Hiding behind the title of Rachel Knox’s debut, Anywhere Else: Essays on Florida, is a braided set of reckonings, of leaving, longing, and return, asking not just what home is, but who gets to define a place so overdetermined in the national story. Knox’s Anywhere Else resists the easy narratives that so often flatten Florida into caricature. What emerges instead is a place rendered through accumulation—of memory, media, desire, contradiction—where personal history and cultural myth are in constant negotiation. These essays trace not a single arc of departure and return, but a series of recursive encounters with “home,” each one reframing what it means to belong to a place so frequently misunderstood, dismissed, or reduced to spectacle.
Knox writes with an attention that is both intimate and analytical, moving fluidly between lived experience and cultural critique. An anecdote opens outward; a fragment of pop culture refracts a deeper emotional truth; a landscape becomes charged with the weight of history. The essay form suits her precisely because it allows for this elasticity—this capacity to hold multiple temporalities and meanings at once. Florida, in her hands, is neither simply refuge nor aberration, but something far more unstable and generative: a site where identity is shaped through tension, distortion, and reclamation.
What is especially striking is Knox’s refusal to resolve these tensions. Instead, she lingers in them, attentive to the ways narratives about place are constructed and imposed, by outsiders, by institutions, and by those who call it home. In doing so, she restores texture to a landscape often stripped of it, insisting on its complexity without sentimentality.
The conversation that follows extends these concerns, offering insight into Knox’s approach, her investment in the essay as a form, and her commitment to reimagining Florida not as an anomaly or as a meme, but as a lens through which broader American realities come into focus.
AAA: Tell me about the choice to write a memoir-in-essays rather than a straight memoir. How much did your desire to examine “home” and redefine Florida shape the decision to keep the explorations more expansive?
RK: I’ve always been drawn to the essay form – I think it offers some narrative possibilities that straightforward memoir might not necessarily lend itself to. Especially fragmentation, like in ‘Wild Things’, where the timeline is all over the place and we jump from scene to criticism back to scene – that’s how my own brain operates, and it reflects the kind of scattered connections I tend to make with the art and media I consume. I started really thinking about the art and media that have shaped how everyone else thinks about Florida, and how that stereotype has shaped my feelings about home, and then the braiding of the two things just felt natural. The thread of Florida and criticism was always in the early drafts. Essays give some more runway for meaning-making in a way that I really enjoy as a reader and as a writer. Also, kind of self-consciously, I felt like maybe just my life’s events weren’t enough to compel a reader! I know that’s not true, I do think there is definitely still some stigma about personal essay, especially for women writers. Melissa Febos has some great writing in ‘Body Work’ about how writing that is focused on the self, for women and writers of color and other marginalized people, is actually an act of defiance. So I wanted to try to use my own story to humanize a place that I think is often stripped of a face and a real, lived identity.
AAA: Also… can you say something about Florida’s place in shaping our national narrative today, in this political moment?
RK: Absolutely. I write in the book that one of the dangers of dismissing Florida as just some whacked-out, nonsensical place, is assuming that what’s happening here isn’t directly connected to the rest of the nation. We’ve been fighting our own book bans and the “Don’t Say Gay” bill for years, with what felt like little outside support other than “Well, that’s just Florida for you”. But just this past weekend a piece of legislation banning books with queer content from school libraries was introduced at the federal level – HR 7661. So, both the circumstances of our state and the reactions to it – that kind of stuff only happens there, those leopards would never eat my face – are dangerous to both Floridians themselves and to every American. Where we go, you go soon.
AAA: Since this is a memoir-in-essays, I’m curious which essay came first. How did you decide on the framing of the book? Were there essays that were harder to write than others, and why?
