by Sarah Gerard
180. the sanctuary had received a $100,000 donation from the Embassy of Qatar: Mullane Estrada, “Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary on Indian Shores Gets $100,000 Surprise from Qatar.”
181. there was no warehouse that could accommodate birds: Eslick, email to Robin Vergara, June 14, 2012.
182. A new warehouse never materialized: Vergara, interview, November 10, 2015.
183. “it would have been a disaster like no other”: Ibid.
184. Fed up, Robin finally left to open his own bird sanctuary: Vergara, interview, July 24, 2015.
185. In April 2014, Florida Fish and Wildlife carried out an inspection of the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, Ralph’s house, and the warehouse: Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, inspection report, April 30, 2014.
186. “confined in unsanitary conditions”: Meacham, “Authorities Issue 59 Violations against Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary.”
187. “no longer rehabbing birds at his home or the warehouse”: Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, inspection report, June 17, 2014.
188. There is no regulation on the number of pigeons a person can have: Gregory, interview, November 29, 2015.
189. In January 2016, Jimbo told me, Andrew, Alex, and Peter planned to return to Florida to force Ralph out of his house and into the warehouse: Guastella, interview, November 27, 2015.
190. “one thing that I’ve always worried about is hurricanes”: Heath, interview, November 4, 2015.
191. Chief Jim Billie is the longest-serving chairman of the Seminole tribe of Florida: Gallagher, “The Rise and Fall of Chief Jim Billie.”
192. In January 2016, Tampa Bay Newspapers ran an online story about a blue heron approaching Ralph at the sanctuary: Goff, “Injured heron finds its way back to seabird sanctuary.”
193. any animals kept by the sanctuary as permanent residents must be made available for public viewing: “Wildlife Rehabilitation Permit,” Rule 68A-9.006.
194. Lieutenant Steve Delacure and Officer Robert O’Horo investigated the claim: Douglas, “Photos Show ‘Deplorable’ Conditions for Wildlife Held Captive by Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary Founder.”
195. “A cloud of rancid-smelling particulate hung in the air”: Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, inspection report, May 5, 2016.
196. The wing of a federally protected laughing gull had been amputated and bound in duct tape: Ibid.
197. He pled not guilty to all charges: Douglas, “Embattled Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary Founder Pleads Not Guilty.”
198. “My assistant who was working there passed away unexpectedly”: Heath, interview, June 5, 2016.
About the Author
Sarah Gerard is the author of the novel Binary Star (Two Dollar Radio), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and appeared on national Book of the Year lists. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, Bookforum, Joyland, Vice, BOMB, and other journals, as well as in anthologies for Joyland and the Saturday Evening Post. She’s been supported by grants and fellowships from Yaddo, Tin House, and PlatteForum. She writes a monthly column for Hazlitt and teaches writing in New York City.
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Advance Praise for Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard
“Gerard is a virtuoso of language, which in her hands is precise, unlabored, and quietly wrought with emotion. . . . She is also a very diligent journalist. . . . Brave, keenly observational, and humanitarian. . . . Gerard’s collection leaves an indelible impression.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“These large-hearted, meticulous essays offer an uncanny X-ray of our national psyche, examining that American mess of saints and con men, the peculiar, culpable innocence that confuses money and moral worth, charity and personal aggrandizement. Gerard’s prose is lacerating and compassionate at once, showing us both the grand beauty of our American dreams and the heartbreaking devastation they wreak.”
—Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
“Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State gloriously gutted me—and by that I mean changed me forever as a reader. Using Florida as a lens and the body as a ticket to travel, Gerard weaves her astonishing prose through land and corporeal truth, like the inside out of love and loss and violence and beauty. What if our obsessions and addictions and longings were actually knotted up in our guts with environmental destruction, religion, and some insane storyline called love? What if our bodies carry the trace evidence of all the places we’ve inhabited? What if our relationships were laid bare like a beach? Sunshine State reminds us of who we really are underneath the skin we live in and the ground we stand on—and mercifully, there is still beauty, in spite of everything.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Chronology of Water
“Good writers learn early in their careers that what people are most interested in is other people. In this regard, Sarah Gerard is indeed a very good writer. Her prose sparkles in this series of essays, but it is the people in Sunshine State who capture and concern us. Vivid, sometimes disturbing, but always engaging, I loved this memoir of our southernmost state where an evolving people play, dance, struggle, and die beneath tropical skies.”
