Panacea is a hamlet along Florida’s Forgotten Coast, a salty stretch of marshes, pine forests, beaches, springs, estuaries, and Dollar Generals that remains more rugged than other regions of Florida. When people ask where the heck it is, you can always say, “East of Sopchoppy.”
Although you might not guess it just from driving along the Big Bend Scenic Byway, the surrounding forests and marshes are well-trod literary ground. They inspire the journal’s ethos on three fronts: literary ephemera, outsider publishing, and the environment.
Panacea’s literary history began with the type of writing that animates this journal: the Steinbeck-Rudloe letters. John Steinbeck wrote “Panacea, Florida” by hand many times, posting letters to the naturalist Jack Rudloe in the 60s. They discussed specimen collecting, the book business, and what Steinbeck called “the free and fierce Kingdom of Life.” Rudloe had founded Panacea’s Gulf Specimen Marine Lab, an aquarium and biological specimen supplier, and had taken inspiration from the Doc character in Cannery Row.
The out-of-the-way qualities of Panacea have lent themselves to the spirit of outsider publishing found in Rudloe’s writing. A few creeks up at Spring Creek, Leo Lovel’s Spring Creek Chronicles gives shape to a Florida gone by. Joy Williams wrote her first book in a trailer in the swamps around the St. Marks River.
The region is also a focus of environmental writing, a theme the Panacea Review hopes to cultivate. The environmental memoirists Janisse Ray and Susan Cerulean lived in what they called the Land Between Two Rivers: the Aucilla and the Ochlockonee. Diane Roberts was inspired by its legends. The Saint Mark’s National Wildlife Refuge, which encases Panacea and St. Mark’s, was the inspiration for Area X in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. There’s something in the water—we hope it will slither its way into The Panacea Review.
That is not to say we are a local or regional publication—far from it. We strive to be as global and universal in scope as any literary journal, even if we lean towards this or that. We use place as a guide to define the journal’s character, not as a limitation.
