In the late eighties, between undergraduate and graduate school, I had the idea to do what many writers before me had done: head South and keep on going till I got to "The Last Resort:" Key West. And so, with thoughts of Hemingway, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and above all, Tennessee Williams, bounding through my head, that's what I did.

I loved the place from the moment I arrived; and I would return to Key West for several longish stays over the ensuing years. It's where I lived for about two years, on and off, while writing The Book of Shadows.

When I first arrived on the island in '88 or so, I met the poet James Merrill - a meeting which led to many great things, not the least of which was being able to spend time in the company of a man whose gifts were prodigious. Merrill had already won every poetry award going, spoke several languages, and though he had a fortune tucked away somewhere (his father had been the Merrill in Merrill Lynch), he rode a Conch cruiser just like the other islanders - that's a fat-tired bike, too beaten down to tempt even the most desperate thief - and was wonderfully humble, and extremely kind to a kid standing in awe of him. (Yes, that'd be me.)

Merrill needed someone to help him convert a long poem of his into play format, for performance. I did this, taking his notes, retyping them and reworking the text to his specifications. My association with the Poet gave me my first glimpse inside "the writer's life," and I liked what I saw. Very much. I wanted the same. And never more so than the night I was invited to Merrill's house for a read-through of "our" work, only to find myself there alongside nine other Key Westers, several of whom had Pulitzers, and National Book Awards, and Bollingen Prizes in their back pockets - John Hersey, Richard Wilbur, Alison Lurie, and John Malcolm Brinnin come to mind. And oh yeah, there I was. With ears as big as satellite dishes. ... I'll never forget mounting my own Conch cruiser later that night and riding over the island for hours, hours, all that erudition ringing in my head - the books they were reading, the languages they knew, the jokes they told, and the work they did. Writers! Cool. (Okay, okay. I was younger then.)

Merrill later introduced me to Peter Taylor, who had just won the Pulitzer for A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS. Here was a dapper man, a true Southern gentleman. Taylor was nearly four-times my age, and had recently suffered a stroke. Though he was still writing, no one but he could decipher his handwriting -- he needed someone to sit beside him and type it out while he read aloud, revising all the while. Merrill recommended me for the job. ...If any aspiring writer has ever had a better Master Class than that, I'd like to hear about it.

Later, after receiving an MA in Dramatic Literature from SUNY Stony Brook, I returned to Key West. I'd just written my thesis on the short fiction of Tennessee Williams, who'd lived on the island for decades. Often I'd pedal past his house - he'd died by then, sadly - as if to breathe a rarer air, as if to convince myself that people, everyday-seeming people, were the ones who wrote great art. It's a valuable lesson, meeting working writers when one is young (emphasis on working). We aspirants need that convincing, that proof, if we're to tackle the job and stay with it. Years later I'd walk past Anne Rice's house in the Garden District - as well as another of Tennessee Williams's homes in the French Quarter, near where I was living - seeking, and finding, the same inspiration.

Later still, I quit a job in New York and once again headed to Key West, determined to write a novel. I worked at it during the day and waited tables at night - at Blue Heaven, for those of you familiar with Key West; for those of you not familiar with the island, Blue Heaven is a funky-weird-homegrown restaurant immortalized in song by, yes, Jimmy Buffett. And I was in Key West - poolside, ha - when I got the call from my present agent, responding in the affirmative to my plea that she represent me, and my weird novel about a hermaphroditic French witch. A long shot? Yeah, you could say so.

And so, as Key West has always been magical for me, I knew I'd be sending a fictional character there at some point. I didn't know it'd be Herculine, though. But then I did some research, and one fact stood out: In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Key West was one of the wealthiest cities, per capita, in America. At times, the wealthiest. Soon I was reading about the wrecking industry, the source of all that wealth, and boomtown Key West, the dates of which worked for the final volume of the trilogy.

Havana? No, I haven't been. Not yet. I had plans to go two years ago, and hope to get there still. But so much of what I read in researching the books involved a triangle of trade the three points of which were New Orleans, Key West and Havana. Delving into diaries of the day, I found my details; and they convinced me I was there, in Havana, in the 1830s. I hope I'm able to convince my readers similarly. Too, in writing the Herculine trilogy, I've discovered that it doesn't much matter - to me, to the characters, or the readers - whether or not I've actually been to the places I write about. First off, I'm a pretty good researcher - and I will say so myself. Secondly, barring a big silvery rocket ship, I cannot travel back in time to anyplace. For instance, I'm researching Victorian London now - for what, I'm not exactly sure just yet - and though I'll probably visit London this winter, there won't be much Victorian stuff to see. It's all gone from the places of interest to me. So, I'll research. And then, as writers do, I'll make up the rest, and hope a bit of magic rains down on the page. Magic like that in the air over Key West.