In Their Own Words

Key West is a great place to live for writers because of its great writer vibe created by its long literary heritage from Hemingway to Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Bishop to Philip Caputo, Tom McGuane, John Leslie and Robert Stone, to name a few.

I also love playing the Green Parrot. I think it is the most interesting bar musically on the island and in South Florida for that matter.

“But the thing that really convinced me was one photograph,” he said. “It was a group shot and in it was the image of a small African-American girl, dressed in the fashion from the early days of the firehouse. She wasn’t there. How’d she show up in the photo?”

I have heard that Key West is known to have some pretty wild partiers and eccentric personalities so hopefully a show like “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” will be right up their alley.

“Bodies in the sand, tropical drink melting in your hand, We’ll be falling in love to the rhythm of a steel drum band, Down in Kokomo.” Released in...

Brooke Babineau’s book, “Below Mile Zero,” is about the Key West he lived in during the 1980s. He has written screenplays and poems, too, but his book...

In recent years, the world of photography has seen a bit of a renaissance. The age of camera phones and digital photography sprouted a significant uptick in...

Why a trawler? “I didn’t think I could single-hand a sailboat,” she said. “I wanted to cruise and knew I’d be doing a lot of it alone, so a trawler with engines made sense to me.”

I have been told that my portrayal of island life is darned accurate, so Keys residents enjoy seeing themselves through my characters. A lot of people from “up north” say that my descriptions warm them in winter and make them long for return visits to the Keys. Aside from that, I think my avoidance of clichés and my examples of island humor make folks want to keep reading the novels.

Howard Alden has studied with some classic teachers of the jazz and blues world after teaching himself the guitar, and he has played and recorded with many...