first pages...More Than Good Enough

Crissa-Jean Chappell reading More Than Good Enough from crissachappell on Vimeo.



As I wrote More Than Good Enough, I wanted to show "the real Miami" that I remember from my childhood. The main character, Trent, moves to the Miccosukee reservation in the Everglades. He feels lost. Trent doesn't know much about his Native American family. His only connection to that world is a father who has forgotten where he came from. As Trent begins to create a documentary for his film class, he learns there is more than one truth. Not one perspective...but many.

Growing up in South Florida in the 1980s, the TV show, Miami Vice, was everywhere. I didn't relate to the images on the screen. It looked nothing like my backyard—the oak trees draped in Spanish moss. The blue crabs scuttling through the grass after it rains. The sing-songy music of the bufo toads in a tropical storm.

When you visit a new place, you often see the surface of things. The keychains. The t-shirts. The pictures in your head shaped from movies and television. The neon-soaked streets of Miami Vice give one perspective that many know of my home. But there are layers of complexity to the Magic City that are often unexplored. It's not just the postcard of sandy beaches, but the handwritten words that tell a personal story of a place.