Anna March: Inventing Anna

Missing Pages S01E06 

Anna March: Inventing Anna

Bethanne Patrick: Have you ever met someone with a certain kind of  je ne sais quoi? Being in their presence, well it’s utterly spellbinding. Their magnetism? Unparalleled. Once upon a time in the literary community, there was a powerful witch, much like this. And she seemed to know all the tricks of the trade! She talked the talk, using all the right publishing lingo. And she walked the walk, rubbing shoulders with award winning authors who commanded the writing community’s trust and respect. But, was she a good witch? Or a bad witch? 

Movie Clip - The Wizard of Oz: Are you a good witch or a bad witch? 

Bethanne Patrick: Or is it more complicated than that? Truth be told: I’ve been nervous about sharing this particular story. Why? Because this one hits close to home for me. But sometimes you’ve got to get a little personal. I’m going to introduce you to a former friend and collaborator of mine: the charming, the bewitching, the bewildering, the mysterious… Anna March. 

Don’t recognize the name? That’s okay. It’s not her real name anyways. False alias or not, that didn’t stop me and many of my friends and colleagues from falling under her spell.

Welcome back to Missing Pages. This is the podcast where we revisit some of the strangest, most bizarre things to happen in the literary world and try to make sense of them. We do the research and dig into the cultural context, using the benefit of hindsight, to figure out whether the media coverage got the story right the first time around. 

I’m your host, Bethanne Patrick – literary critic, writer, and publishing insider. After the break, I’m opening up about my experience being deceived. When we come back, Inventing Anna: The Anna March Story.  

Welcome back to this episode of Missing Pages, Inventing Anna: The Anna March Story. Where shall we begin?

CHAPTER 1: Let the Good Times Roll - Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler

Picture it, you’re in downtown L.A. It’s a crisp Thursday night in early February. You’ve been waiting in line for an hour and finally, it’s your turn to catch the next elevator up to a rooftop party. The event is at one of the hippest hotel bars in town. Everyone, who’s anyone is there. And the host? She’s mysterious. 

A recent transplant from the east coast, she’s middle-aged with eye-catching pink hair.

She whisks around the Mezzanine bar in a fabulous polka-dot dress. Who was this woman? 

Melissa Chadburn: I do remember being at that party in L.A., which was at the ACE hotel and, you know, all of literary L.A. was there.

Bethanne Patrick: That’s Melissa Chadburn. Or should I say, the almost Dr. Melissa Chadburn? She’s an author, journalist, activist, and PhD candidate at USC’s Creative Writing Program. 

Melissa Chadburn: And we were just like, what is this party? Like, Hello L.A.? So like, she moved here and she's throwing a party in an open bar, and we were like, “Whatever, free drinks.”

Bethanne Patrick: A native Angelino, Melissa joined me from her home in Los Angeles to recount this swinging party and her other experiences with the woman she knew as Anna March.

Melissa Chadburn: There was like, a line out the door, and she went up to people at various times throughout the night, people of influence. She would say, “Oh God, you know, there's a line out the door. I should just go down there and give them twenty bucks, you know?” And so she did, which was like, such a weird thing, you know? So, I think she thought that if she threw money at this thing, then perhaps it would make her a more legitimate author or something.

Bethanne Patrick: A post from 2015 cheekily titled “Party Like the Literary Industry Isn’t Collapsing In On Itself” from the online magazine, The Rumpus, namechecks Melissa, along with other reputable writers announcing the event. 

Looking back, many of the writers mentioned were recognizable names synonymous with feminism, activism, and the majority hailing from historically marginalized backgrounds. Anna appeared legitimate by association, and in the book world, it’s pretty much about who you know.

Melissa Chadburn: I left that party still, you know, just baffled by who this person was and, you know. But again, it was free drinks and it was a night [where] I can hang out with other people that I knew and liked.

Bethanne Patrick (To Melissa Chadburn): When there's an open bar, writers drop their guards.

