Tyler Gillespie graduated from USF St. Petersburg in 2018 with his master’s in Journalism and Media Studies. On June 15, his book “Florida Man: Poems” was published. It began as a collection of essays. Delaney Brown | The Crow’s Nest
By Delaney Brown
Hunched over a broken mic, in the library of his alma mater, Tyler Gillespie read a few lines from his new collection “Florida Man: Poems” to the small crowd of students and faculty that gathered to hear him speak.
The crowd certainly wouldn’t pack an amphitheater, but the few dozen students and faculty sit in total silence, completely enraptured.
The crowd giggles as Gillespie reads the headlines ripped from the Florida Man Twitter account: “Florida Man Breaks Into Neighbor’s Kitchen to Look for Sesame Seeds for Hamburger,” “Florida Man Won’t Let Hurricane Get in the Way of Screaming ‘Dicks Out for Harambe’ on Live TV,” “Florida Man Wakes Up from Coma, Immediately Demands Taco Bell.”
Florida Man hijinks, the innermost dreams of alligators, election drama, and Florida’s privacy laws are all openly discussed in Gillespie’s collection. One moment he’s making the crowd laugh at the incredulous plight of poor Florida Man, the next he’s cast a hush over the audience as he asks them to consider the consequences of open records and snap judgments.
“You come in for the meme and get a little more than you bargained for,” Gillespie said.
Gillespie is a fourth-generation Floridian. He grew up in the Tampa Bay but left the area for college, earning a degree in English from the University of Central Florida before moving to New Orleans to earn a master’s degree in creative writing. He received his masters in Journalism and Media Studies from USF St. Petersburg in 2018.
He’s worked as a journalist for the past seven years, writing for publications like The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Salon and GQ.
“You know when you’re interviewing someone and they’re so lyrical?” he asked. “To me, I hear it and that’s a poem to me.”
Many of the poems in the collection come from Gillespie’s work as a journalist. Poems like the one about Florida Man are ripped straight from the headlines. Others are inspired by interviews that happened on assignment. Some come from experiences in Gillespie’s own personal life.
He writes about exploring the gay bars and nightlife of Ybor as a teenager and his own drunk driving arrest in 2008. Parts of Gillespie’s arrest report find their way into the verse.
His arrest happened just five days before Hillsborough County began to digitize the majority of its public records.
“You can’t find my mugshot online,” Gillespie said, “And no, that’s not a challenge.”
Gillespie described being arrested in the parking lot of a shopping mall as the lowest point in his life. He’s still not proud of what happened, but now that it’s been 10 years he feels comfortable sharing his story, even in front of a room of former classmates and professors.
“I couldn’t put all those people’s stories out there without including my own,” said Gillespie.
Gillespie spent years talking to people whose lowest moments played out in the public spotlight. He says Florida’s open record laws make it easy for these types of “clickbait-y” headlines to go viral.
Gillespie emphasized that there’s a difference between being charged and convicted. Not all of the people who come to make up the Florida Man headlines are convicted of a crime, though Gillespie says that by the time the story is written, the damage is already done.
For Gillespie, there’s a difference between him and the people whose arrests go viral: He’s able to control the narrative.
