This summer I published a new novel, State of Paradise, and embarked on a book tour that included three stops in Florida, where I grew up. This was my first time doing bookstore events in my home state, and to mark the occasion, my mom decided to road-trip with me. We would start at the Writer’s Block in Winter Park, then drive northwest to Gainesville for an event at the Lynx, before swinging over to the Gulf side of the state to visit Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg.
State of Paradise is set in Florida and features, as a side character, a governor whose draconian policies are wreaking havoc on residents. The governor remains unnamed, but the inspiration is clear. My mother and I were traveling in Ron DeSantis’s Florida, and it was a strange feeling, to be doing my first book tour there at a moment when literature has never been more contested.
My mom lobbied for taking local roads the whole way, but I wasn’t willing to double our drive time. She gets anxious on highways, especially I-4—which, to be fair, represents so much of what has gone wrong in Florida: dysfunction, danger, unrealized dreams. I-4 is its own reality, a state of mind.
In 2022, DeSantis signed a bill that paved the way for anyone to challenge the books stocked in public school libraries; school boards had to “let the public know” when they wanted to approve new texts and were required to report to the state “any objections to the material, by a parent or not.” A person does not have to live in the school district in question or even have children to object to a book. In 2023, the authors of works removed included Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, André Aciman (author of Call Me by Your Name), and Colleen Hoover. This year, PEN America reported that Florida is responsible for 72 percent of the books that have been pulled from schools in the United States.
These policies have created an environment that is hostile to education, art, free expression, and queer culture. Teacher departures from Florida public schools have skyrocketed since DeSantis took office. When I asked Alsace Walentine, who co-owns Tombolo Books with her wife, Candice Anderson, about the impact of these policies, she said: “ ‘Don’t say gay’ laws in conjunction with book bans have created an atmosphere of confusion and fear, especially among schoolteachers and librarians in Florida.” The store has made plans to collaborate with public schools to organize free author events, but at least two different schools have canceled events after Tombolo scheduled them.
Public libraries are also under fire. In March, the American Library Association reported that 2,700 titles “were targeted for restriction or removal in Florida schools and public libraries.” A recent rule barred “grant activities” between Florida libraries and the ALA, which supports training and funding for libraries across the nation. I asked several authors with strong ties to the state about the effects on their communities. Kristen Arnett, a Florida-based novelist and former librarian, expressed concern for library budgets, which do a lot more than keep books on shelves. “Book banning is one portion of this,” she said. “Libraries are whole worlds for some [people] that provide everything, including food and sometimes clothing for job interviews. When one portion of a budget gets wiped, it affects everything. It affects the community. Book banning means people banning, especially in Florida.”
Tania Galiñanes and her book earrings, a gift from a friend, seen on her next-to-last day as media specialist at Tohopekaliga High School in Kissimmee, Florida, in 2023. Galiñanes quit her job because of the state government’s book banning.
I became a reader when I was in college. I spent countless hours in library stacks, where Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye was among my early literary discoveries. When I desperately needed to imagine other possibilities, I could pursue my own intellectual growth. I was free to find what I needed to find. Today’s young people are not always so lucky.
Books bans are not, of course, limited to Florida, but they amplify the “Floriduh” caricature, the narrative that the state is a cultural wasteland, home only to sunburned retirees, drunk spring breakers, theme parks, terrifying gator encounters, and Confederate flags. Every bookstore owner and bookseller I spoke to noted the challenge of convincing publishers to send authors to Florida. (They also took care to emphasize that if a writer felt unsafe coming to Florida, they understood and respected the choice not to.)
I was adamant that my book tour include Florida. State of Paradise emerged from the wild singularity of the Floridan landscape, and it felt strange to imagine discussing the book with readers in Los Angeles and Brooklyn but not with the community I had been writing toward. I lived in Florida until I was 21, and then again for three years in my late 30s, and yet I’d never pushed to do a bookstore event in my home state. Had I bought into the Floriduh stereotype without even realizing it? Arnett resists these clichés: “Florida is such a living, breathing, succulent place. It’s so alive all of the time. The way that people sometimes talk about it makes it sound dead. But this is one of the least dead places on the planet!”
