The first night I spent in Tallahassee, the previous tenant of the house I was renting showed me how the office locked from the outside. She and her ex used to take turns locking each other in to work on their novels. The office smelled powerfully of cigarettes. I loved it, and her, at once. After she gave me the keys, she asked me if I wanted to go to Bird’s.
We met two of her friends there. They were also writers. I was new to town, but already everyone I knew was a writer. I had moved to Tally from Connecticut-by-way-of-Brooklyn, to teach and study for my PhD at Florida State. Bird’s Aphrodisiac Oyster Shack, where I immediately became a regular, is a writerly bar.
