15 Views of Orlando has been stolen from the tubes of the Internet and is now in book form, due out on 1/31/12. Read this intro and the first story in full, get hooked, and pre-order it here.

Here’s a fun game.

I name a city, and you try to picture that city as depicted in literature and film. Create a list of all the different stories that have offered a view of that city, and picture the portrait of that city painted by the various authors and filmmakers.

It’s an easy game, too. Here, we’ll start with a major American city: Chicago. Take a moment. Create a mental list.

What sort of images came to mind, and from which books, which movies? Did you picture the white city/ dark city of The Devil in The White City, the immigrant meat-grinder of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle? Or did you skip ahead 100 years, picture the Caprini Green of Candyman, the suburbs of Wayne’s World? The skyscrapers and offices of Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End?  How many different authors have attempted to capture the personality of Chicago on the page or on the screen? How many have contributed to its legacy in literature, to its mythology?

Fun game, right? We’ll try again.

Take another moment, and picture New York City as depicted in literature and film. Close your eyes. Heck, I could do my best to make this tough, and it would still be easy. I could give you a single decade—the 1980s—and you’d have no problem forming a list of books and movies which have left indelible “New York” images in your mind: Jay McInernay’s Bright Lights, Big City, or Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, or Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. The Muppets Take Manhattan, even. Skip ahead a decade, and now Sex and the City immediately comes to mind. Pick any decade, and you’ve still got Law & Order. As a character in film and literature, New York is more often appropriated than Robin Hood or King Arthur.

Now picture Los Angeles. Picture Atlanta. Picture Boston, New Orleans, San Francisco, Detroit. Literature. Cinema. Television. I drop the name of a city—Baltimore!—and you’re already thinking of the ports and the schools and the “Bodymore Murdaland” graffiti from The Wire. The American City used not simply as a generic setting, but crafted into a unique character every bit as memorable as the men and women populating the story, every bit as desire-driven and multi-dimensional as the men and women who have walked the city streets for centuries.

Easy game.

Now we’ll try it one last time. Picture our city of Orlando. Make a list. What comes to mind?

…

Anything?

…

This thought has stuck with me for quite awhile, has—in fact—become a nagging frustration/ question/ goal for years, because when I close my eyes and picture the city of Orlando and its place in film and literature, I am left with this image: Carl Winslow happily herding his children through Disney World, pointing and laughing at some dancing Goofy or Donald Duck costumed character while Steve Urkel slaps along behind them. It is the cast of Family Matters enjoying a vacation episode in our fair city (or, rather, our fair metropolis), and even when I saw this episode as a middle-schooler, it felt horrible and phony. I’d been to Disney World several times, after all, and what I remembered most about the experience were the long lines, the heat and humidity from a full day outdoors (Urkel didn’t even look like he was breaking a sweat!), the smell of the lockers where my father would store a cooler full of sandwiches for our entire family rather than spending God-knows-how-much at the concession stands and restaurants, the cheap plastic Mickey Mouse toy I’d beg my parents to buy for me at some edge-of-the-city gas station/ souvenir shop combo…the hotels, too, and the claustrophobic feeling of cramming into a single room with my entire family of five…oh, I had a fantastic time as a kid, loved the rides, loved the sights, but it was nothing like the scenes from Family Matters. They’d given us a slice of Orlando—a slice of Disney World—without any honesty, and yet this is what I still picture when I think of the legacy of Orlando in books and movies? Steve Urkel?

So I’ll breathe, and I’ll take another moment to picture Orlando in literature and film. I’ll build my list. And now I’m picturing a dozen other sitcoms with episodes real and imagined, all of them within the safe bubble of theme park. Now I’m picturing ESPN the Weekend, Drew Brees on a float. Now I’m picturing Ellen or Rosie O’Donnell shooting a full week of episodes from Disney or Universal. I’ve got to be missing something, right? I’ve lived in Orlando for more than a decade, and there’s got to be some book I’m forgetting about? Zora Neale Hurston, maybe? Okay, but that still feels more “Florida” than “Orlando.” And is there anything modern, anything that tackles the city in its contemporary form, the Disney World and Universal Studios theme parks at conflict with Downtown Orlando at conflict with Orange County at conflict with International Drive? Is there any film or book which peeks into the dark spaces, that is not simply satisfied with the façade of this international city, that knows that Parramore and the Coalition for the Homeless and the University of Central Florida and the Eyesore on I-4 and Wally’s Liquors and the Mall at Millennia and Little Vietnam and Johnny’s Fillin’ Station and Bithlo and Metro West and the Orange County Convention Center and the Amway Arena (new and old) all co-exist to complete the personality of a city far more interesting and complex than the swampy X-marks-the-spot crossroads of I-4 and the Turnpike that Walt Disney pictured from his plane in 1963 as the future home of his theme park? Is there anything out there?

Deep breath.

And yet I picture Steve Urkel.

This is the genesis (silly as it might sound) for the “15 Views of Orlando” project, a collaboration between fifteen different Orlando authors, which will provide that multi-faceted characterization of a city that we all—as residents, past and present—know has a lot of character, but which is too often acknowledged in the same bland and one-dimensional way. For this project, we’ve recruited authors young and old, established and aspiring; we’ve got teachers and students, novelists and editors; the project is to be a work of fiction, but we’ve got authors whose background or expertise comes not simply in fiction, but also in poetry, memoir, journalism, and blogging; the 15-part story will take place entirely within the Orlando metropolitan area, but some authors are lifelong residents, some are transplants, and some have moved as far away as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The authors’ views of the city will be both dark and light, sad and funny, optimistic and cynical, epic and tiny, as scattered and (yes) schizophrenic as the city itself. Quite simply, this will be a literary portrait of the city, but also a showcase of the town’s literary talent.

But the word “portrait” sounds too static, so we decided to make this even more interesting. This isn’t just a series of snapshots of Orlando’s skyline. The “15 Views of Orlando” will be a linked story unfolding over fifteen weeks: from the start of this project, our authors will write a long narrative that winds and snakes through the city, each installment focusing on a different location within Greater Orlando, each installment written to follow the last (with a character or event or image or moment always linking one “view” to the next).  No, this won’t be a traditional story with a plot as clean as a sitcom episode, but like our city, all of these views live and breathe together, are dependent upon one another. Each author has only a week to write his/her own 1,000-word installment in the story, with each delivered on the Burrow blog on Thursdays.

Along the way, of course, we want our readers to add to our “Wish List” of places to visit. Fifteen views will never be enough to capture the city in its entirety, but with each new installment, the personality and character and mythology of our Orlando grows…and with every suggestion to our Wish List, we—authors and readers alike—will continue to watch the possibilities of “Orlando in Literature” grow. So make sure to sign up for the Burrow Press email list, post a comment to the Wish List below, and check back every Thursday to read the latest installment. A full schedule of authors (with bios and links to personal web sites) will be posted next week.

The Orlando Wish List: Suggest Places You’d Like to See Depicted

Beefy King

Appliance Direct

Lake Eola

Orlando Ale House

Waterford Lakes

The Eyesore on I-4