I found that culture of aliveness in all the bookstores I visited. I found warm, packed rooms, smart questions, engaged and welcoming audiences. Most book tours focus on destinations that are understood to be cultural epicenters—e.g., L.A.—but there is value in going to places that aren’t already overwhelmed with cultural programming, or places where authors have personal relationships with the community. In Florida, it felt meaningful to connect with the readers I had written this book for, to talk about the St. Johns River or the I-4 hellscape without having to explain what I meant.
A mural in Jacksonville, Florida. Over 200 people attended a banned-book readout organized by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History at James Weldon Johnson Park near the mural, earlier in the day.
It was also important to support Florida’s rich network of independent bookstores, vital forces when it comes to pushing back against book bans and challenges. The Lynx was founded by novelist Lauren Groff and her husband, Clay Kallman. Groff praises Gainesville, home to the University of Florida, as a supportive ecosystem for the store. At my event, I was in conversation with Groff, who came prepared with exceptionally insightful questions, and I could feel a sharp, crackling excitement coming from the audience. In the signing line, person after person expressed deep gratitude for the store. When I asked Groff how the Lynx is navigating the current climate, she said that bookstores are “usually private businesses, and don’t take federal or state money, so they’re not under duress to submit to the kinds of unjust laws or astonishingly stupid forms of censorship that our universities, public schools, and libraries have to submit to.”
The Lynx has a nonprofit arm, the Lynx Watch Inc., which works to distribute challenged and banned books widely in Florida, and recently launched Gainesville Reads, a monthlong community reading festival focused on one book. (The inaugural read is The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, by Jeff Goodell.) Tombolo celebrates banned and challenged books through the store and has helped stock pop-up banned-book libraries. A bookseller made a pocket-size zine about book bans, which the store gives away for free. Walentine also hopes to encourage more participation at school board meetings.
Groff has a vision of bookstores as “inherently radical places, because they open up the potential to discover vastly different worlds than our own.” In State of Paradise, the narrator is preoccupied with past memories of her time in a psychiatric facility, recalling at one point: “Once, at the Institute, I asked a counselor why the library didn’t have any novels and he said that invented worlds overstimulated the imagination.” What is it about these invented worlds that people find so threatening? It must have to do with how stories expose us to new possibilities. Stories encourage us to imagine futures that might deviate from the futures those in power want us to believe in. I started writing because I started reading. Which is to say: Stories move people to action all the time.
I might be biased, but I believe there is something special about Florida literature. “There’s an innate wildness to the writing of writers from Florida,” said the Miami-born writer Jennine Capó Crucet. (She launched her latest novel, Say Hello to My Little Friend, at legendary local chain Books & Books earlier this year.) “Florida writing takes risks because we don’t even register them as risks; to us, it’s just what life looks like, and the results are often sublime.” At the Lynx, I chatted with Carlynn Crosby, who runs a book club devoted to Florida literature. She mentioned titles coming up on the club’s schedule by Betty Mae Tiger Jumper, Thao Thai, Harry Crews, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Tananarive Due, and Arnett. They’d already read Zora Neale Hurston and Crucet’s new one. Later, over email, Crosby said: “Florida has such a rich and vibrant literary tradition, but that’s not what we’re known for now. Rather than acknowledged as a generative place of incredible creative talent and artistic expression, we’re seen instead as a place that restricts those things.”
There is something special about Florida readers, too. We do not take culture for granted. We do not take it for granted that authors will come here and share their work—or that they will even be permitted to do so. We understand that we need to support the bookstores that are working so hard to, as Walentine put it, “[fight] for the right to think.”
Outside St. Petersburg, my mom and I had the very Florida experience of driving through a series of torrential rainstorms. We were nearly run off the road by a semi truck and, once again, my mom cursed our decision to travel on major highways. The Tombolo event was well worth a somewhat harrowing drive, however. The store sold out of copies of State of Paradise before the event even started. I was in conversation with Arnett, and it was beautiful to be with writers and readers who all have a stake in the survival of this place.
And on the drive home, my mom finally got her wish. The GPS routed us onto local roads to avoid weekend traffic. We exited the highway in Coleman. The sun was out. We passed a tiny post office, a fruit stand, cows. We could have been in a Kinnan Rawlings novel—that is, until we saw the massive housing developments, still in the skeletal stages. We talked about the events, the people we’d met, the haul of children’s books we were bringing back to my nieces. I thought about how this part of the tour had deepened my belief that Florida has always been, and will always be, a place where art happens. That Florida is a place worth fighting for.
This post was originally published on here
