“…meaningful connection to landscape is a human birthright.” Leodrune, Occult Needlecraft

I know what you’re thinking: isn’t all Florida “weird Florida”? As everyone’s aware of, we’re home to perhaps an outsized share of American strange—but that’s what makes writing weird fiction set in Florida so challenging, and so rewarding. The more elastic the average reader’s view of Florida is, the further a writer can stretch the truth and still have the story hit home.

Much like ass men and breast men, there are plot writers and there are character writers. Then there’s me and Thomas Hardy, whose first love is landscape. Wherever I am, that’s where I’m writing about; I’ve been fortunate to live in a fair few places, all of them quite different from each other, all of them requiring close attention and a lot of staring at trees. But although I love writing upstate New York Gothic, and although I racked up a ton of Nega-Ohio tales when I lived in Cleveland, weird Florida is always at the bottom of my heart, wherever I am.

According to my Google Drive, the first WFL story appeared in 2013. But my landscape fascination had begun to emerge in high school, in no small part due to reading Their Eyes Were Watching God for AP Language. Now here was a writer from my own neck of the woods, making real art about real places that weren’t New York City, Los Angeles, or a European capital between the wars. Zora caused Florida to come alive for me in a way that merely being raised there hadn’t. Central Florida in particular was a worthy subject, deserving of interest, even adoration. I sat down and wrote a short story about a pink Spanish Revival house in an orange grove, a Shakespearean grandmother, and a troubling Southern Gothic relationship between twins. The template was created.

The map above is a sprinkling of the stories of this type people can read, a thin shelf of the iceberg beneath Little Nothing—thus far the WFL item with most reach. There are novels and short stories littering my Drive folders that will never see daylight, but were not yet wastes of time to write. There are trunk stories that might garner editor interest someday; there are novel-shaped items ripe for cannibalizing by other novels-in-progress. Most of all, there’s a record of thinking in these modes, a pattern of interest mirroring the springs, caverns, sinkholes, and subterranean rivers of the Floridan aquifer.

Here’s another youthful influence, much less high-flown than Zora Neale Hurston: Piers Anthony. If you’ve never lost brain cells to Xanth, know that it’s shaped like Florida—because he lives, of all places, in Inverness. Much as it grieves me to admit, encountering a fantasy land shaped like the place I lived was mind-blowing. The rules changed. My interest in second-world fantasy, stimulated by the Lord of the Rings movies, declined sharply. Instead I began to ask myself the questions all low fantasists love: what makes the place I live weird? What would make it weirder? If magic existed in this place, what shape would it take? What is our folklore? What folklore is still being invented?

“No country is so primitive that it has no lore, and no country has yet become so civilized that no folklore is being made within its boundaries.” Zora Neale Hurston, Go Gator and Muddy the Water

As of this writing, some particularly Floridian elements gestured to or outright pursued in the WFL catalogue: the Tarpon Springs Epiphany Cross Dive, cave diving, the Windover archaeological site, curative spring spas, our Confederate history, turpentine camps, the Highwaymen, Eohippus, Gibsonton, St. Augustine’s legacy of spiritualism, and Hialeah Park. No pirates yet—not real ones, anyway—but Weeki Wachee-style mermaids may yet emerge… stay tuned.

On that note, and in honor of #MerMay, a treat for you readers: you can find an unpublished short story, “The Grotto,” in PDF here. As I’ve been revising my current WFL project, as of now named Balmy Springs, I’ve also been revisiting the earliest stories I wrote in these veins—for plundering, and also for sheer love of the sport. It’s been a great reminder of the joy I’ve taken over the years in this playground, beloved of weird luminaries like Alissa Nutting and Karen Russell, my magical home state. “The Grotto” is one of my favorites, and there’s a lot of its spirit in Balmy Springs. If you check it out, I hope you enjoy it too.