They were Christian poems and stories and novels, or rather the novels and stories and poems of Christians, and Marianne could hardly bear to look at them, much less read more than a page or two at a time. First off, a good number of them had been printed on pastel paper, pinks and blues and yellows and creams. Easter egg colors, baby blanket colors, three-pack-of-panties colors, clashing, in their ever-growing stacks, with her room’s dark-and-bright seventies decor, the grainy wood furniture and the demented cabbage roses on the upholstery. And they smelled, some like talcum powder and others like a cloying, familiar perfume, many like menthol cigarettes. Together the smells blended into a noxious, headache-inducing sweetness that drove Marianne outside, into the hazy light of Florida’s late summer.

The Genesis Inspirational Writing Ranch—or the Ranch, for short, suggestive of a mix of industry and ease, Republicans and wealth—was a collection of white stucco buildings set back from the road and obscured by a stand of live oaks with twisted gray trunks and dusty, rubbery leaves. It had two long rows of guest rooms, perpendicular to the beach, behind a central building, which had since been turned into the common areas: a room for pool and darts, a library, a caterer’s kitchen. These would comprise the school’s office and dining hall, its spaces for readings and public functions. There were two large rooms in a single building, and a smaller cabana near the water, that would serve as classrooms. The grounds included a kidney-shaped pool, a sliver of beach, a garden—but groundskeeping, or any other kind of upkeep, had not been a recent priority. Broken things—the pool filter, some of the air-conditioning units, most of the minifridges—had gone unfixed, while everything else took on an air of seaside decay. Screen doors made an uneven seal with the rooms. Giant bugs lurked in corners. Almost every room had a spreading stain on the ceiling, marking the many places where the roof shingles had dislodged. Outside, vicious sand burrs crept onto every footpath, and the statues in the garden, a collection of half-naked nymphs and satyrs thoroughly unsuitable for a Christian writing ranch, groped each other in long tufts of switchgrass.

“This was a bad idea,” she told Eric over Skype, her laptop screen angled to show a recently scrubbed fridge and a towering pile of manuscripts. “Here is what you should do: sell this place for the land, then refund all these application fees.”

Eric Osborne—her best friend, ex-fiancé, and business partner—had recently abandoned her for the United Arab Emirates, where he had a semester-long gig teaching fiction. Marianne pictured him lazily eating figs and pomegranates, sunning himself next to a pool uncontaminated by algae or raccoons.