Melissa Chadburn: Right. So at that party, we did all think that it was weird. I will say, like, we were all looking at each other, like, “What are we doing here? Whatever. Free bar.” And I think a big part of that party too was that she was, at the time, telling us, telling everyone that Dan Smetanka of Counterpoint was courting her. And so, to see him at a party that she was hosting was also sort of solidifying this thing.

Bethanne Patrick: Melissa is talking about Counterpoint Press here, a well-regarded publishing house based out of California. And the “him” she’s referring to is an editor from Counterpoint who was also at this lavish party at the ACE, which seemed to validate a story that Anna had been telling.

Full disclosure: Counterpoint is actually the publisher of my forthcoming memoir. But at the time, back around 2015, both Melissa and I remember Anna saying that Counterpoint wanted to publish her work.

The body of work in question? “The Diary of Suzanne Frank.” A novel, it promised to be an unabashedly sexual take on the justly famed Anne Frank's adolescent diaries written while Anne and her family were in hiding from the Nazis. I’ll add here to further paint the picture of this person: Anna March had Anne Frank's Shoah number tattooed on her forearm. 

Many in writing circles, from what I remember seeing and hearing, expressed distaste for this tattoo. But to Anna? It seemed to represent her devotion to the murdered Jewish teenager and to other femmes who had been silenced throughout history.

Alright, where were we? So, this 2015 “Hello, L.A.” event, which marked Anna March’s launch into the L.A. literary scene, exuded credibility vis-a-vis its affiliation to this community of notable authors and editors alike. But who was bankrolling this whole soiree? Holding an event at a rooftop in downtown L.A. with an open bar, well that’s not free.

Melissa Chadburn: My wife, who dropped me off at the party, saw Adam – 

Bethanne Patrick: Adam is Adam Pesachowitz. This was Anna March’s fiancé at the time. The two had recently moved from Rehoboth Beach to the west coast together for what appeared to be Anna’s entry into literary L.A. 

Melissa Chadburn: This was a party that was mostly on the rooftop or, you know, the top floor of the ACE hotel, and Adam's in a wheelchair. So, he's like, in the foyer, in a wheelchair, and paying for the whole damn thing.

Bethanne Patrick: Along with being published in Salon.com and The Rumpus, the year before this event in 2014, Anna had gained notoriety for writing about their relationship in a piece for the New York Times’s celebrated “Modern Love” column. 

Audio Clip - Modern Love: When Anna March started dating her boyfriend, Adam, people made a lot of assumptions about their relationship because Adam is parapalegic. Her essay is read by Mandy Moore, who stars in NBC's This is Us.

Bethanne Patrick: And yes, in the podcast episode about the article, that Mandy Moore, from such classic films as Saved! and A Walk To Remember, gives a heartfelt read of Anna’s article. How about a little snippet?

Audio Clip - Modern Love: Here's the thing about Adam and me. Despite all appearances with him being disabled, I actually consider myself to be the less able person in the relationship.

Bethanne Patrick: Anna actually appeared in a follow-up interview on the Modern Love podcast in June 2018 to reflect on the relationship.

Podcast Clip - Modern Love: It's not about the walking. Adam and I always used to say, “It's not about the walking.” When they say something like, “Someone who's able-bodied is somehow doing something noble by dating someone with a disability,” we're all doing something noble when we openly and honestly try to love someone else.

Bethanne Patrick: From an outsider looking in, Anna seemed fiercely compassionate and maybe like a woman with her heart in the right place. In this follow-up interview, she also talks about the couple’s subsequent breakup.

Podcast Clip - Modern Love: About a year after my piece appeared in Modern Love, Adam and I split up. If that’s what was best for both of us, although I certainly didn't think that at the time, I think that I didn't love Adam as generously and openly as I could have.

Bethanne Patrick: And here, it does kind of sound like Anna takes responsibility for her missteps in the relationship? But as Melissa uncovered in an investigative article she co-wrote and reported on for the Los Angeles Times published in July 2018, only a month after this interview came out, there was more to the story. 

Here, Melissa recalls finding out about Anna’s breakup shortly after that glamorous “Hello L.A.” party when the two met up to discuss future events of its kind.

