of the 2008 Florida Book Awards Book Design Gold
Medal: Emmett H.L. Snellings, Jr., Seminole Views Children's Literature Gold Medal: Susan Womble, Newt's World: Beginnings
Silver Medal: Donna Gephart, As
If Being 12 3/4 Isn't Bad Enough, My Mother Is Running For President
Bronze Medal: Loreen
Leedy, Missing Math: A Number Mystery Florida Nonfiction Gold Medal: Shawn Bean, The First Hollywood Silver
Medal: John Stuart & John Stack, Eds., The New Deal in South Florida
Read our review.Bronze Medal: Rodney Hurst, It was Never about a Hot Dog
and a Coke
Jeff Klinkenberg, Pilgrim in a Land of Alligators
Greg
Turner, A Journey into Florida Railroad History
General Fiction Gold Medal: John Dufresne, Requiem,
Mass.
Silver Medal: Tony D'Souza, The Konkans
Bronze Medal: Kristy
Kiernan, Matters of Faith
Debra Dean, Confessions
of a Falling Woman Genre Fiction Gold Medal:
Deborah & Joel Shlian, Rabbit in the Moon
Silver Medal: Lisa Unger,
Black Out
Bronze Medal: James Swain, The
Night Stalker
Patrick Kendrick, Papa's Problem
Martha Powers,
Conspiracy of Silence Poetry Gold
Medal: David Kirby, Temple Gate Called Beautiful
Silver Medal Winner:
Campbell McGrath, Seven Notebooks
Bronze Medal: Terri Witek, The Shipwreck Dress
Frank Giampietro, Begin Anywhere
Helen Wallace, Shimming the Glass House Spanish Language Book Gold Medal: Antonio Orlando Rodriguez, Chiquita
Silver Medal: José Álvarez, Principio y fin del mito fidelista Young Adult Literature
Gold Medal: John Tkac, Whispers from the Bay
Silver Medal: Anne Ake, Everglades
Bronze Medal: Julie Gonzalez, Imaginary Enemy
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