Mangroves flourish out back. Iguanas stalk the area. Monkeys sometimes stop by. Crocodiles, too.

So it's no surprise that John Dufresne, author of novels, short stories, screenplays and a guide to writing fiction, finds inspiration in his own backyard.

``It's a beautiful place to write about. It's interesting, it's unique,'' said Dufresne, who lives in Dania Beach. ``It's the only subtropical region in the country. You see things here you don't see other places.''

He will read from his latest novel, Requiem, Mass., at Miami Book Fair International at 10:30 a.m. Nov. 15. He has also drawn praise for his previous novels: Louisiana Power & Light, Love Warps the Mind a Little and Deep in the Shade of Paradise.

Raised in Massachusetts, Dufresne, 61, took the long way to get to South Florida. He went to graduate school in Arkansas and then taught in Louisiana, New York and Georgia before taking a job at Florida International University, where he teaches creative writing.

A South Florida resident since 1990 with wife Cindy Chinelly, who also teaches at FIU, and son Tristan, now 24, Dufresne settled first in Hallandale Beach and then Dania Beach. That was long before either city had added the word ``Beach'' to their official names.

``I liked the way it looked up here. I liked Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood,'' he said. ``Hollywood at the time was kind of like the 1950s, with all the mom-and-pop motels.''

Smack between the two cities, Dufresne finds himself close enough to the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport that he once hoofed it home after his flight landed, trailing a suitcase. It was about an hour's walk.

``Probably no one was home and I was too cheap to call a taxi,'' he said. ``Writers can't afford cabs.''

For all South Florida's charms and eccentricities, Dufresne said he initially had a hard time writing about the region.

``I couldn't write about South Florida for a long time, and I was always trying to. I never quite understood it,'' he said. ``It's too big, it's too large, there are so many cultures.''

But then he realized what he was familiar with, and Florida finally found its way into his fiction.

``One day I realized, well, I know Dania Beach pretty well. Why don't I just focus on this? That's when I began to feel I could write about the place,'' Dufresne said.

Dania Beach and its surrounding areas appear in several pieces in his 2005 short story collection, Johnny Too Bad. The title story takes place as a destructive hurricane bears down on the area.

``Everything is just gridlock,'' Dufresne said. He had some experience with that scenario, trying to flee the day before Hurricane Andrew struck in 1992, and getting stuck on northbound I-95.

His neighborhood drinking hole, the Kings Head Pub, also shows up in a story.

Besides teaching creative writing to university students, Dufresne offers a free writing workshop for the public about every other Friday night at the school's Biscayne Bay campus. He said people regularly come from Palm Beach County and the Florida Keys.

Dufresne calls South Florida ``a great place to be a writer'' thanks to the writing programs at his university, as well as other schools in Broward and Miami-Dade, independent book shops like Books & Books and Murder on the Beach, and Miami Book Fair International.

``If you said South Florida to people in the Midwest, South Florida literature, they would think of Carl Hiaasen, Jim Hall,'' he said. ``But it's much larger than that. It's all kinds of wonderful literary writers and genre writers.''

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