—Homer Hickam, author Carrying Albert Home and Rocket Boys
“With visceral wit and a literary toolkit full to the brim with new forms, Sarah Gerard’s first collection of essays makes the wild and untamed inner life of Florida bloom vividly within the reader’s mind. Sunshine State is a strange, thoughtful, and deeply felt journey through a state whose beauty and peril speak to the contradictions of an entire nation.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Intimations and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
“I’ve never read anything like Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State, and I’m worse off as a writer for it. Gerard manages to personalize the political and politicize the personal in ways that feel at once effortless and insanely ambitious. These essays remind me that at the bottom and top of structural inequities are people with emotions, friends, failures, and memories of love and loss. Sunshine State is a book of essays, but really it defies and embraces form. That formal defiance leads to some of the best essays I’ve read in the twenty-first century. Sunshine State should be mandatory reading for everyone living in Florida, the United States, and the world. It’s an amazing creation.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
“Sarah Gerard writes with soulful clarity and keen intelligence about the cultish relationships and aspirational thinking that course through American life. This is a collection packed with bittersweet longing—for a life that’s fuller or wilder or wealthier, for a larger self that’s always out of reach.”
—Alex Mar, author of Witches of America
“Sarah Gerard’s sparkling essays-as-memoir is as multifaceted as Florida itself. Navigating intense friendships; her family’s unconventional faith; a flirtation with Amway, tattoos, drugs, boyfriends, and a husband; a homeless shelter and a bird sanctuary run by a corrupt madman, Gerhard is wide-eyed yet fully present, blunt yet empathetic to not only the crazy swirl of characters that surround her, but to herself in formation. A tough, honest, beautiful work by one of our brightest and most unflinching young writers.”
—Rob Spillman, editor of Tin House and author of All Tomorrow’s Parties
“As a fellow Floridian, it was a great gift to discover such a viscerally refreshing vision of home in Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State. Gerard masterfully explores the environmental, economic, and regional complexities of Florida alongside the eternal mysteries of identity, home, family, trauma, and desire. A stellar essay collection by a writer in possession of a talent as singular and furious as Florida itself.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me
“For those who fea
r Florida is comprised primarily of gators and the insane, this book may seem like it was written for you. In many ways, it surely was, giving life and voice to a world which has previously not held much acreage in your mind. But at its core, Sunshine State is a love letter to the wild and fascinating land itself, and the cast of characters who call it home.”
—Amelia Gray, author of Isadora and Gutshot
“In Sunshine State, Gerard goes deep into the paradoxes of her birth state. I found these essays to be smart, kind, and illuminating. This book left me improved spiritually.”
—Darcey Steinke, author of Sister Golden Hair and Suicide Blonde
“Intensely personal and intricately researched, Sarah Gerard’s essays break ground with the work of Eula Biss, Maggie Nelson, Joan Didion. Gerard is provocative and an excellent sleuth. She digs for the secret, unshakeable truths we are busy turning away from—yet she is never sensational, never sentimental. Her mind is tough but she reaches with love. She asks that we reach with her—with her resilience, her prodigious strength. This book is a gift to all of us.”
—Noy Holland, author of I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like and Bird
“Sarah Gerard has that lingering gaze shared by investigative journalists and lovers. With equal measures of scrutiny and tenderness, she examines her feverish homeland and its denizens, herself and those she loves. No idealization can withstand this kind of scrutiny, and thank God, because I would not trade the hours I’ve spent in Gerard’s world for any more perfect version. One can’t hope for a more sharp-eyed, tender-hearted chronicler of herself and our busted world.”
—Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
“Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State weaves narrative nonfiction and personal essay in a way that creates its own unique tapestry. This essay collection is unlike any other I’ve encountered—stylistically dazzling without sacrificing a reporter’s precision, relentlessly moving without doling a sentimentalist’s artificial sugar—this is a collection of so many Floridas only a native could know. At a time when America feels so broken, Gerard allowed me to love it again somehow.”
—Porochista Khakpour, author of Sick and The Last Illusion
“Brilliant, empathetic, fearless, and humane—in her search to better understand herself, her family, and the state that helped shape her, Sarah’s insight, heart, and diligence are boundless. The best book of essays I’ve read in years—a brilliant collection from a writer of incredible versatility and talent.”