Melissa Chadburn: We met one day at Stories in Echo Park in Los Angeles to talk about it. She had just moved to L.A. She wanted to sort of plant her seed here. She really wanted to get roots here. I was meeting her for this thing I didn't know about, which was like, a common experience when working with her. She's like, she has this idea, she wants to start a nonprofit. She wants to like, you know, upend the patriarchy and like, we're going to meet for coffee. And you're like, “What? Okay.” 

So I went there, and she showed up, you know, thirty minutes late, totally disheveled, a wreck, crying. Her and Adam had broken up and, you know, she didn't know what to do. And she walked out and left.

Bethanne Patrick (To Melissa Chadburn): It's so interesting because, of course, that's exactly how she approached me and got me involved, was through, “I want to start Lit Folks D.C.” It sounds like alarm bells went off for you pretty early, but people still treated her like a legitimate professional acquaintance.

Melissa Chadburn: Yeah, well that's the thing, is that the alarm bells go off and then I'm like, “Oh, but you know, she's working with a huge person when it comes to publicity.”

Bethanne Patrick: As Melissa and I traded war stories about our experience with the charming and mercurial Anna March, I began having flashbacks to our first chance encounter. When we come back from the break: how I got involved, and then (thankfully) uninvolved, with Anna.

CHAPTER 2: After the Party Ends, Apres la Soiree

To recap: Anna is an emerging writer with bylines in reputable publications and a rolodex of important literary connections. She loves to wine and dine writers, and appears to have the budget to host fabulous parties. And Anna is mission-driven, starting non-profits and aligning herself with causes that empower underrepresented voices and progressive, feminist writers like herself.

I probably met Anna March a few weeks after this party at the ACE Hotel that Melissa attended. The timelines are a bit messy. This is partially because the world in the months surrounding the 2016 election was a bit messy and partially because everything involving Anna was always a swirl of confusion. As I recall, here’s how I remember our first meeting:

I'm sitting at a table in the leafy garden of D.C.'s Tabard Inn. Its very name is a literary homage to the inn where Chaucer's pilgrims told their tales. It seemed like the perfect place to meet up with a new writer friend for lunch. 

In she sweeps, all striped stockings and pink hair: Anna March.  She's asked me here to talk about her ideas for a group. She plans to call it Lit Folks D.C., building on the success of her new west coast community Lit Folks L.A. 

I already know of Anna through a friend with whom she's launched the Lulu Awards, which are intended to honor femmes whose writing is sex positive and from diverse perspectives. As you’ll hear, there’s always someone credible you know who seems to endorse Anna, so she gets the benefit of the doubt. 

While much of the lunch remains a blur in my memory, at one point, I do remember when Anna asked about my own work. I said, “I'm still emerging, but I think I'm a good writer at least.” Then, dramatically, she took my hand, leaned toward me, looked me dead in the eyes and said, “I think you're a great writer, Bethanne. A great writer!” And at that precise moment, she reminded me that she was treating me to lunch, so I’d better order dessert.

Somehow, I can't think about Anna without thinking about food and drink. And I don't think this has anything to do with her own consumption or with her plus size physique or mine. Nearly everyone I talked to fondly remembered that Anna never skimped on a party. It has to do with the aura of abundance and excess Anna cultivated everywhere she went. If you were having breakfast with her at a conference, for example? Bring on the tall stack of pancakes and extra bacon. For a writer's retreat lunch? There were multiple casseroles of gooey Mac and Cheese, enormous green salads, and multiple baguettes.

People who visited her Rehoboth Beach home were encouraged to have picnics and large frozen cocktails, seaside. At another conference, she took a few dozen writers out to the Palm for a feast, plying them with martinis and appetizers and steak. 

Anna March fed people well in order to cultivate a different kind of hunger; a hunger for connection that is both obvious, but also seen as shameful in creative types. She fed people exactly what they needed to hear at precisely the right moment. My friend Luis Urrea, an award-winning author, joined me to reflect on his experience with Anna March’s charm and tact.

Luis Urrea: So, Anna March, what's up with that? 

Bethanne Patrick (to Luis Urrea): What do you remember about Anna?