RK: Funnily enough, the first essay I wrote in this book was the last to actually be included. I started “Motel Art”, which is an essay about Thomas Kinkade and The Highwaymen – a collective of Black Floridian landscape painters – about nine years ago in an undergraduate class at The New School. I’d returned to college a decade after I’d first dropped out of a state university in Florida and had no idea what kind of writer I was, just that I had a lot to say. That essay sat in a drawer for a long time. It was briefly revived as an idea for a whole book about Kinkade – I’m kind of obsessed with him – before I abandoned it again. A professor told me it lacked love. It was just too critical, too cynical, with no other elements to grab onto for a reader. I just couldn’t find the spark in it. After I’d written the proposal for this book, where I knew Florida and identity would be the throughline, I started thinking about it through a different lens. I wanted to write about the art that I felt exemplified and really enshrined Florida’s natural beauty, as opposed to this commercial, Disney-fied thing that Kinkade represented for me. I’d always known about and loved the Highwaymen, but I hadn’t realized how connected those paintings were to my own feelings about nature and the divine, whereas Kinkade’s paintings represented something really essential to my Floridian childhood, something painful. *The framing of the book itself made it click, and opened up a different channel for me. I don’t know if that counts – it’s sort of a Ship of Theseus situation – but the bones of that essay have been rattling around inside of me for a decade. “Deserter” was the hardest for me to write, for sure, and is still the hardest for me to reckon with. I had a real desire for it to be perfect, which is of course impossible, but also a huge reluctance to include it in the book. Some of the reasons for that are kind of obvious, maybe – it’s about abortion and motherhood and faith – all tricky subjects to navigate. But some are more personal. I was and am most afraid of *publishing* that essay. I know it’s the one that will be read most subjectively, that will make people who know me think a bit differently of me – for better or worse, I don’t know – and the one I still can’t totally re-read without getting a little freaked out. As far as easiest – “Wild Things”, definitely. It sounds corny, but it sort of possessed me. I wrote it in a week or two, I think, the initial draft, and then obsessed over it for a year, tinkering and editing and rearranging it. It had almost twice as many sections as it does in the book, originally. It just kind of bubbled up in my consciousness in a way nothing else I’ve written has before or since – like I was a sort of conduit for my own subconscious. I wrote it during a really hot early spring and summer and thought about it constantly. It was kind of spooky. I hope it happens again, that kind of automatic whole-body writing.
AAA: “Wild” and “wilderness” echo throughout the book. By invoking wildness, I read a kind of defiant reclamation of the term—not just in relation to Florida, but to youth, coming of age, and womanhood. Can you talk about how you wanted to reset or reclaim that word in relation to your own experiences growing up in Florida?
RK: I actually wanted to call the manuscript “Wild Things”, but that presents a lot of SEO problems and copyright confusion. But it feels like the heart of the book to me. There are so many things that come up in association that feel linked – Where The Wild Things Are, Girls Gone Wild, Wild America, The Wild Heart of Florida (which is an incredible anthology of Florida nature writing). It was a word applied to me and my friends frequently, growing up. So the reclamation of it felt natural to me – I think there’s such a loaded double meaning. There’s a line in “Wild Things” (the essay) about the difference between ‘wild’ and ‘feral’ being based on perception, not reality – I really wanted to dig in to that idea. Who gets to say something is wild, and who gets to impose upon that wildness? You might call a wild landscape ‘unspoiled’ or ‘preserved’ and technically mean the same thing – but the connotation depends on the definer, not the thing being defined. That’s just too loaded of a metaphor to choose not to explore.
AAA: In Anywhere Else, you use one of my favorite essay techniques: pulling the reader into a broader, deeper story through seemingly small entry points. For example, a trip home to St. Petersburg leads to a reflection on the X-Files episode “Agua Mala,” which moves into a first crush (Mikey), leaving home, and the complicated ways people change or become unrecognizable to one another. It’s masterfully done—and one of many essays that works this way. Can you talk about your approach to structuring personal essays and weaving research into them? Do you know where an essay will land when you begin, or does the ending emerge along the way?
RK: I try to stay open to structure when I’m drafting, even though my instincts always tend towards fragmentation or braided styles. Writing that way is easiest for me, but it isn’t always the most satisfying reading experience when there’s an action-driven or more plot-heavy story. So, I try to find a form that fits the function of the essay. It’s funny you mention ‘Agua Mala’ as an example – that essay changed so many times before publication because the actual events and circumstances were changing in real time, even as I proposed and revised and edited and copyedited the book. Even now, things have happened related to that story that make me wish I’d held onto it for longer, or changed the parallels in some ways. That’s the thing I love and hate about nonfiction – an essay isn’t ever really done. You just have to decide when to stop. You as the writer are always gaining perspective, or more information, or you go see a movie that reframes your whole idea about an event. But you could keep writing the same essay for 30 years that way, you know? I left the ending of that one a bit short of the current reality, because it felt like it fit the message of the piece more, which is really about sitting with the feeling of not-knowing.
AAA: What surprised you in the writing and research of this book—both about yourself as a writer and about your home state?