—J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest
“Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State is a deeply intelligent, personal, and political collection of rich essays, with a clarity sharp as an icicle and “place” as the connective tissue. The themes of class, identity politics, and loneliness emerge in ways that are simultaneously disturbing and comforting. The perfect book for the complex and heady humans in your life—aka, for everyone.”
—Chloë Caldwell, author of Women and I’ll Tell You in Person
“Armed with a mesmerizing breadth of empathy and a rare, hi-res emotional intuition, Sarah Gerard’s essays lead us forward through decades of her observation of our world, along the way unpacking everything from religion to economics, desire to aspiration, grief to the very grit of what seems to make a person tick. It’s rare to find a voice you can come to believe in so quickly and completely, like an old friend, and one whose very spirit makes the world seem that much more bearable, more true. Here is something to believe in.”
—Blake Butler, author of 300,000,000
“Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State probes at the fringes of society, the intersection of right and wrong, the private core of our fundamental self-definitions. Sarah’s compassionate and boundlessly curious essay collection drives always toward truth, even when that truth is hard to bear. An unforgettable book, by a writer with a powerful, essential American voice.”
—Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
“Compelling, intriguing, and brimming with voice, Sunshine State showcases Sarah Gerard’s huge heart and huge brain. Each of her essays is a relentless interrogation—of herself and of the world around her. She is a seeker and a seer, a critic and an empath, an intellectual and a poet. This book isn’t just about Florida; it’s about America. It’s about humanity. I could read Sarah Gerard all day.”
—Diana Spechler, author of Who by Fire and Skinny
“Sarah Gerard brings an immersion journalist’s acuity and shrewdness to essays made urgent by a native daughter’s alloy of sympathy and rage. Capacious and captivating, Sunshine State gets Florida right—and dead to rights—while breathing fresh life into the shoe-leather memoir.”
—Justin Taylor, author of Flings
“Sarah Gerard’s writing is so precise, so deft, so marvelously human, so deeply connected to the people around her, that if I were to have my choice of executioners, I’d call on her.”
—John Reed, author of Snowball’s Chance
“An insightful look into the darker corners of our sunny paradise from a skilled writer and sharp-eyed observer, Sunshine State is a collection of essays that weaves a portrait of Florida as a place that's closer to the police blotter reality than the puffery of the tourism promoters.”
—Craig Pittman, author of Oh, Florida!
Also by Sarah Gerard
Binary Star
Copyright
The following essays previously appeared elsewhere in slightly altered forms: “BFF” was originally published as a chapbook by Guillotine; “Going Diamond” was originally published in Granta.
This is a work of nonfiction. Except where indicated otherwise, the events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as remembered by the author, to the best of her ability, or as told to the author by those who were present. Some names, physical descriptions, and other identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy and anonymity of the individuals involved.
sunshine state. Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Gerard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
first edition
Cover design by Joanne O’Neill
Cover illustrations: © Alamy Stock Photo (hummingbird, squid, fish, jellyfish, and spider); © Getty Images (turtle, snake, alligator, rabbit, bat, blue heron, and moth)
ISBN 978-0-06-243487-6 (pbk.)
EPUB Edition APRIL 2017
ISBN: 9780062434883
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* This represented a second year of decline for Alticor, whose sales in 2014 totaled $
10.8 billion.3
* He studied at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois; San José State; and Southwest University, a correspondence school, where he received his PhD.
* There are long sections in Amway dedicated to teaching readers how to go about programming others to be positive—you are helping people in this way, Cross says, “You can offer them hope when they feel as though they are in a hopeless situation. Best of all, there are no limits to those you can help.” In fact, Cross says, it may be in your best interest to seek out the most hopeless and lonely people you know and invite them to become Amway distributors. Sometimes “negative people turn out to be the best prospects of all” because they are the ones who really need Amway most—“they are the ones who are looking for something else in life.” Likewise, you should “locate the lonely individuals of this world and offer them something that will counteract their isolation.”
* DeVos and his family are joint owners of the Orlando Magic.
* Tickets to Amway functions now cost between seventy and ninety dollars.
* However, door-to-door sales are discouraged.
* With his wife, Birdie, Yager was the first Amway “Founders Crown Ambassador 60 FAA”—or Crown Ambassador with sixty Founders Achievement Awards points—in the world, and is the topic of Stephen Butterfield’s 1985 exposé book, Amway: The Cult of Free Enterprise.
* “Money—and what it can buy—is the universally recognizable indicator of success,” says Cross.61