Luis Urrea: She wrote to me, she was amazing. Hit it off right away. You know me, besties with women. I was like, “Yeah, blah, blah, blah.” We would just go off and running. And she was coming to Chicago to do a panel on women's sexuality, and there was only one male she would want on that panel, which was me, of course. My ego was like, “Well, yeah, who else but me, man?” And then we got there and I was terrified. I was just like, “What am I doing at this table?” 

But this [was a] panel of women and they were talking quite frankly, and I was just sitting there. And then Anna would say, teasingly, “Well, what about you Luis, you must have an opinion about blah, blah,  blah.” So, she forced me out of my shell and it was really fun. So, I thought this woman's badass, you know, like everybody did, and we stayed in touch and she had all these plans for me.

Bethanne Patrick: For writers and creative types, like me and Luis, it’s easy to descend into our caves of solitude, and often more difficult to find the right opportunities and communities to pull us out of our shells. The events and connections Anna always seemed to be building with big literary names attached, like Cheryl Strayed of the best-selling memoir Wild or Ashley C. Ford or Saeed Jones or – the list goes on-and-on – held a certain appeal to the aspiring or “emerging” writer class. 

It’s normal, even encouraged, for writers to visit residencies, retreats, conferences, and workshops to develop their craft with their contemporaries. All of these elements – writing, meeting, drinking, eating, circling the competition, screwing the competition – well, they’ve been happening for centuries, maybe millennia, and they'll never get old. It's part of the writerly temperament to scurry forth a few times a year and socialize, after which we all head back to our lairs to do the work. 

Creatives also have to be really careful about energy drain. And, one thing I remember about Anna March, is she knew this. She knew that you ask someone to a one-on-one lunch, and then ask them to a party and then, you know, have something small again, and then have them come to something big. She was very intentional and strategic about bringing people into her fold.

Like Melissa and Luis, my professional relationship with Anna March was a slow build – before it imploded. After our lunch date, we were touch and go via email or text. Anna seemed to be busy, busy, busy. Whether it was a new project in the literary community or a personal health or family crisis, her emails or texts were always prefaced with “Can’t talk” or “On the go,” then followed by a longer explanatory paragraph about why, which must have taken time to craft. Here’s Luis talking about what all of this seemed to imply.

Luis Urrea: You know, she had the con artist’s genius, I think, of giving you a taste of what you most needed. And I think all of us writers need connection, guidance, success, voice, publication. I mean, why are we doing this? 

And she also was a hell of a good actor. I mean, she played this role of this together, slightly overwhelmed by success, woman, a little impatient with it all, but I'm getting it – But that was, I think, that was the key to the scam. “I am so fucking important. It's hard for me to compartmentalize it, but I'm doing it. I'm getting it all together.” And that was always the thing that moved the little cup with the pea around on the table, you know? 

Yes, I'm just putting this aside right now. I'm tending to this and whatever, I don't remember details anymore, but whatever things we were talking about, you know, as pertaining to what I was doing or she wanted me to do, she was always having to move it aside just for a moment.A nd it threw me. 

And I remember thinking she presented herself like some Hollywood figure almost. You know, very busy, ready to go, very charming, very funny. And she claimed, which I thought was kind of brilliant, it had chutzpah, but she claimed familiarity with every author and every topic. So you thought, “Shit, she knows everyone.” You know, you wanted to be her for a minute. 

Bethanne Patrick: About a year after our initial lunch meeting, Anna did end up recruiting me for a project. The 2016 election was over. 

News Clip - BBC: “I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.”

Bethanne Patrick: Doing mission driven work that elevated women and underrepresented voices, well, for me and a lot of people, it felt more urgent than ever.

News Clip - The Atlantic: We’re wearing the Pink Pussy Hat, and I never thought I’d be saying that, but we’re wearing it because he has no right to be gathering women’s pussies.

Bethanne Patrick: And Anna, who had historically aligned herself with feminist initiatives, capitalized on the political uncertainty. Here I am talking to my producer about how I wound up being the books editor for Anna’s new online digital magazine, ROAR, in 2017.

