Anywhere Else - Essays on Florida

A memoir of growing up in Florida interwoven with cultural reflections of the state from The X-Files to Emerson—revealing the complex truths of life as a Floridian Florida and pop culture are a magnetic, viral match. From true crimes on social media to spring break movies to Miami Vice, the state has been served up for the rest of the world as a place of swamp things, serial killers, beach bums, teen girls, and dead poets. In Anywhere Else, Rachel Knox weaves her own story around the media caricatures, digging deeper into what it’s like to be from a “wild” place—and who gets to decide what that means. Knox writes from her own experiences of Florida as a child in Sunday school, a student on field trips to Everglades National Park, and a bartender making drinks for both out-of-state partiers and locals. She blends these memories with critical looks at touchstones from different cultural moments, such as Aileen Wuornos, America’s most famous female serial killer; Florida’s Highwaymen artists and Thomas Kinkade, the much-beloved religious “Painter of Light”; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalist writer who spent time in St.