Coming of Age in Florida’s Turbulent Waters

In Arielle Hebert’s debut poetry collection Bottom Feeders, Florida lures you in with long summer nights, oversized t-shirts and damp bikinis, trips to Publix for champagne and orange juice. There’s a reason so many choose the Sunshine State for their vacations, but as Hebert points out, vacations here are quick to become trap doors: “A whole town of trap doors / and someone always lost / on the other side.”

Bottom Feeders explores Hebert’s love for a state that’s produced an opioid crisis and for those who struggled with that addiction. These two loves collapse into one another, becoming interchangeable objects of desire and destruction, the speaker too immersed in the damage to see a way out. Distance offers relief, a chance to catch her breath after living so long underwater, but it doesn’t extinguish the pull.

Like Hebert, I grew up in Florida and left for many of the reasons she depicts. While distance felt necessary at the time, Florida is a seductress, and after so many years I find myself questioning why I left, even the humidity I once found so oppressive rewritten in my memory as a familiar comfort. This longing is palpable in Hebert as well, both in her collection and in our conversation. In our interview, I asked Hebert how she writes about disaster without falling back into its magic. Like she states in the collection, “Everything we do / is self-preservation / or self-destruction,” but how can you tell which is which? It’s a question I asked as much for the readers’ benefit as for my own.

Although states apart, I could feel our shared insatiability for the place we both left behind. Potted ferns decorated both our backgrounds as we talked over Zoom, her words pressed like fingers on a bruise: Painful, yes, but also a relief to be reminded that part of you is still there.

Sam Risak: Florida is often made into spectacle: the news stories, the memes, the mythology. Do you feel the state warrants this portrayal? Did you find yourself consciously writing toward it or against it?

Arielle Hebert: I am hyper-aware of the ways that Florida is portrayed in the media, especially since I’ve left the state and hear outsiders’ perspectives. When I say, “I’m from Florida,” it’s received with a certain look, or a recognition of what they see portrayed in the media, whether that’s Florida Man stories or, these days, about the political climate. But when I was writing the book, I tried to be aware of those preconceived notions about Florida and to write honestly toward my own experience. I tried to do a little bit of both leaning into and away from what folks might think they know about Florida.

SR: Taking the preconceived notions and complicating them?

AH: Complicating them, interrogating them, and also trying to portray what I loved about Florida, the flora and the fauna, the landscapes, the ocean, the swamps, all of it. It’s such a beautiful place where complicated things happen.

SR: In Bottom Feeders, the opioid crisis functions as a structural backdrop to the personal narrative. Why was it important to put the state’s conditions in conversation with the speaker’s intimate life?

AH: I didn’t want it just to be about a breakup or a relationship. The time that the book is written about is my later years of high school and then the few years after graduation. So certainly adolescence and being a young adult. And during that time, there was so much happening that I really wanted that intertwined-ness to be present in the book. It wasn’t just early love and early hurt or heartbreak. It was also exploring my sexuality and finding a group of friends to do that with that I felt safe and accepted by.

It was also the height of the opioid epidemic, and that was certainly ever-present in all our lives whether it was in that friend group or outside of it. It touched everyone I knew, whether personally or [by] a few degrees of separation.

And then, going back to Florida as a place, erosion is ever-present. I lived on the coast, the west coast of Florida in Sarasota, and the beaches have been eroding since I moved there in 2000. So all these issues were swirling around each other, and I don’t know if I could have written about only the personal or only the external factors. It seemed like they were all predicated on one another.

SR: In “Hurricane Blues” you write: “We treaded grief like water, / missed hurricanes in the off season, / when chaos ebbed enough / for us to see clearly, all the damage.” It seemed like a parallel that runs throughout the collection: that both the speaker and the citizens of Florida are inclined to dwell in disaster rather than take on the arduous work of reckoning. Do you have a sense of what produces that collective avoidance? Did your thinking about it change while writing the collection?

It’s hard to reckon with one disaster as another one is befalling you.

AH: My perception definitely changed as I started to write the collection. There is this sort of, I don’t know if addiction is the right word, but keeping in the themes of the book, this addiction to chaos, where things are happening very quickly, and one piece of chaos or disaster can befall [you], and you don’t have time to process before the next thing is happening, whether that’s hurricanes, overdoses, prom, funerals, all of it overlapped. And going back to that intertwined-ness of chaos, I would say that as I was writing it, my perception did change, but it was also confirmed in a way.

I keep daily planners and weekly calendars, and I have since middle school. And it was illuminating and also affirming to look back at those old calendars from high school and from the couple of years that followed to see how frequently these life-changing events were happening, and in such quick succession. So in part, I think that chaos does prevent some of the processing and the reconciliation that needs to happen. And I don’t know about the collective, but for me, it certainly was a space that was hard to heal when you’re inside of it. It’s hard to reckon with one disaster as another one is befalling you. It’s like keeping your head above water during a high tide. You’re treading water and doing everything you can to just make it to the next day or the next week or the next year.

SR: And in turn, the chaos becomes the familiar.

AH: Definitely, definitely. The chaos becomes the stasis of being.

SR: It can be difficult to write about addiction without romanticizing it. How did you navigate that balance, both for the readers’ sake and your own? Were there poems in this collection that crossed a line you had to pull back from?

AH: Early in my writing career, I did fall victim to that, but I’m very lucky to have wonderful mentors. When I first started writing these poems during my MFA, I remember one particular workshop with Eduardo C. Corral where we were going over a poem in which I had likened an image of track marks to wisteria vines. And one of the most valuable pieces of feedback I got about that poem from Eduardo was that I was using beauty for something I shouldn’t. I was afraid to dwell in the ugliness for a long time, and my defense mechanism was to use these beautiful images to lift the reader out of that, or to essentially romanticize it.

