A Q&A with Cricket Desmarais

Local mover & shaker Cricket Desmarais is a writer, artist, dancer and scientist. She is also the author of LOVE ON THE ROCK, a compilation of her early 2000’s dating column in the Florida Keys Keynoter. We had a chance to chat with her, in advance of her Feb. 3 event (6:30 in person at Hugh’s View, register here), and find out why now is the time for a second chance for LOVE ON THE ROCK.

Q: If you would, tell us a little bit about LOVE ON THE ROCK?

A: LOVE ON THE ROCK is a compilation of work from my year as a dating columnist for Florida Keys Keynoter in 2005 – 2006. I like to think of it as a “time-capsule laugh” that paints a picture of what it was like (and possibly still is) to date on a tiny island. I spent that year with my dating life under a microscope and connected with other “Singletons” about theirs. I researched our human biological drive and social “norms” to make sense of it all. And I called on my readers to reflect on their own beliefs and behaviors. There’s some obvious humor in that, but there’s also a lot of heart.

Q: What made you decide now was the time to collect and republish a column that originally ran in 2005-2006?

A: I have wanted to do this for over a decade but the “free” time to do so just never seemed to arrive. I made a commitment last year to get several completed projects out of my computer and into the world. This one seemed like the easiest since I knew people had already read the original, lessening any anxiety of putting it out there.

Q: What was it like to reread work you’d written 17 years prior?

A: A little bit cringe but also a bit hopeful. I was reminded that I once had a sense of humor & a pretty active dating life

Q: What was the process of getting the book ready for publication like?

A: Grueling. Being an artist comes with a lot of bootstrapping. In an ideal world, someone else would do all the things. I highly recommend not copy editing your own work. Ever. You’ll regret it when you read teh first print run of you book, I garauntee. Wink.

Q: Did you edit the columns or is this what people would have read in the Keynoter?

A: There was some necessary copy editing and occasional sentence structure shifts or omissions, but it’s pretty much the same and in the same order as they came out. I thought about editing some of it to be more inclusive around gender identity but decided against it. This is a snapshot of life in the mid aughts. History is what it is, & erasing or changing that didn’t sit right.

Q: Give us a teaser. What’s one of your favorite stories from the book?

A: The columns were originally printed in a Keys-wide, family-friendly publication. You can imagine that talking about dating and all that goes with it can get pretty limited when you layer in censorship. I had to be creative and used a lot of innuendos. Midway into the year, my publisher finally gave me the green light to write a piece on sex. I invited people to email me their insights, stories, and secrets to help me write “The Proper Naughty Column” and got an inbox full of – nothing.

That column actually became one of my favorites because I somehow managed to not only come up with a column for that week but also include a fantastic Sharon Olds’ poem (“The Solution”). It starts like this:

Finally, they got the Singles problem under / control, they made it scientific They opened huge/ Sex Centers – you could simply go and state what you / wanted and they would find you someone who wanted that/ too. You would stand under a sign saying I Like To/ Be Touched and Held and when someone came and / stood under the sign saying I Like to Touch and Hold they would send the two of you off together.

It gets more saucy & hilarious after that. Sharon Olds was one of my professors at NYU, so including her felt like an homage to her.

It also references interesting tidbits about the sexual behavior of animals. Because everyone should know that “Australian marsupial mice die of exhaustion from their twelve-hour romps, bat rays are romantics and do it only in the moonlight, and a pig’s big O is said to last half an hour Lucky, lucky.”

Q: What do you hope people will take away from the book?
A: Mostly I just want to give people a laugh & a bit of an escape. If they could take anything away from it, I’d hope for them it would be a sense of humor about their own dating history, an invitation to take the time to explore & enjoy who they truly are without the need for that special “other” while maintaining hope for what’s to come.

Q: How long have you lived in Key West? What originally brought you here and from where?

A: I came to Key West in 1997-1999 from Brooklyn during my grad school summer & winter breaks, working as a mate in the charter boat industry while staying at my mom’s. The creative culture of the City fed me but not as much as the daily connection to the sea I had when here. After I graduated, I came back “for now,” thinking I’d save money to move back to the central coast of California, where I lived prior to NYU. I did move there shortly thereafter but quickly circled back. It’s special there, too, but there’s no place like home.

Q: In addition to being a writer, you’re an artist, a dancer, a yoga practitioner and teacher, as well as a marine scientist. How do your interests come together and feed your writing?

