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Rachel Knox Credit: Adam Lichtenstein \/ University Press of Florida<\/p>\nRachel Knox Credit: Adam Lichtenstein \/ University Press of Florida<\/p>\n
To be from Florida, even for someone born here, is to don a kind of Scarlet F. And that F-word comes with baggage, a lot of it, most of which brought on by idiots who aren\u2019t even from Florida. Delineating details rarely make the more salacious headlines, and the fact remains: this place is its own ecosystem, politically and culturally, apart from the rest of the South and the nation, really.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Florida\u2019s problem is its exports. Through media and myth, Florida remains a kind of punchline.<\/p>\n
Sunshine state native and debut author Rachel Knox<\/a>\u2019s \u201cAnywhere Else\u201d(University Press of Florida<\/a>) invites readers into her Florida, one that is and isn\u2019t what you know. Using pop culture, history, and lived experience, she parses Florida through cultural touchstones in time, from \u201cWild Things\u201dto Aileen Wuornos, examining what those exports conceal and who buys into the illusion. She also makes a case for something locals have always known: Florida isn\u2019t just kinda queer\u2014it\u2019s historically so.\u00a0<\/p>\n A kind of orb weaver\u2019s web results from Knox\u2019s varying shades of Florida and her life growing up here. One that feels closer to so many of our own experiences than most \u201cFlorida\u201d books, eerily so. It felt like she was a spy narrating so many beach-bum days, drinking too many cheap beers at Shadrack\u2019s. Like all of us Florida-born young folks were just a couple barstools away in the same places in different chapters.\u00a0<\/p>\n Knox celebrates the official launch of \u201cAnywhere Else\u201d at Tombolo Books<\/a> in St. Petersburg on Tuesday, March 24, 7 p.m.-8 p.m., where she\u2019ll be in conversation with fellow Florida writer Tyler Gillespie<\/a>. The no-cover event is open to the public.<\/p>\n Before the launch, Creative Loafing Tampa Bay spoke with Knox about writing Florida without turning it into a punchline and what it was like to edit her first book during two catastrophic hurricanes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Thanks so much for talking to me. \u2026 Reading your book was like\u2014first of all, it\u2019s the first book I\u2019ve read in under 24 hours since having a baby four years ago. That\u2019s my praise. It\u2019s super high praise. And your book is getting such great pre-press. I saw T Kira Madden posted about it. That must feel really good.<\/p>\n It does. I feel like it\u2019s hard to gauge the level of feeling. It\u2019s a very strange industry. It\u2019s really hard to tell when you love a book and when lots of people like a book. So I\u2019m just kind of like, \u201cWe\u2019ll see what happens.\u201d<\/p>\n You moved back to Florida in 2020. You\u2019d finished at New School by then?<\/p>\n I graduated in May of 2020, which was chaos. Every industry was on fire. \u2026 My husband\u2019s family is down here, and I was like, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we go back to Florida? At least we\u2019ll be near family, and then I can apply to some grad schools.\u201d I ended up getting into a few programs, but USF had the best aid package, fully-funded, so I was like, \u201cI guess we\u2019re staying here.\u201d<\/p>\n I love that the book avoids genre. \u2026 How did you start pulling this project together? Did it come out of the MFA?<\/p>\n This is the hardest part of talking about the book. I\u2019ve always had trouble explaining what I write. It doesn\u2019t fit into any typical nonfiction box. \u2026 I got really sick of reading books about Florida that all sounded the same and didn\u2019t reflect my experience. So the challenge was like, \u201cOK, what would reflect the version of Florida that I know?\u201d \u2026 It\u2019s too complicated to explain easily. I don\u2019t think the typical memoir form does that, and I don\u2019t think the typical Florida essay does that either. So I sort of had to smash them together.<\/p>\n I love that you found ways to use all your research, all the early Florida history in the archives. The book makes clear Florida isn\u2019t just queer, we\u2019re historically queer. Was that something you were thinking about?<\/p>\n One of the huge reasons I wanted to go to grad school in Florida was because I knew what I wanted to write about would be influenced by Florida, and I needed to be here to remember certain things, to have the rose-colored glasses taken off.<\/p>\n One of my favorite lines you wrote: \u201cyour Florida provenance becomes your defining characteristic.\u201d \u2026 And you did the thing I didn\u2019t do. You went to New York. But then if you go to New York, you\u2019re from Florida.<\/p>\n Yeah, and I actually don\u2019t think New York helped me become a writer. I moved there to get out of Florida and see what I could do with my life, and restaurants are what changed my life. I was always a writer. I just needed to be somewhere else, away from my family and away from stuff that had happened, and figure something else out.<\/p>\n You\u2019re also a bookseller. It must be wild to write a book as a bookseller.<\/p>\n Yeah. I actually think it\u2019s the best education any writer can have. Everyone who wants to publish a book should work at a bookstore because you see how the sausage gets made. Publishing is one thing. Bookselling is another. They\u2019re connected, but not the same. Seeing what people actually buy and read, what sells and what doesn\u2019t, helps you figure out how to position the book you want to write. I was definitely thinking, \u201cOK, where in the store is this book going to live? \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Being part of a literary community, we have regulars like a bar. \u2026 Events are like going to a TED talk twice a week. MFA program, writing a book, working at a bookstore, it supercharged the process.<\/p>\n You seemed really conscious about punching up.<\/p>\n That\u2019s super important to me. \u2026 I always had uneasiness with how people joke about Florida. Some of it is funny, yes, we\u2019re fucked up in weird ways, and it\u2019s easy to lean into the jokes. But I grew up really poor, and I had family you would consider rednecks or white trash. \u2026 I grew up originally in Port Tampa. When we moved to St. Pete when I was in seventh grade, I was like, oh my god, what is this place? \u2026 We shopped at Walmart. So it felt important to write for those people, too, to make sure anyone reading this never feels made fun of. Not even in a \u201cYou\u2019re in on the joke\u201d way. There isn\u2019t a joke. It\u2019s like, this is what it is. Only we get to have our sense of humor.<\/p>\n It never occurred to me to be ashamed of being from Florida \u2026 until I entered the greater writing world.<\/p>\n Yeah. You don\u2019t even know you\u2019re othered because you\u2019re doing all the right things. You\u2019re like, \u201cI\u2019m so metropolitan, I\u2019m so cultured.\u201d And then you do something you don\u2019t realize is outing yourself. You\u2019re like, oh, I\u2019m never going to be able to get away from this. At some point I stopped being embarrassed. I was like, I actually have a leg up on these people. They\u2019re wearing Carhartt to class and paying thousands of dollars for it, and I\u2019ve had that in my closet since I was 10. It\u2019s my uncle\u2019s jacket. I actually know something these people don\u2019t know. They want what we have. They just never want to have to live through it.<\/p>\n I was curious about the timeline, too. You graduated and then pulled this together. Were you writing through the hurricanes?<\/p>\n Oh, yeah. My final manuscript, not the one with copy edits, but the one to turn in before edits, was due the between between Helene and Milton. I was like, \u201cHey, this isn\u2019t going to happen, sorry, hurricane.\u201d And that was one of the benefits of being with a Florida press. They\u2019re like, yeah, we know.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pitch in to help make the Tampa Bay Journalism Project a success.<\/a><\/p>\n Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.<\/a><\/p>\n Follow us:\u00a0Google News<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0NewsBreak<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Reddit<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Instagram<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Facebook\u00a0<\/a>|\u00a0BlueSky<\/a><\/p>\n This article appears in Mar. 05 \u2013 11, 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tRelated\n<\/p>\n \t