Florida Field Notes
Every novel I write grows from real ground — the outlaws, the forgotten scandals, the institutions and the people they used up, and the Everglades frontier that swallowed so much of it. Florida Field Notes are short works of nonfiction where I dig into that history directly: the true stories beneath the fiction.
These essays are for anyone drawn to Florida history, the Southern literary tradition, and the long struggle of ordinary people against concentrated power — the same current that runs through all five of my novels.
The seventy-year campaign to drain the Everglades: Hamilton Disston's 1881 gamble, Governor Broward's "Empire of the Everglades," Richard Bolles selling swampland "by the gallon" — and Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who finally named it a river of grass. The true history beneath the novel.
Read the Field Note →The true 1936 Jacksonville murder behind the novel: a killing that left a fortune untouched, a bootlegger accused, two hired killers who recanted, and a coerced-testimony case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in Hysler v. Florida.
Read the Field Note →The outlaw "King of the Everglades" was, to the poor crackers who knew him, no mere bandit but a folk hero striking back at the banks and the powerful. Reign of terror, or strikes against the leviathan? The question that drives my novels.
Read the Field Note →From the prison camp of Cool Hand Luke to the turpentine swamps where Martin Tabert was flogged to death — the convict-lease system that rebuilt slavery under a new name, and the two words in the Thirteenth Amendment that made it legal.
Read the Field Note →A paradise sold sight unseen: the binder boys flipping options ten times a day, William Jennings Bryan preaching real estate from the Venetian Pool, Ponzi's swampland syndicate, and the hurricane that ended it — leaving the common man holding the paper.
Read the Field Note →More Field Notes are on the way — Florida outlaws, forgotten histories, and the landscape that shaped them.