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’t 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.
Florida’s problem is its exports. Through media and myth, Florida remains a kind of punchline.
Sunshine state native and debut author Rachel Knox’s “Anywhere Else”(University Press of Florida) invites readers into her Florida, one that is and isn’t what you know. Using pop culture, history, and lived experience, she parses Florida through cultural touchstones in time, from “Wild Things”to 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’t just kinda queer—it’s historically so.
A kind of orb weaver’s web results from Knox’s varying shades of Florida and her life growing up here. One that feels closer to so many of our own experiences than most “Florida” books, eerily so. It felt like she was a spy narrating so many beach-bum days, drinking too many cheap beers at Shadrack’s. Like all of us, Florida-born young folks were just a couple barstools away in the same places in different chapters.
Knox celebrates the official launch of “Anywhere Else” at Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg on Tuesday, March 24, 7 p.m.-8 p.m., where she’ll be in conversation with fellow Florida writer Tyler Gillespie. The no-cover event is open to the public.
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.
Anywhere Else – The Launch Event with Rachel Knox
Time Tue., March 24, 7-8 p.m.
Location Tombolo Books, 2153 1st Ave S., St. Petersburg
Description Tombolo Books is PROUD to present the launch event for Anywhere Else: Essays on Florida by our very own Rachel Knox! In this beautiful, big-hearted collection, Knox explores images of Florida in pop culture together with her own experiences growing up in Florida and discussions of issues central to life in the state. We couldn’t be more excited to launch this book into the literary world and celebrate an incredible accomplishment of one of our own! Knox will be in conversation with local poet Tyler Gillespie!
Thanks so much for talking to me. … Reading your book was like—first of all, it’s the first book I’ve read in under 24 hours since having a baby four years ago. That’s my praise. It’s 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.
It does. I feel like it’s hard to gauge the level of feeling. It’s a very strange industry. It’s really hard to tell when you love a book and when lots of people like a book. So I’m just kind of like, “We’ll see what happens.”
You moved back to Florida in 2020. You’d finished at New School by then?
I graduated in May of 2020, which was chaos. Every industry was on fire. … My husband’s family is down here, and I was like, “Why don’t we go back to Florida? At least we’ll be near family, and then I can apply to some grad schools.” I ended up getting into a few programs, but USF had the best aid package, fully-funded, so I was like, “I guess we’re staying here.”
I love that the book avoids genre. … How did you start pulling this project together? Did it come out of the MFA?
This is the hardest part of talking about the book. I’ve always had trouble explaining what I write. It doesn’t fit into any typical nonfiction box. … I got really sick of reading books about Florida that all sounded the same and didn’t reflect my experience. So the challenge was like, “OK, what would reflect the version of Florida that I know?” … It’s too complicated to explain easily. I don’t think the typical memoir form does that, and I don’t think the typical Florida essay does that either. So I sort of had to smash them together.
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’t just queer, we’re historically queer. Was that something you were thinking about?
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.
One of my favorite lines you wrote: “your Florida provenance becomes your defining characteristic.” … And you did the thing I didn’t do. You went to New York. But then if you go to New York, you’re from Florida.
Yeah, and I actually don’t 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.
You’re also a bookseller. It must be wild to write a book as a bookseller.
Yeah. I actually think it’s 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’re connected, but not the same. Seeing what people actually buy and read, what sells and what doesn’t, helps you figure out how to position the book you want to write. I was definitely thinking, “OK, where in the store is this book going to live? …”
Being part of a literary community, we have regulars like a bar. … Events are like going to a TED talk twice a week. MFA program, writing a book, working at a bookstore, it supercharged the process.
You seemed really conscious about punching up.
That’s super important to me. … I always had uneasiness with how people joke about Florida. Some of it is funny, yes, we’re fucked up in weird ways, and it’s easy to lean into the jokes. But I grew up really poor, and I had family you would consider rednecks or white trash. … 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? … 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 “You’re in on the joke” way. There isn’t a joke. It’s like, this is what it is. Only we get to have our sense of humor.
It never occurred to me to be ashamed of being from Florida … until I entered the greater writing world.
Yeah. You don’t even know you’re othered because you’re doing all the right things. You’re like, “I’m so metropolitan, I’m so cultured.” And then you do something you don’t realize is outing yourself. You’re like, oh, I’m 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’re wearing Carhartt to class and paying thousands of dollars for it, and I’ve had that in my closet since I was 10. It’s my uncle’s jacket. I actually know something these people don’t know. They want what we have. They just never want to have to live through it.
I was curious about the timeline, too. You graduated and then pulled this together. Were you writing through the hurricanes?
Oh, yeah. My final manuscript, not the one with copy edits, but the one to turn in before edits, was due between Helene and Milton. I was like, “Hey, this isn’t going to happen, sorry, hurricane.” And that was one of the benefits of being with a Florida press. They’re like, yeah, we know.
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This article appears in Mar. 05 – 11, 2026.