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"  Last night, the Dredgeman told me how he died. Why she wrote the last line: This is the last line I wrote from my novel in progress, Swamplandia! The novel began as a story, &amp;quot;Ava Wrestles the Alligator,&amp;quot; about a family of five alligator wrestlers in the Florida Everglades. They call themselves the Bigtree Family Wrestling Dynasty, and they perform a cheesy mimicry of their old traditions for the tourists: wrestling bull gators, conducting tram tours. In the 1940s and &amp;#039;50s, Swamplandia! was the #1 gator-themed park in the state, but these days it&amp;#039;s teetering on bankruptcy. The swamp itself is dying after decades of assault from developers, would-be farmers, and the Army Corps of Engineers.  When the novel opens, the Bigtrees are on the brink of extinction themselves. A family tragedy has left the Bigtree children raw and bewildered: Ava&amp;#039;s mother, the show&amp;#039;s headliner, has recently died. The novel tries to explore what becomes of the Bigtree daughters in the wake of that event. At its heart is the relationship between two young sisters, Ava and Osceola, who are trying to cope with the decline of their island world. In the line above, Ava is listening uncomfortably as her big sister, Osceola, recounts her latest date with a dead man. Osceola is a dreamy, white-haired girl who believes that she is a spiritual medium, and she uses her occult powers to contact eligible ghost bachelors, and, after some dubious seduction, date them. Ossie tromps around the black mangroves with her Ouija board in tow. She met her current boyfriend, the Dredgeman, on the wreck of a haunted 1922 American Steel Dredge that the two sisters discovered in a puddle of red rust, deep in the swamp.  Ossie&amp;#039;s possessions are sort of like adolescent infatuation to the extreme. When she says, &amp;quot;The Dredgeman told me how he died,&amp;quot; she&amp;#039;s not trying to be creepy -- she&amp;#039;s actually bragging to Ava. The Dredgeman has entrusted her with his most intimate secret, the story of his death. I figured a &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; teenage girl might react the same way if her boyfriend gave her his class ring or Varsity letter.  I&amp;#039;m hoping that Ossie&amp;#039;s ghost romance hooks into something that feels emotionally true to readers. She&amp;#039;s sixteen, she&amp;#039;s living in a weird, isolated world, and so it made a kind of sense to me when she started dating these phantom men. Because the love she wants is not available, she conjures her own. And poor Ava receives this news with the queasiness of any kid sister confidante -- she&amp;#039;s not comfortable with her sister&amp;#039;s new dating life, but she doesn&amp;#039;t want to be excluded from it, either.  In the next section, which I am working on now, Osceola elopes with her ghost boyfriend to the shallow end of the Underworld. This Underworld looks a lot like the Bigtrees&amp;#039; backyard, with rednecks and airboats and heavy humidity. Ava has to row into these mists to try to wrestle her sister back to the land of the living. So even though I never intended for this to happen, Swamplandia! has become a reimagining of the old myths. The novel seemed to take this shape of its own accord; one day, Osceola was in love with the Dredgeman, and the next day he had swept her downriver, sort of a backwoods version of Persephone and Hades. At first I felt like I needed somebody&amp;#039;s permission to do this, to write my own Underworld -- I was intimidated by the folks who had gone there before me. Alice in Wonderland, Dante, Oedipus, Orpheus, Gilgamesh, Jesus -- the trip to Hell is a well-worn route! When I started writing the novel, I never thought, &amp;quot;Wouldn&amp;#039;t it be a hoot to send an adolescent girl alligator wrestler to the Underworld? Yes, that&amp;#039;s sure to be a big hit. I should probably make this nameless canal in the Everglades a modern tributary of the River Styx, etc.&amp;quot; I didn&amp;#039;t want to scuff up Homer&amp;#039;s turf. I thought I was writing the story of one family&amp;#039;s grief, and one girl&amp;#039;s coming-of-age.  