Bethanne Patrick (To Caila Litman): Anna decided she was going to start a new online magazine called ROAR or ROAR Feminist. And she came to me and offered me all sorts of different positions, executive editor, managing editor, this and that. And I said, “You know what? Let me try Books Editor out because it was right in my wheelhouse and I thought, “Okay, I'll see how this goes.” 

It was a great opportunity. There were some amazing people that she'd gathered – essayists and critics and artists, people who were doing fascinating things, everything from, you know, combining genres to someone who was doing a column about abortion stories, to a woman who was putting together these fascinating dioramas that were really politically charged.

So, I thought this [was] a great opportunity to work with all of these different people. But we were male and female and non-binary, mostly fems, but a lot of people from underrepresented groups, and so different kinds of voices. And I thought for me to take, you know, sort of a backseat instead of, you know, saying, “Oh sure, I'll be the big, you know, Kahoona, managing editor felt like the right choice at that time as well.

So, Anna told me she'd pay me a thousand dollars a month. That's a nice chunk of change. That made sense for me. I didn't think I needed a lot more. I was just doing the books column and I thought she had money. And, you know, the first couple of months when I sent in invoices and got no pay, I thought, “Alright, I do this, I batch invoices, this is a new venture, it'll be okay in a few months, she'll pay.” And I think she probably paid once in the first, it's hard to remember, let's say five or six months, and then there were no other payments. And I wound up, you know, having to be really tough in order to get more of the money she owed me. And later in the episode, we'll talk a little bit more about that, but it was pretty difficult. 

And the other thing that really disturbed me is that although she had, even if she wasn't paying me all the time, she had at least promised to pay me. But a lot of the contributors, especially people who were contributing some of the content I thought was most exciting and most well put together, were getting very, very little and they weren't getting paid either. 

Caila Litman: And again, like her whole thing was that she was trying to elevate underrepresented groups, underrepresented voices, but then not paying them appropriately.

Bethanne Patrick to Caila Litman: Exactly.

Bethanne Patrick: To fill in a few blanks here, I also saw Anna in person at a big writers conference in March of 2017. This was at the first, and what I didn’t realize at the time, the last in person meeting of the ROAR team. Anna looked healthy. She hosted an event attended by all sorts of big names like Roxanne Gay. At that time, everything was looking good for our writing retreat in Positano. I had no reason to believe otherwise. Plus, I was excited to go to Italy.

Video Clip - Positano Travel Guide: Specializing in scenery, shopping, and sand, the resort town of Positano hangs on the most spectacular stretch of the coast.

Bethanne Patrick: After all, my friends and other legitimate writers would be there. Here I am talking to my friend Luis again about how this whole trip to Italy eventually got derailed.

Bethanne Patrick (to Luis Urrea): My bullshit meter finally went off in 2017, just before this retreat was supposed to happen. And Anna called one day, and I said, “Where is this villa?” Because I'd been to Positano, I’d been to Sirenland, and so I knew it very well. And I said, “Where are we staying?” And she sent me this link to a house that doesn't actually exist. Come on, there's Google Earth now, you can see where the villas are, right? I'm like, “Anna!” And she says, “Well, I'm going to send you another link, but I have to let you know, I have ankle cancer.” And I was like, “What?” Now you might remember, you know, I broke my ankle badly several years ago. You know, the Franken-ankle. And so I'm like, “There is no such thing as ankle cancer. Do you have bone cancer?” I was very concerned, but here was the thing that tipped me off. She said this to me right after she'd sent me the link to the non-existent villa. And I said, “Anna, you realize Positano was all stairs.”

Video Clip - Positano Travel Guide: The village is squished into a ravine with narrow pedestrian-only alleys that cascade down to the harbor.

Bethanne Patrick: You’re probably thinking, “Bethanne! How could you be so dumb to fall for this person? And for years?” Trust me. I’ve thought the same thing.

First things first, I thought Anna March was capable of hosting a writing retreat abroad because I had already seen her do it. In the summer of 2016, Anna held a writing workshop in Provence, France at La Pitchoune, the former estate of the legendary Julia Child. “La Peetch,” as Child aficionados called it, had recently been purchased by a Smith College alum, McKenna Held, and open to outside workshops for the first time in over a decade. 

