An indoor portrait photograph of author Vanessa Frances standing and leaning casually against a large white pillar. They have long reddish-brown hair with bangs and are wearing a white, sleeveless button-down v-neck top and light-colored pants with thin vertical stripes. They are holding a dark-colored book with both hands in front of them and looking directly at the camera with a gentle expression. Small tattoos are visible on their right arm. The background features the interior of a grand building with white walls, a dark wood handrail, and decorative geometric black metal railings bordering an open balcony area. — Vanessa Frances Credit: faaemusic / Instagram

There’s a particular grief that comes from growing up in Florida: loving a place while watching it become increasingly inaccessible in real time.

Vanessa Frances’ debut novel “Orange Island” understands that feeling intimately. It’s set in a near-future version of the state shaped by climate collapse and runaway development, but its emotional center is quieter and more familiar to those who grew up here—yearning.

Beneath the speculative fiction scaffolding is a grief-struck love letter to a state that feels on the verge of disappearing. Frances writes about Florida as a precious ecosystem that people are still fighting to recognize before it’s gone.

Ahead of her talk at Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg this Thursday, Creative Loafing Tampa Bay spoke with Frances about Octavia Butler, old Florida mythology and what it means to love something enough to worry about its future.

Orange Island – An Evening with Vanessa Frances

Time Thu., May 21, 7-8 p.m.

Location Tombolo Books, 2153 1st Ave S., St. Petersburg

Description Tombolo Books is thrilled to welcome Florida author Vanessa Frances to the bookstore to celebrate the release of her book Orange Island. A mysterious death, a techno-dystopian backdrop, a crumbling climate. A young woman searches for answers in this meditative, lyrical thriller.

One thing I immediately loved about ‘Orange Island’ is that it feels deeply Floridian in ways that are subtle if you grew up here. There were little details where I thought, ‘there’s no way this person didn’t grow up here.’

Vanessa Frances: I love this state so dearly, with all of its quirks and nuance and nonsense. It’s such a special place. It’s so special because it is so fragile.

When I’ve talked about “Orange Island” with people outside Florida, it’s been interesting trying to explain Florida beyond Disney, beaches, crazy people and alligators. Florida existed long before the parks.

There’s this idea running through the book that so much suffering is preventable… the brutality is constantly laid alongside wealth and access and artificial comfort. Growing up here, so much of Florida can feel just barely out of reach.

I’ve always thought about love and worry as very intertwined. When you care about something deeply, it’s inevitable that you worry about its future… ‘Orange Island’ is definitely a “please don’t let this happen” kind of book.

The relationship Savannah has with Dove represents my relationship with this place. It’s this idea of a better outcome that could have been… a Florida that looks different from the one we have today.

I loved that you took the history of Florida all the way back in the book… It reminded me of ‘The Everglades: River of Grass.’ You’re grounding this futuristic, techno-dystopian landscape in something ancient and fragile.

I was also thinking a lot about speculative fiction while reading it. Writers like Octavia Butler were often relegated because of genre, even though they’re some of the greatest novelists we have. And reading ‘Orange Island,’ it feels like the narrative is constantly on our heels here.

I struggled with the genre label while writing it because it feels so close to reality… I wanted to market it as literary fiction at first because some of the things inside it barely felt speculative.

There were things in the original draft I literally ended up taking out because they happened by 2024. Some parts stopped feeling speculative entirely.

I think there’s often more commentary on the present inside speculative fiction and sci-fi than there is in a lot of literary fiction.

The idea that Orange County becomes the last coveted safe haven in Florida feels both horrifying and kind of funny.

“Orange Island” is actually a real geological term. It was some of the first land to emerge from the water in Florida… and in the book it becomes the last thing left above water.

Growing up in Central Florida, I was always hearing about these hundred-year development plans. The idea of people retreating inland from the coasts, trying to preserve what little elevation is left, felt very surreal but also very possible.

Melissa Febos once said her wife, the poet Donika Kelly, described the music she listens to as “begging-ass songs,” and ‘Orange Island’ feels like a begging-ass book about Florida. It feels like it’s pleading with the state to survive itself.

I’ve been a professional yearner since I was a kid… This is literally my yearning book. Dove represents my relationship with this place. It’s a story about grief, but also longing for a version of Florida that feels increasingly out of reach.

Important Florida question: What’s your 7-Eleven order?

Since I was a little kid, I’ve been a queso-and-chips hyperfixation person… so I’ll get the really cheap nachos with the jar cheese and an electrolyte drink because I’m constantly dehydrated. I have to balance out all the salt in my 900 million milligrams of sodium nachos.

I’m an ocean girl. Salt, sand, any body of water is not safe for me… I think it’s years of perpetual salt exposure. I’m like, “I gotta drink the ocean water and then eat my nacho chips.”

Orange Island cheese.

It is functionally Orange Island cheese.

There’s no cover, but an RSVP is requested, to see Vanessa Frances at Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg on Thursday, May 21.

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