She said every writer in South Florida writes thrillers, and they all make money. “What makes you so special?”
“I make money.”
“Real money,” she said. “Just write one thriller.”
“They don’t let you write just one.”
No, they don't. If you live in South Florida and read enough of the fiction born here, you will encounter a virtual bloodbath – from Michael Connolly to Edna Buchanan to Jim Hall to Carl Hiassen – the blood spatters like grease in the pan.
In his first-person tale, DuFresne tries to write a thriller but all he can come up with is a grisly murder of a tenor performing in "La Boheme," who is taken out in Wilton Manors, a gay-friendly enclave north of Miami.
Like DuFresne himself, the stories in "Johnny Too Bad" (Norton) are quirky, tender and slightly crazy. But they give another look at this wacky place, in which love breaks out at least as often as death, though you might not notice it between the pages of the Miami Herald or the fiction penned by the wealth of local writers.
"It's hard to be a fiction writer in South Florida because real life is so unbelievable here. How do you compete with it?" DuFresne wonders over coffee at a Barnes & Noble in Dania Beach. Sporting a diamond stud in his left earlobe and wearing red Nike shoes, he illustrates some of the non-fiction wonders playing out here:
"A recent city manager was arrested for taking money from the Do The Right Thing Foundation so he could buy tickets to sporting events and nights out with his mistress. In Hialeah Gardens, the 'Mini-skirt Mayor' was convicted of hiring a hit man to kill her husband. At the trial, her husband testified on her behalf … " It goes on: a Miccosukee Indian backed his ex-girlfriend's SUV into a canal, drowning his young sons who were inside, and then claimed he didn't know they were there; presidents of teachers unions in Dade and Broward convicted of, respectively, embezzlement and child pornography. It's a wild world.
DuFresne laughs, "I wouldn't want to live in it, but it's a great world to write about."
Luckily, he does both.
South Florida is made up of many strangers, some who lashed their cultures to their rafts, others from "Up North," still others who made it, semi-natively, where they stand. Florida International University professor DuFresne is a successful transplant. Although after 17 years in South Florida, he still can't get Worcester, Mass., out of his voice, DuFresne has become a local.
And as a teacher of creative writing, he is already a local institution. The Miami Heat may not move him, but he misses the humidity when he is away, and reckons paradise to be an orange seat on a wring-yourself-out summer night at Dolphin Stadium watching the Marlins with just a few faithful fans. Favorite indoor haunts include John Martin's Pub in Coral Gables, and the Books & Books stores there and on Lincoln Road. In October, he can be found at the FIU sponsored Key West Writer's Conference.
Before coming to Miami to teach, DuFresne spent seven years in Massachusetts as a drug prevention counselor (his teaching style resembles group therapy). Then he headed south to earn a master's in creative writing at Arkansas. He lived and taught in small towns in Louisiana and Georgia before coming to FIU. DuFresne, who writes longhand with a fountain pen, moves son Tristan's whitebellied Maine coon cat Molly out of the way when he works.
Since moving here in 1989, DuFresne has published three novels and a book about fiction writing. He has adapted a screenplay from his first novel ("Louisiana Power & Light"), as yet unproduced, and written a shorter screenplay, "Freezer Jesus," based on a Tennessee man's experience of having the likeness of Jesus appear on his freezer door. His play "Trailerville" premiered last year.
DuFresne may be even more famous for the writers he has helped incubate – in his classes and especially in the nondegree seeking group Friday Night Writers who meet bi-weekly in a cavernous classroom at FIU's north campus. Serious fiction writers, poets and others find a place to polish their work there. And several have published books or stories as a result. Among the published authors who have attended the free group encounter: Steve Almond, Barbara Parker and Ann Prospero.
The two-hour sessions are not for the faint of heart. Writers photocopy stories, poems or book chapters and distribute them during one session, to be critiqued in the next. DuFresne is quick to praise, and identify specific problems rather than overall reaction to stories with titles like "My Lonely, Miserable Lesbian Pregnancy." He prefers to give writers practical suggestions.
Although comments, including his own, may wander, he brings it back to the story and the group: "I don't mind that it ends like this," he says of one story. "But I don't know. What do you think?"
David Beaty, a current Friday Night Writer from Miami who joined the group three years ago says, "John Dufresne makes it clear that he wants no showing off, no useless, slashing attacks, no ego games in his workshop. We are there to help each other to write better."
Says Almond, author of the award-winning "Candyfreak," (Algonquin), who attended Friday Night Writers in the early '90s when he was a reporter for New Times: "Those sessions helped me more than I can say ... Now, as a somewhat established writer, it strikes me as even more unbelievable that John would – given all his other time commitments – offer such an opportunity to people in the community. It is an act of generosity that still awes me."