We sat down in season one with local author, historian, storyteller and educator, Tim Gilmore. No one tells the story of Jacksonville quite like him.
[This post contains some affiliate links. Purchases made using these links result in us receiving a small commission with no additional cost to you.]Dr. Gilmore is the author of 20 books, including Murder Capital: 8 Stories, 1890s-1980s, Channeling Anna Fletcher, Repossessions: Mass Shooting in Baymeadows, Goat Island Hermit: The State of Florida vs. Rollians Christopher, The Book of Isaiah: A Vision of the Founder of a City, illustrated by Shep Shepard, The Devil in the Baptist Church: Bob Gray’s Unholy Trinity, In Search of Eartha White: Storehouse for the People, The Mad Atlas of Virginia King, and Stalking Ottis Toole: A Southern Gothic. (Other titles can be found here).
Gilmore teaches Literature and Writing at Florida State College at Jacksonville, where he was awarded a 2018 Distinguished Faculty Award. The Cultural Council of Greater Jacksonville named Gilmore the 2018 Literary Artist of the Year. Also in 2018, Gilmore served on the Jacksonville City Council’s Civil Rights History Task Force. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida.
Tim is also the founder of Jax by Jax, “a literary arts festival built on the theme of “Jacksonville Writers Writing Jacksonville.” He’s the writer and creator of www.jaxpsychogeo.com, a project that explores place and catalogues the Southern Gothic, telling nearly 600 stories of strange and historic locations in and around Jacksonville, Florida.” https://darlynfinchkuhn.com/
“I want to live in a city that has events like Jax by Jax” Tim Gilmore.
In our interview from season one, I asked Tim about his most recent book, Murder Capital: 8 Stories, 1890s-1980s, and his process behind his writing.
Tim tells us “this is the 20th (book) so i’m a little uh, obsessive.
He goes on to say, “You know yeah and that’s Murder Capital 8 stories 1890s – 1980s and it actually began with a talk that I gave to the Jacksonville Historical Society in 2013 and at the time I had just come out with Stalking Ottis Tool: A Southern Gothic, and I was talking to the person who was the head of the Historical Society at the time who said you could do it and talk but she said “you know Ottis Tool’s probably too dark, why don’t you talk on the history of murder in Jacksonville”, so I don’t know how that’s less dark but you know I dug into a number of stories then and they kind of stuck in my head and I wanted to know more about them. You know that’s the kind of something that happens is that the stories stick around and put their tendrils out and connect to other stories and feels like kind of a never-ending process you know? “
We went on to discuss his involvement with local groups assisting registered voters to properly fill out their ballots. He had written an article about Shawanna Brooks and ‘Color Jax Blue‘ and her involvement and getting out the black vote and she was also instrumental in coordinating a large mural on the side of a warehouse on Myrtle Avenue. It has a message to it to get involved with voting. She even had shuttles running from the mural site over to the Prime Osborn Convention Center so that they could vote.
“She has an Eartha white like kind of energy I think Eartha White, you know, lived to be 97 years old and slept about 4 hours a night. Reputedly she was about five feet tall but she was a giant, you know so I mean there’s a number of ways I could go with. I was helping cure mail-in ballots, so I was volunteering for mail-in ballots that had signature problems, you know, so whether it’s a lot of times people forgot to sign it or something, and a lot of times the people who sent in their ballots who had those kinds of problems are elderly and disabled.”
In an article by Hurley Winkler, Writing the South: an Interview with Tim Gilmore, Tim said: “To begin with, I wanted to write this huge, sprawling postmodern novel. I wanted to represent the entire city as a novel somehow. And if you did that, you’d have to just sample everything you could sample, whether that was something hugely and historically significant, like Axe Handle Saturday, or if it was a woman falling asleep at her piano in Queens Harbor.”
“So I did that, and then realized that it was just huge and unwieldy. I wanted to expand so many of the smaller stories into bigger stories. I started the website, and originally, the first stories were all parts of what I thought was going to be this novel about Jacksonville. Instead, I put them all up [on the website] in a couple of days.”
“I write mostly about historic stuff. I always center it in place. I look at the place as it is now. That inevitably means that I’m looking at what has happened here, and infuse the identity of that particular place. You can’t go back in time, so even when you’re talking about the past, it’s present. I always see it through place rather than time.”
Keep being the ‘writer writing Jacksonville’ Tim.