A: I don’t know that they’re ever apart, really. It’s a bit more symbiotic, I think, even though the expression of each is different from one to the other. The common thread is observation—of the self & of the outer world— powered by a discipline of showing up for it, for staying in the moment of what is & keeping an open heart while doing so. Writing a poem, monitoring coral, dancing in the Studios’ window dressed like a wind-up doll – they all evoke a sense of connection & wonder for & in me. All of that informs & influences my life & the expression of it.

Q: What are you reading and recommending these days?
A: I’m reading Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs by Juli Berwald. It’s a gorgeous and relatable blend of science writing & memoir – coral ecology & restoration & her daughter’s mental health struggle— that explores hope and healing against all odds.

Celebrate Black History Month

Black history and the contemporary Black experience encompass an incredible range of emotions, lives and circumstances. Come explore Black rage, and Black joy, Black curiosity and Black hope. Read about what makes our experiences universal, what we share as Black communities and cultures, and what makes us unique.

Here are the books featured in this graphic, but we have many more in store. Stop by or follow us on social media for recommendations during Black History Month and throughout the year.

Nigel and the Moon by Antwan Eady, illustrated by Gracey Zhang

The 1619 Project: Born on the Water by Nikole Hannah-Jones & Renée Watson, illustrated by Nikkolas Smith

Stones: Poems by Kevin Young

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival by Jabari Asim

The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings

The Keeper by Tananarive Due & Steven Barnes, illustrated by Marco Finnegan

Will you be our Bloody Valentine?

Want something a little different this Valentine’s Day? How about a book that mixes love and death?

The quintessential Key West pick for this is Ben Harrison’s UNDYING LOVE, which tells the story of Count Carl von Cosel, who didn’t allow even death to separate him from his love – literally.

Or by our very own George Cooper, try POISON WIDOWS, which features a magic butter knife, a love potion that works better as a poison, and a number of women who, knowingly or not, solve domestic problems with murder.

If you like your dark romance mythic, try A TOUCH OF DARKNESS by Scarlett St. Clair, a steamy, contemporary retelling of the story of Hades and Persephone.

Or LOVE IN THE TIME OF SERIAL KILLERS by Alicia Thompson which asks the age-old question, can a true crime aficionado trust enough to let romance bloom – or are her suspicions justified?

Store manager Emily believes A CERTAIN HUNGER by Chelsea G. Summers will hit the spot, fulfilling your desire for a dark, fascinating entrée. In her staff pick review last year, Emily wrote, “Dorothy Daniels is a food critic with all the descriptive language skills needed to tell her story of love, lust, murder and a smidgen of cannibalism. You know she did it, you know she gets caught, and yet I still found this to be a page turner.” Read her full review.

WHEN NO ONE IS WATCHING by Alyssa Cole has been described as “Rear Window meets Get Out” and it will have you peering around corners and double-checking your door locks.

With crackling suspense, unforgettable characters and searing insight, THE LOST APOTHECARY by Sarah Penner is a subversive and intoxicating debut novel of secrets, vengeance and the remarkable ways women can save each other despite the barrier of time. Look for Penner’s new book, THE LONDON SÉANCE SOCIETY, out in March.

THE SILENT PATIENT by Alex Michaelides — What isn’t she saying and why?

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

A novel of sensational literary and psychological suspense from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho that tracks a group of privileged high school friends in a vibrantly fictionalized 1980s Los Angeles as a serial killer strikes across the city

Bret Easton Ellis’s masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.

Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with the Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them—and Bret in particular—with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends—or his own mind—to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision. 

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero L.A., The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret’s life at seventeen—sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting, and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.

American Inheritance by Edward J. Larson

From a Pulitzer Prize winner, a powerful history that reveals how the twin strands of liberty and slavery were joined in the nation’s founding.

New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders of the founding who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves: George Washington consistently refused to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation. And we have long needed a history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed.

We now have that history in Edward J. Larson’s insightful synthesis of the founding. With slavery thriving in Britain’s Caribbean empire and practiced in all of the American colonies, the independence movement’s calls for liberty proved narrow, though some Black observers and others made their full implications clear. In the war, both sides employed strategies to draw needed support from free and enslaved Blacks, whose responses varied by local conditions. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, a widening sectional divide shaped the fateful compromises over slavery that would prove disastrous in the coming decades. Larson’s narrative delivers poignant moments that deepen our understanding: we witness New York’s tumultuous welcome of Washington as liberator through the eyes of Daniel Payne, a Black man who had escaped enslavement at Mount Vernon two years before. Indeed, throughout Larson’s brilliant history it is the voices of Black Americans that prove the most convincing of all on the urgency of liberty.

How To Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

New York Times bestselling author Grady Hendrix takes on the haunted house in a thrilling new novel that explores the way your past—and your family—can haunt you like nothing else.
 
