"SWAMPLANDIA!," a novel by Karen Russell that was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is named for the fictional gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades it depicts. Wildly imaginative, the book takes the reader through eerie mangrove swamps, expansive saw grass prairies and kitschy roadside attractions.
"On the West Coast, everyone would ask, 'How did you come up with that?,' " recalled the 31-year-old Miami native. "But in Florida, it was just realism. People would say, 'The dad character — that's got to be Jungle Leary.' "
For the novel and her forthcoming book of short stories, "Vampires in the Lemon Grove," Ms. Russell retraced her childhood trips to the Everglades. Below are edited excerpts from a conversation with her about rediscovering them.
Q. Where in the Everglades would you go as a child?
A. My family would always camp in the Ten Thousand Islands. And when we did the same a few years ago, the mangrove tunnels felt just like the labyrinths I remembered, like portals to some other world. Such strangle-looking trees mangroves are, their roots like stilts in the water. There's something spidery and ominous about them. You get so turned around there because it's so densely foliated; there's not always a horizon to consult. It's like an echo of a tree everywhere.
As you go back toward Miami, it's a completely different ecosystem from the Gulf. My mother would take us biking on this trail in Shark Valley, a saw grass prairie lined with alligators. It's pretty severe looking, like an African savanna, just a few inches lower in elevation than the green mangroves, and this creates such a different landscape.
Q. How do you navigate around the islands?
A. On a motorboat. My uncle, the mad madman that he is, has gone camping on chickees, these little huts with thatched roofs on stilts in the water. They're scattered throughout the islands, so rangers have to give you a map. You sleep on the platform, listen to all of the alligators and fish and mosquitoes at night, and hope you don't roll out.
Q. Any place to stay on relatively dry land?
A. Chokoloskee Island. It's bigger and more elevated than the other islands because its bedrock is a mound of shells. Before the Spanish came to Florida, the Calusa, a mysterious group, lived there for hundreds of years and threw all of these shells into a pyre, maybe for some ceremonial purpose. No one really knows why.
I don't think many people think of Florida as frontier, but it really was. In the early 1900s, there was just a handful of people living on Chokoloskee Island, people like Ted Smallwood who set up this Indian trading post. His descendants have kept it as it was then: the door a certain angle for hoop skirts and all sorts of dyed alligator skins. As a kid reading about these pioneers, I thought they were so cool — all the outlaws and crackpots who started the thing up.
Q. Was that site the inspiration for "Swamplandia!"?
A. One of them. There are so many places that resemble that ticky-tacky, mom-and-pop theme park. On some unannounced Wednesday in the fifth grade, you'd all pile into a bus and drive about an hour to the Miccosukee Indian Village, such a short commute to get to a place that felt so alien. It's a reservation with huts built out of palm fronds and saw grass, and a little like Colonial Williamsburg: you watch people doing daily tasks from the past, a woman making dolls, a sweaty man wrestling an alligator. And then you buy traditional dolls and bracelets. In Florida, we're very candid about the fact that we're selling you history or a fantasy. We're like, "This is our treasure, and you can have it for four bucks."
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