RK:I was surprised at how easily I found myself writing into extremes. I would write a passage and then think, am I being too apologetic about such a horrible place? And then I’d re-read it a few days later and think, actually, I’m being way too self-conscious about this gorgeous, amazing place. In a meta-way, that’s so much of the Floridian experience – are they laughing with me, or laughing at me?
AAA: In the essay “It Is a Queer Place,” you write, in the wake of the “Don’t Say Gay” law, about the long history of queer writers who have made Florida home. What is it about the state, do you think, that can hold these contradictions?
RK: I think Florida is built on contradictions. The state’s entire history is violent and complicated and messy – the land was stolen from Native people like the Calusa and the Tocabaga and the Seminole by the Spanish and French and Andrew Jackson, decades of war and slaughter slashing their numbers. But it was also a haven for newly freed, formerly enslaved people and abolitionists after the Civil War. Then came subsistence farming settlements and fish camps and anarchist cowboys and all kinds of people who had to navigate an incredibly dangerous landscape to survive. Now, after the mid-century boom of land development and citrus farming, it’s totally different. It’s a vacationer’s paradise, which runs on the dollars of tourists, while also actively being derided by those same tourists. There are a million “Florida Man” jokes, but I see a sunburnt “Cleveland Man” acting a fool at a beach bar here every weekend. As far as Florida’s queer history, that was something I always knew would be a cornerstone of the book. It’s always been there, from Tennesee Williams to Doechii – and especially in my hometown of St. Pete, where I live, which is known for being a queer haven and home to the biggest Pride parade in Florida, our thriving Grand Central District gayborhood downtown, tons of queer artists and writers living here. Key West, Miami, Orlando, Tallahassee, even the tinier rural areas have thriving queer communities despite, or in pure spite of, constant targeted harassment, violence, and policies from our state leadership. There are Floridians with wildly different experiences – I can only speak from my own, but I tried to put as many different versions as I could into the book – but in some ways I do think Floridians are very alike, because of how being from such a singular place has shaped us. One of the main qualities, in my opinion, is resilience. Maybe that looks like defiance when people want you dead, maybe it’s resourcefulness – making a way out of no way. Making art that no one will take seriously or understand, until they do. Deciding to stay put even after the tourists go home, after hurricanes and heatwaves and tragedies because it belongs to you, too. That’s extremely Floridian to me.
AAA: You write a bit about Didion throughout the book, and I was wondering, aside from her, who else shapes your writing?
RK: Obviously the Florida greats past and present, who made me want to write about place – Zora Neale Hurston, the Marjories (Kinnan Rawlings and Stoneman Douglas). But also the kind of new guard of Florida writers – Lauren Groff, Karen Russell’s brilliant ‘Swamplandia!’, ‘Florida Palms’ by Joe Pan. Edgar Gomez wrote a memoir called ‘Alligator Tears’ that came out last year that’s exactly the kind of Florida book I’d been waiting to read. Outside of that, I’ve always been obsessed with the memoirs of Mary Karr and Annie Ernaux, totally different in place and style but real models of self-writing that feels universal and specific at the same time. I was reading Ernaux’s ‘Happening’ and Melissa Febos’ “Girlhood” and Jeanie Vanasco’s ‘Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was A Girl’ while writing the first drafts of these essays, and they definitely imprinted on me and the book.
AAA: How do you feel after writing this book? And what are you working on now?
RK: I feel different every day! I’m excited, but I’m nervous. I have no idea how it will be received, or if it will at all, so I’m anxious to see what happens when it starts to find readers. Hopefully, people will feel seen by it. Right now, I’m working on a proposal for book two, which is looking like it’s going to be about bars, drinking culture, and my many years of bartending and working in hospitality. I don’t know exactly the shape it wants to take yet, but I have a lot of ideas. It’s in that fun, ‘this could still be anything’ stage, which is my favorite. Plus – the research for this one sounds a lot more fun, if you ask me!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rachel Knox is a writer, teacher, and bookseller born and raised in Tampa Bay. Her writing has been featured in several publications, including The New Delta Review, Counter Service, Saw Palm, Lumina Journal, and 12th Street. She teaches writing at the University of South Florida and is a bookseller at Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg. ANYWHERE ELSE: Essays on Florida is her first book.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Asale Angel-Ajani is the author of the novel, A Country You Can Leave, a NY Times recommended book and an Amazon Fiction Editor’s Choice, as well as the nonfiction books Strange Trade and the forthcoming memoir, Fugitive Archives. Originally from California, she lives in New York City.