In Their Own Words

Back then, Sloppy’s was the “locals spot.” They brought in a lot of diverse, cool music, a lot of national touring bands were playing there. I remember Leon Russell playing there, War, Pure Prairie League.

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?”

Some songs are bilingual, some are straight English, some are straight Spanish. It really depends on when the song was written, how it was written, and what it talks about. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore nowadays, our best performance so far was in Canada where nobody spoke Spanish and everybody was singing our songs.

The “Defibulators” band’s name was misspelled for their first gig and the misspelling has stuck for the country band from Brooklyn. As the band plays on, it...

first visited the Keys in the mid-’80s and fell in love with the area. I knew right then this would be my home. I spent every moment after that trying to figure how to live here. It took a while but there was no other place on the planet I wanted to be. I just love everything about the Keys.

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.

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.”