When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.
 
Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she’ll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it’ll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market.
 
But some houses don’t want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them…
 
Like his novels The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and The Final Girl Support GroupHow to Sell a Haunted House is classic Hendrix: equal parts heartfelt and terrifying—a gripping new read from “the horror master” (USA Today).

Rough Sleepers by Tracy Kidder

The powerful story of an inspiring doctor who made a difference, by helping to create a program to care for Boston’s homeless community—by the Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling author of Mountains Beyond Mountains

“I couldn’t put Rough Sleepers down. I am left in awe of the human spirit and inspired to do better.”—Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone

 
Tracy Kidder has been described by The Baltimore Sun as a “master of the nonfiction narrative.” In Rough Sleepers, Kidder shows how one person can make a difference, as he tells the story of Dr. Jim O’Connell, a gifted man who invented ways to create a community of care for a city’s unhoused population, including those who sleep on the streets—the “rough sleepers.”
 
When Jim O’Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School and was nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, the chief of medicine made a proposal: Would he defer a prestigious fellowship and spend a year helping to create an organization to bring health care to homeless citizens? Jim took the job because he felt he couldn’t refuse. But that year turned into his life’s calling. Tracy Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell and his colleagues as they served their thousands of homeless patients. In this illuminating book we travel with O’Connell as he navigates the city, offering medical care, socks, soup, empathy, humor, and friendship to some of the city’s most endangered citizens. He emphasizes a style of medicine in which patients come first, joined with their providers in what he calls “a system of friends.” 
 
Much as he did with Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains, Kidder explores how a small but dedicated group of people have changed countless lives by facing one of American society’s difficult problems instead of looking away.

Spare by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex

It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother’s coffin as the world watched in sorrow—and horror. As Princess Diana was laid to rest, billions wondered what Prince William and Prince Harry must be thinking and feeling—and how their lives would play out from that point on.

For Harry, this is that story at last.

Before losing his mother, twelve-year-old Prince Harry was known as the carefree one, the happy-go-lucky Spare to the more serious Heir. Grief changed everything. He struggled at school, struggled with anger, with loneliness—and, because he blamed the press for his mother’s death, he struggled to accept life in the spotlight.

At twenty-one, he joined the British Army. The discipline gave him structure, and two combat tours made him a hero at home. But he soon felt more lost than ever, suffering from post-traumatic stress and prone to crippling panic attacks. Above all, he couldn’t find true love. 

Then he met Meghan. The world was swept away by the couple’s cinematic romance and rejoiced in their fairy-tale wedding. But from the beginning, Harry and Meghan were preyed upon by the press, subjected to waves of abuse, racism, and lies. Watching his wife suffer, their safety and mental health at risk, Harry saw no other way to prevent the tragedy of history repeating itself but to flee his mother country. Over the centuries, leaving the Royal Family was an act few had dared. The last to try, in fact, had been his mother. . . .

For the first time, Prince Harry tells his own story, chronicling his journey with raw, unflinching honesty. A landmark publication, Spare is full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

In this gripping, horror-laced debut, a young Cree woman’s dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community and the land they call home.

“A mystery and a horror story about grief, but one with defiant hope in its beating heart.” —Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Pallbearers Club

When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow’s head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.   

Night after night, Mackenzie’s dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina’s untimely death: a weekend at the family’s lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too—a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina—Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.

Traveling north to her rural hometown in Alberta, she finds her family still steeped in the same grief that she ran away to Vancouver to escape. They welcome her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams—and make them more dangerous.

What really happened that night at the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina’s death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was already inside?

The Nazi Conspiracy by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch

From the New York Times bestselling authors of The First Conspiracy and The Lincoln Conspiracy comes the little-known true story of a Nazi plot to kill FDR, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill at the height of World War II.

In 1943, as the war against Nazi Germany raged abroad, President Franklin Roosevelt had a critical goal: a face-to-face sit-down with his allies Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. This first-ever meeting of the Big Three in Tehran, Iran, would decide some of the most crucial strategic details of the war. Yet when the Nazis found out about the meeting, their own secret plan took shape—an assassination plot that would’ve changed history.

A true story filled with daring rescues, body doubles, and political intrigue, The Nazi Conspiracy details FDR’s pivotal meeting in Tehran and the deadly Nazi plot against the heads of state of the three major Allied powers who attended it.

With all the hallmarks of a Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch page-turner, The Nazi Conspiracy explores the great political minds of the twentieth century, investigating the pivotal years of the war in gripping detail. This meeting of the Big Three changed the course of World War II. Here’s the inside story of how it almost led to a world-shattering disaster.