Anna had booked her own writer’s retreat at La Peetch the day after the one I was attending there ended. So, she asked for me to come to lunch that Monday and talk to her group about what it was like to live as a freelance writer. I didn't even see the ridiculousness of this, or ask, or know anything about who the writers attending would be. I just thought it would be fun and, after all, I was already there.

And the other main reason that I kept buying into Anna’s stunts, well, it’s something that Melissa and Luis and many in her orbit have said again and again. The literary world still runs on trust. When someone declaims something – a fellowship, a book deal, a promotion – people take them at their word. 

And as Melissa identified when talking about that swinging rooftop party, people in this biz will size up your credibility based on who you know. Anna March always seemed to be associating with very big-deal writers. So, who was I to question their judgment? These people were very successful.

But this undercurrent of trust also derives, of course, from the nature of the writing beast. Writers are solitary. We pour our individual consciousnesses into novels, short stories, poetry, memoir, and plays. It takes a monumental amount of trust to turn that work over to another reader, to believe that that reader will not casually mock or unkindly correct the words you've worked so hard to set down on a page. Anna was effusive about other peoples’ work. She was accepting. She was kind. But to what end?

Karen Palmer: And I should have known that it was, you know, it was kind of ridiculous. It was too good to be true. And why me?

Bethanne Patrick: That’s award-winning author, and my friend, Karen Palmer, talking about her experience with Anna March and her trip to Italy in summer 2017.

Karen Palmer: She said she wanted to hire me as an instructor at this one that she was going to do in Positano, in Italy. And I thought, “Oh, that's great.” And she said, “I can't pay you, but you will have free room and board. If you can get yourself to Italy, there's free room and board for a week on the Amalfi coast. And I'm going to have a chef and all this kind of stuff.”

Bethanne Patrick: Karen Palmer met Anna March in Los Angeles in 2016 in much the same way we all did – over a long, decadent meal.

Karen Palmer: I knew of her for about a year before I ever actually met her in person. You know, she came out to visit some friends or something.

Bethanne Patrick (To Karen Palmer): She was complimenting your work, absolutely, correct?

Karen Palmer: Yes. And of course, you know, it's like, the praise is so, you know, few and far between, it was like, you know, it was this balm to have someone. And not only did she praise it, she got it, which is a very seductive thing. Then she was also very confessional. You know, she did this thing that I think women do when there's a spark between them and they are maybe destined to be friends where you give up a little bit of yourself, and then the other person gives up a little bit of themself, and it goes back and forth.

I mean, it was a long lunch. It was, you know, two and a half hours and it felt very intimate. You know, we talked, I have no idea whether this is even true, but we talked about going to Catholic girl high school, you know, all these kinds of things that, it's not that we had him in common, but it felt like we understood each other.

Bethanne Patrick: Another thing Karen and Anna bonded over at this lunch date, which I had to ask her about when we chatted, was their shared experience embracing new names and writing about the traumatic events that led to this major decision to overhaul their identity.

You can read Karen’s gripping account of how she disappeared under a false alias to protect her family in a 2016 essay, “The Reader is The Protagonist,” published in the Virginia Quarterly Review. You can read a much gauzier tale of necessary name changes in the online magazine, Literary Orphans, by Anna March. 

Her edgy, yet prosey, essay entitled “What's In a Name? A Biography of Sorts” details a long history reclaiming her identity and healing from familial abuse by taking on a slew of new names over the years. Reading this particular piece back, it seems a lot of the secrets about the woman we all knew as Anna March were right there, hiding in plain sight.

Karen Palmer: I'm glad you mentioned it because that was another thing we bonded over during this lunch, was I had read this essay of hers and, you know, I've read other of her writing and that essay is the only thing that I ever liked, was that one essay. And it was because it spoke to my situation about having changed your name and having done this thing that, even if you feel like you have a good reason, you’re kind of ashamed of having done. And I thought it was honest. And that appealed to me.

