When we left DC, we headed to Rehoboth Beach to see the fabulous Anna March. In the corner of the writing world in which I live, Anna March is a force of nature. She has five thousand Facebook friends, and she knows who each one of them is and what they do. She is one of the organizers of AWP HEAT, a marathon reading benefiting VIDA and pretty much the best networking opportunity at the conference. She’s widely published as both a literary writer and a cultural critic. In other words, she is made of awesome.
Anna taught me how to eat crabs–it was surprisingly like opening up a beer can.
Dominik spent much of this leg of the trip locked in our little motel room in a nearby town, working diligently on a translation of Jim Butcher’s Side Jobs for his German publisher, so Anna took me to lunch at Claws and I had my first ever big-pile-of-crabs. I’m now crazy about them. What’s not to love about a huge pile of delicious seafood that comes with a hammer? It was part lunch and part DIY project. I see yearly pilgrimages to crab restaurants in our future.
But, of course, the best thing was that it takes a long time to eat crabs, so I got to talk with Anna for a long time. You know how, when you set out to do any sort of arty thing, you daydream about long afternoons spent talking about art with other people passionate about it? And how, really, that’s a rare thing? Well, this afternoon was the most wonderful example of that rare thing. Anna knows everyone and everything, and she is very, very generous with that knowledge. I kept thinking, “This must have been what it was like to go and visit Gertrude Stein in Paris.” Except, of course, that Anna is a better dresser and a whole lot less imperious. But you get my drift. We talked about publishing strategies. We gossiped about writers we both know (but, don’t worry, not you.) We swapped inside information on agents, platforms (though we found artful ways to avoid that awful word), and the whole awful money side of writing. It was amazing. I want to live next door to Anna March for the rest of my life and have these kinds of afternoons ALL THE TIME.
Dominik got about five minutes of beach time, but he was an awfully good sport.
Post-crabs, I headed back to the hotel, where I had just enough time to wash the butter and crab shell bits off my hands, throw on a dress, and pull Dominik away from his work. I felt awful for him, and a little awful for me, because we both love the beach and would loved to have spent some time walking by the ocean together, but he is the kind of person to never miss a deadline (which is part of why he’s so amazing) and so pretty much he had time to take off his shoes, walk far enough out onto the sand for me to snap this picture, then put on his shoes and go to dinner. Next year, my love, I promise we’ll find a way to actually get you all the way down to the water!
We then went to Blue Moon with Anna and her fabulous husband Adam. Because this is Rehoboth, and because it was Memorial Day weekend, the restaurant was packed with gay men here to celebrate the start of the season, so it was particularly wonderful to be there. Anna is also clearly a force of nature in her community as well as in the writing world: on the way to the restaurant, at the restaurant, and on our way back from the restaurant she was pulled into conversations with almost everyone we passed. I can’t tell you what I would give to have a tiny portion of her social acumen and her amazing memory for names, faces, and the details of other people’s lives.
My cocktail lit up and changed colors! It was very festive. Also, very yummy.
The food at the Blue Moon was wonderful (although my enthusiasm was a little dampened by all those crabs, Dominik ate heartily and praised everything he ordered). The hit of the meal, for me, was my cocktail–which lit up and changed colors! We talked some more–I could talk to Anna every day forever and never get tired of listening to what she has to say–and the time just flew by. This was one of those WFD dinners where it felt like I was seeing an old friend again after a long absence, not really meeting someone for the first time. (I had, of course, met Anna at AWP, but that only barely counts. Everyone is so busy that it almost doesn’t count.) It was the sort of evening I envisioned when I conceived of the tour, and it was wonderful.
