San Miguel de Allende

As I type this, I’m sitting in a sunny little sala, listening to a burbling fountain outside. We are in San Miguel de Allende in Central Mexico and it took us a long, long time to get here. Not the actual traveling, mind you. More like the journey.

Way back in 2002 I started working as an Editorial Assistant (copy monkey) at Doubleday Broadway, a division of Random House. I have thousands of wacky stories from this era–stories about meeting Elvis Costello, surviving on $30,000 a year in New York City, and mingling with the bookish elite–but we’ll get to those another time.

Being an Editorial Assistant is rather like being an indentured servant. On your first day, they assign you to a Big Important Editor and for the next several years you are 100% at his or her mercy. My boss still works there so I shall withhold his name, but he was at that time, and still is today, arguably the foremost editor of literary nonfiction. He publishes many New York Times bestselling authors, and one of our personal favorites was a writer named Tony Cohan.

“Tony,” as we called him, wrote ON MEXICAN TIME, one of the best-selling and most important travel journals about Mexico. He is beloved in literary circles but has somehow avoided becoming a household name–which I think suits him just fine, thankyouverymuch.

I read Tony’s book before my interview with my potential boss and I think it was my working knowledge of this delightful sojourn that clinched the gig for me. And while I worked at Random House, Tony would go on to write another travel memoir about Mexico, MEXICAN DAYS, and another book about growing up in L.A., NATIVE STATE. Seriously, you should check him out if you like literary memoirs.

Tony’s first book, ON MEXICAN TIME, was about a place I had never heard of, San Miguel de Allende. What he described sounded like a wonderland to me. Cobblestone colonial streets, brightly painted stone buildings, street parades with brass bands, and a thriving community of expat artists from all over the world. On those cold, snowy nights in Brooklyn, when I had just barely enough money to pay the rent, I dreamed of visiting this sunny escape and getting lost to time–and maybe never coming back.

His follow up book, MEXICAN DAYS, picks up where the first book left off. After he’s been away for awhile, he returns to his beloved San Miguel to find it overrun with an American movie crew filming Zorro and too many gringos. He decamps for nearby Guanajuato in search of a new adventure, a town still not on foreign radars.

From the first moment I met Nathan, I began telling him about San Miguel and Guanajuato and soon he caught the fever too. For years we tried to get down here and explore the two towns we had fallen in love with through someone else’s words, but it never worked out. The timing was off. The money wasn’t there. The swine flu broke out.

Then, a few months ago, Nathan got invited to attend the San Miguel Writers’ Conference. He forwarded the email to me and said, “I’m guessing we can’t say yes fast enough…” And say yes we did.

It would be hard for a place to measure up to my wild imagination and Tony’s vivid writing, and yet San Miguel has been everything that he promised it would be and even more than my mind could conjure. There are no beaches. There is little nightlife to speak of. There aren’t even many attractions. The town is the attraction, as our Lonely Planet guidebook says.

And everywhere, there are artists, everywhere there is someone who wants to hear about your novel, who is at the ready with a hilarious story about the time he met Richard Yates. And today, we are off to Guanajuato, where our next adventure awaits.

Until then, amigos. Una margarita en las rocas con sal is waiting for me.