Bethanne Patrick: So, it was through these deeply personal and generously vulnerable conversations that Anna built trust with Karen during this fateful lunch date.

Karen Palmer: I thought we were going to have a quick lunch, and we wound up talking [for] a very long time. And, you know, we had sandwiches and we had milkshakes and she was very complimentary about the essay. And in the course of the lunch, she started talking to me about these workshops that she was doing. She was putting on these sort of, you know, one week, or I think they were one week, I don't think they were longer than that, you know, like groups of maybe 5, 6, 7 people, mostly women, but not exclusively, would go someplace, you know, kind of exotic or different as a way to have like, a little mini residency. And we would all write and write and write and there would be, you know, communal meals and that sort of thing.

She said she wanted to hire me as an instructor at this one that she was going to do in Positano. And I thought, “Oh, that's great.” And she said, “I can't pay you, but you will have free room and board. If you can get yourself to Italy, there's free room and board for a week on the Amalfi coast.”

Bethanne Patrick (To Karen Palmer): When did alarm bells start ringing for you about Anna?

Karen Palmer: Well, just to go back, there was one last part of  this first lunch. So, she invited me to lunch. She wanted to take me to lunch. When we first sat down, she was like, “This is on me.” So, two and a half hours later, we go to pay, and she doesn't have any money. She's forgotten her credit card. So, you know, it was fine. So I paid, you know, it was an expensive afternoon, and then I had paid, you know, the penalty in the parking garage. You know, it was like a $100 afternoon with this person who supposedly was inviting me to lunch to offer me a job. 

So, when I say it was a precursor, that's also a part of what was a precursor, is that it, you know, looking back on it, it's like, well, she never had any intention of paying.

Bethanne Patrick (To Karen Palmer): Let's talk about what led up to Positano. What were you thinking about the retreat?

Karen Palmer: Well, I think again, you know, Anna was having sort of this reputation at the time as kind of a guru, a writing guru. Particularly with women and particularly middle-aged women. So, I didn't really know what was expected of me. And I kept writing Anna, saying, “Okay, I'm trying to prepare what I'm going to teach. Can you give me some idea of, you know, of what you're looking for, of what the format is? You know, is it a two hour workshop in the morning?” You know, just something, some kind of heads up about what the structure was going to be. Because I hadn't heard anything.

We were getting closer and closer to the time that we were going. I had bought my plane ticket, you know, all this stuff, and she just wouldn't write back. I wouldn't hear from her. And I remember you and I had these exchanges going, “What's going on with Anna?” 

Bethanne Patrick (To Karen Palmer): You know, from what I know of you as a friend, but also as a writer, you're a pretty careful planner.

Karen Palmer: Yes. 

Bethanne Patrick (To Karen Palmer): Would you ever have operated like this in another circumstance?

Karen Palmer: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. No. No, I am too much of a control freak. 

Bethanne Patrick (To Karen Palmer): Why did we abandon our senses? 

Karen Palmer: We wanted to go! We wanted to go. I really wanted to go. I, you know, at [a] ripe old age had never been to Europe. This was my first opportunity to go and I was thrilled. And as a matter of fact, I arranged to go three days early so I could spend some time in Rome before, you know, before going to Positano and meeting, you know, everyone else who was attending. So, I mean, I was just thrilled.

Bethanne Patrick (To Karen Palmer): So you get on this flight, you're very excited. When did you find out that the whole thing had been canceled? 

Karen Palmer: So, I'm standing at this, you know, in this little cobblestone street outside this place where I'm supposed to stay. I take out my phone and I look and there's a message from Anna to the group in which she has canceled the workshop.

Because I went early, I think I was the only person out of that group that was actually in Europe at the time she canceled, but she canceled a day or two before other people were flying. So, you know, and I'm sure people had non-refundable tickets and all, all kinds of mess, but I was the only one that was actually stranded and I was frantically writing [to] her.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. 

Bethanne Patrick (To Karen Palmer): How did you finally get home? 