I don’t think any poems that made it into the book do that. I hope not. What I did end up doing was incorporating beauty and levity and love into the book, but where those things fit, [like in] the relationship between the speaker and her girlfriend before the addiction, or the relationship between the speaker and her friend group. There were moments of real joy and beauty in there, but they didn’t belong in the poems that dwelled in addiction.

SR: The speaker implicates herself throughout the collection, perhaps most directly in “The Architect” as she says: “Even if it wasn’t my intention, / I helped build this house.” How do you write culpability without letting it tip into self-blame?

AH: Writing those poems helped me blame myself a little less. Early on in these experiences, I did feel incredibly guilty and responsible. I was constantly grappling with the question, “What else could I have done?” And writing the poems where I do express some culpability helped me pull back enough to say, “We were in the trenches together, and we weren’t each other’s keeper. We did the best with the tools we had at the time.” And in a way, expressing that culpability helped me forgive myself a little bit and forgive her, forgive Florida, forgive our friend group. We weren’t always the best to each other, and that’s something that made our friendships very complicated but also very beautiful. We were certainly flawed, and yet we had this sort of unshakable bond. We were fiercely protective of each other, and sometimes that fierceness turned into fierce betrayals.

We were fiercely protective of each other, and sometimes that fierceness turned into fierce betrayals.

I don’t want to say I’m completely guilt-free now. I do still grapple with those feelings, but it was also important for me to include some of my own experiences with opioids or experimenting with drugs and alcohol because we were all in it together. I wasn’t a victim. I wasn’t a bystander or an innocent witness. I was right there alongside the rest of them. And I think, for better or for worse, admitting some of those things to myself and in the book also demonstrates that I’m not demonizing the speaker’s girlfriend. I’m not vilifying addiction or addicts or anyone in recovery. There is only a thin line between what happened and what could have happened. It could have been any of us. And I say that in the collection too. It feels like I got lucky.

SR: Do you find that writing gives you some intellectual distance that helped you get to that place of forgiveness?

AH: It’s a phase of my writing, a lens that I use during revision or drafting. And sometimes thinking of myself as “the speaker” is like the Scooby-Doo villain’s mask that you take off, and it’s the same person underneath. But even that tiny layer of distance provides enough outside perspective that I can look at things a little bit differently, even if it’s just one hue or shade different.

SR: Distance from Florida appears in the collection as necessary, and yet it does not ultimately offer a total solution. Instead, recovery is portrayed as an unglamorous, unending process. How do you write honestly about recovery without diminishing its urgency?

AH: Like anything worthwhile in life, recovery can be difficult, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. And seeing friends and loved ones go through recovery and advocate for themselves motivated me to portray how difficult it is. How unending it is. It really is a cycle.

There’s a metaphor in psychology that likens grief to a ball in a box. And when grief or trauma first happens, the ball inside the box is really large, and it bumps against the walls frequently and with force. Over time, the ball in the box gets smaller, but each time it hits a wall, it’s still just as powerful, just as visceral, as when it first happens.

And I think that’s also an apt description for recovery and addiction. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been cycling through or which number of the cycle you’re on. It’s just as easy to ping back to day one of a recovery or a relapse. But knowing you don’t have to do it alone, that there are people who believe in you, makes it worth it. Their care and love, and the care and love you feel for yourself, is worth it.

SR: Would you be willing to share what your relationship with Florida looks like now?

AH: Still complicated. I miss Florida every day. I have mermaids in almost every room of my house. I’ve got some shark teeth on my desk. This summer, I’ll have lived in North Carolina for just as long as I lived in Florida, so 13 years, but I don’t know if I’ll ever think of Florida as anything but home. My folks still live in Sarasota. I’ve got lots of friends there. It’s a place that I love to visit. I’m not sure I’ll ever live there again, although those are some famous last words.

Sometimes thinking of myself as ‘the speaker’ is like the Scooby-Doo villain’s mask that you take off, and it’s the same person underneath.

Though, I do want to add, Florida was recently rated the least safe state in the US for LGBTQ folks. I know tons of queer people who still live in Florida, and it’s so hard to hold that in my mind. There is this awful legislation and political climate in Florida, but also so many people fighting the good fight. A lot of times, I wish I was one of them.

SR: Your final poem is titled “athazagoraphobia,” meaning the fear of being forgotten. In it, you write: “I start to wonder / if I’ve ever really seen a wolf.” When you write for a living, it’s easy to become aware of how memory is constructed, even manufactured. Do you find yourself struggling to trust your own memories? If so, how do you deal with it? How do you know that wolf was really there?

AH: I don’t trust my memory because it’s not very strong, but that’s why I have all my calendars and weekly planners. I keep my dentist appointments and doctors appointments and my meetings and my work obligations in those pages, but I also keep written logs of hanging out with friends and going to the beach and, if we’re thinking back to the years depicted in the book, when prom was, when my coach’s funeral was, when our intervention for my girlfriend happened.

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I’m drawn to writing and archiving because I know that memory can change over time. Like you said, we can fabricate what a memory becomes for us, which is one of the reasons I wanted to write the book so badly, or felt compelled to write these poems. I don’t trust my memory, and I wanted to stay true to the way things were and how they happened and who we were during those times. I wanted to honor us and tell our stories. And the story’s not over. Memory goes on just like the story does. Being a poet and a writer and an archivist is another failsafe in having a shoddy memory. I want to look back someday and know that I kept a record, that I stayed true to those girls we once were.

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