Florida Book Club

Laura van den Berg's new novel State of Paradise gave me serious Franz Kafka and David Lynch vibes. It contains some of the weirdest evocations of Florida I've ever encountered, and that's saying a lot. I'm not sure we even touched on half of what this book contains, thematically, in this great conversation to wrap up season 10!

Fans of climate-change poetry and the struggles most people endure under late-stage capitalism in Florida will love Alex Gurtis' When the Ocean Comes to Me. And if you aren't, but you are into imagism, haiku, and/or prose poetry, you will still love our conversation about his new chapbook from Bottlecap Press.

Leaving Florida after you've built a huge legacy with a project like O, Miami must be hard. We welcome back P. Scott Cunningham to talk about relocating to Illinois, how O, Miami will carry on, some rising South Florida authors, and the strange state Florida literary education currently finds itself in.

Poet Tyler Gillespie's 2018 collection Florida Man is BACK! The 2024 reissue contains 20 new poems under the title Heat Advisory. He stops by the clubhouse to talk about the book's republication, how Florida has changed since 2018, and why QR codes are aesthetically cool (among other topics).

Gale Massey presents a varied cast of imperfect, sometimes violent or reckless, but ultimately sympathetic characters in her 2021 collection Rising and Other Stories. We cover her creative process in our conversation, the factors involved in identifying as a "Florida writer," and we also give some shout-outs to Pinellas Park!

Lan O Lakes native and recent Ringling College grad Ansel Taylor joins us to discuss his animated series concept Swampland, a fun amalgamation of Gravity Falls, Celtic mythology, and Florida wildlife, among many other elements! He'll also revisit George McCowan's eco-horror film Frogs with us, and talk about why he thinks queer people are drawn to cryptids.

"Dystopia" is a frequently-invoked genre description; Scott Michael Powers, author of the novel The Murder Plague, joins us in this episode to discuss his tale of a pathogen emerging from a Florida biotech facility and driving those infected to embark on deranged murderous rampages that destroy the social fabric of the US, and why dystopias have such a broad appeal and rich recent literary history.

Gambling, murder, and desperation plague the small town of Hockta, Florida over a several-day period in the 1950s in Lori Roy's compelling new novel Lake County. There's also a (fictionalized) celebrity involved! Lori joins us in conversation about her book to kick off season 10 of Florida Book Club.

Florida Weird is a zine that will remind some readers of a rougher-around-the-edges Islandia Journal. The creator and driving artistic force behind Florida Weird, Mara Beneway, joins us to discuss the zine's creation and how Florida has inspired her, as a non-native. (Also, find out – what is a zine?)

Further Reading

Ariel Francisco joins us today to discuss his bilingual volume of poems, A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship, which features haikus, lots of poems about insomnia, and haunting imagery of the sea reclaiming Florida. He also talks a bit about his own translation work!