And I still am. But I&amp;#039;ve since come to see that I&amp;#039;m telling these stories the only way I know how, at a slant angle. I love reading realist stories and novels, but whenever I&amp;#039;ve tried to write about a thoroughly &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; world, everything comes out stilted and wrong. Suddenly the angles become stiff, unyielding. If somebody held a gun to my head and said, &amp;quot;Write a moving tale about a family of struggling car salesmen in Detroit,&amp;quot; I couldn&amp;#039;t do it. But a family of alligator wrestlers in a mythic swamp? That I can do.  It&amp;#039;s much easier for me to write something emotionally true if I&amp;#039;m working in a semimagical place. But I never want to drift so far into space that there&amp;#039;s no anchor to our real world; my biggest fear is that I&amp;#039;ll write something that feels merely gimmicky, not relatable. I love fiction where the boundaries between fantasy and reality are fluid, because then you get to tell an old story in a new, surprising way. (Denis Johnson, George Saunders, Kelly Link, Scott Snyder, and Kevin Brockmeier are a few of my favorite writers who blur this line.) Ava&amp;#039;s story seems to be occurring in two overlapping spheres: She&amp;#039;s up against the Everglades&amp;#039; real ecological crisis, but she&amp;#039;s also lost in this subaqueous Underworld, a place that opened up after her mother passed away. On a good day, writing about Ava&amp;#039;s adventure is pure joy. On a bad day, I want to pull each of my hairs out individually. I&amp;#039;ll start to doubt the very premise of the novel. I&amp;#039;ve got these noisy critical voices inside of me, a mean bunch who I like to visualize as a chorus of spinster aunts. I think they subsist on vinegar and unsalted pretzels; they heckle me continuously as I write. The aunts fill the stands of a dumpy dog track and place dollar bets on how badly the novel is going to turn out. I&amp;#039;ve found the best way to shut these haters up is to listen to a lot of hip-hop.  I&amp;#039;m pretty sure I&amp;#039;m not the target demographic for a lot of this music: I&amp;#039;m a short, apple-shaped white girl who cares too much about the opinions of others. But that&amp;#039;s why I love it when Kanye West hollers, &amp;quot;Bow in the presence of greatness!&amp;quot; Is Kanye sitting around wringing his hands, wondering if he&amp;#039;s just written a clunker of a metaphor? No, Kanye responds to his critics with a gleeful &amp;quot;Na-uh/You can&amp;#039;t tell me nothing!&amp;quot; When I&amp;#039;m worried about my ability to finish the novel, a rapper&amp;#039;s jolt of pure ego feels like vitamins, insulin. Can you imagine Alice Munro or Cormac McCarthy telling their fans &amp;quot;Envy me. I&amp;#039;m literary fiction&amp;#039;s MVP&amp;quot;? Sometimes I wish they would! It takes real courage, I think, to write forward in the face of self-doubt.  My current favorite is Ice Cube&amp;#039;s 1999 hit &amp;quot;You Can Do It (Put Your Back in to It).&amp;quot; Perhaps Ice Cube did not write this song to inspire first-time novelists. In fact, I&amp;#039;m pretty sure the &amp;quot;it&amp;quot; in question involves moving your ass at the velocity of a helicopter rotor and having 14 hours of intercourse with Ice Cube. Well, I have reinterpreted You Can Do It for my purposes; in my world, &amp;quot;it&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;finish a final draft of Swamplandia! &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ll fail!&amp;quot; the aunts squeal, but I know that I will not. I&amp;#039;ll continue to &amp;quot;do it,&amp;quot; as per Ice Cube&amp;#039;s request, and I cannot wait to write my real &amp;quot;last line.&amp;quot;  About the author: Karen Russell is the author of the story collection St. Lucy&amp;#039;s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which was named a Best Book of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Best American Short Stories 2007, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, and Oxford American. -- As told to Anya Yurchyshyn "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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