A Book’s Landscape is a Character Itself by J.P. White

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A Book’s Landscape is a Character Itself by J.P. White


I'm partial to stories where the landscape is a character itself. 
   
You find this quality in almost any British or Australian novelist or any "island" writer for that matter.  In my first novel Every Boat Turns South, Florida and the islands of the Bahamas and upper Caribbean assume a major character role: the stickiness, the heat, the summer rains, the tree frogs, the alligator turtles, the unrelenting monotony of moisture and rot.

Why does Florida inspire so many writers? Florida has so many loose ends, so many failed dreams, so many abandoned boats and broken people combined with an abundant alligator population, vultures galore and all seven kinds of poisonous snakes that it's a perfect setting for a novel.

Novels are built out of conflicts and journeys that people can't easily solve or finish.  How could such a sultry place as Florida not make for a good setting for a mystery/crime novel? 
   
In a place "where the weather suits your clothes" like Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, California there is always a startling contrast between emptiness and fullness, between no-place-to-go and over-development, between the swanky restaurant on the beach and the lone fisherman at the end of the rickety pier.  I've drawn to those contrasts partly because they represent, not so much the extremes in social strata, as they do the extremes within the individual psyche.  People who have everything routinely want to escape from it.  People who have nothing want just the opposite. Between those longings, there is ample room for a writer to find not just fodder for a plot, but the universal elements of drama: crime, guilt, and redemption.

In Every Boat Turns South, Matt Younger, a 30-year-old boat delivery captain, returns to Amelia Island, Florida after a 13-year absence to make a confession to his dying father.  The son wants to tell the father about a failed boat delivery from West Palm Beach to St. Thomas, BVI.  The father wants to hear about Matt's role in the death of the favorite son, Hale.  Between the telling of the tale at home and the telling of an island tale, Florida inserts itself as one more difficulty that father and son must overcome or merge with, but time is running out for both of them.  Why?  The father is rapidly dying and the son has someone from his past that's on his trail.

In the last 35 years, J.P. White has published essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry in over a hundred publications including The Nation, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, and Poetry (Chicago).  He is a graduate of New College in Sarasota, Florida, Colorado State University and Vermont College in Fine Arts. He is the author of five books of poems and a novel, Every Boat Turns South.  You can visit his website atwww.jpwhite.net.

J.P. will be on virtual book tour May 3 – June 25. Visit his official tour page at Pump Up Your Book to find out more about his exciting new book, Every Boat Turns South.
 Amazon or Barnes & Noble are the best way to obtain your copies, although it will be available to order in most bookstores.