Karen Palmer: I wound up staying the entire time on my ticket because I had a non-refundable ticket and I couldn't change it. So I thought, “Well, I'll try to make the best of it. And you know, it's Rome, how bad can it be?” Even though I was scared out of my wits, because again, I didn't speak the language and I didn't know what I was doing and I was just lost. I made it through the 10 days and I flew home. And then tried to get my money from Anna.

Bethanne Patrick (To Karen Palmer): Did you ever get reimbursed? 

Karen Palmer: Uh, she did. She partially reimbursed me, and I think, you know, it seemed to me that the way it went was she kind of paid people back based on who could cause the most trouble for her. 

Bethanne Patrick (To Karen Palmer): She should have paid for your therapy! 

Karen Palmer: Yeah, no kidding. We were all all so traumatized, you know, it was like telling the story. It's hard to just, it's hard to convey how traumatizing the whole thing was. You know, when I got back to Los Angeles and you and I talked, and it just seemed like it was a total grift. 

Bethanne Patrick: Upon returning to L.A., Karen started talking to other people who had been deceived by Anna March. It began as an email exchange between a few people, but everyday it seemed a new victim joined the thread, bringing along with them their own story of how Anna had misled them into a money-losing venture.

Karen Palmer: I was really scared of her and I guess I thought that she would do something to my reputation, or she would, you know, she would badmouth me to people that I thought were friends. I felt very vulnerable as I know everybody in that group did. We all just kind of bitched for a while and it took Melissa Chadburn to finally say, “I'm going to write about this.” 

Bethanne Patrick: For me and a lot of people connected with Anna March’s circus, the failed Positano trip was a nail in the coffin to her credibility. Then, the following year in summer 2018, Melissa Chadburn and Carolyn Kellogg published a broad sweeping investigative piece for the L.A. Times that revealed that Anna March was merely an alias. 

The woman we had all thought we knew had a checkered past in the non-profit sphere, preying on the pocketbooks of vulnerable communities and with a history of subtle name changes, she had disappeared into thin air. Who was this person? And what was she after? 

Melissa Chadburn: She was born Nancy Delaney Anderson. Was it Nancy Kruse? There's been so many names, but uh, okay. There's been so many names over the years. 

Bethanne Patrick: Let’s find out, after the break.

CHAPTER 3: The Consequences

Who was Anna March? Where did she come from? And was this her first time whisking into a community, building relationships and abruptly disappearing with a stack of unpaid invoices in her wake? 

Let’s circle back with one of our story’s heroes, Melissa Chadburn, who, like Karen, had been out of money from one of her few dealings with Anna and wound up on this post Positano email chain in 2017.

Melissa Chadburn: So, somebody on the email chain was able to like, do background checks and discover her aliases. She was born Nancy. Was it Nancy Kruse? There's been so many names, but uh, okay. 

Bethanne Patrick (To Melissa Chadburn): There's been so many names. 

Melissa Chadburn: Delaney Anderson is a completely fabricated name, so Nancy I think is her – Nancy Lott is her birth name. And then Nancy Kruse is her married name. Now, she's using Anna March Kruse. 

Bethanne Patrick: It was time to permanently document what kind of person Anna March really was, and online for everyone to see and read. So, the gist of the L.A. Times piece that Melissa reported was that Anna March, before she went by that name, had aligned herself with various political campaigns and non-profit orgs and founded consultancies and charitable funds over the years, only to defraud them of money and then disappear into the ether.

A write-up in the public broadcasting newsletter, the Current, reported on how, in 2005, her fundraising consultancy Kruse and Partners’ failed to live up to its end of a partnership with NPR and its affiliate stations, leading to a judgment against her that totaled more than $380,000.

She would sweep in, host incredible events and charm good people, many of whom stood for progressive causes, and then just as folks took notice of financial loose ends, she would vanish and adopt a new name, then seemingly re-skin this grift with a new community, under a different alias.

But how did she get away with this time and time again? It was a combination of tactics. Anna or Nancy or Delaney or whomever seemed to seek out vulnerable groups, communities that run on trust and word of mouth referrals. Here’s Karen talking about the “why” and “how” of it all.

Karen Palmer: You know, everything is a power dynamic, even in writing. I thought of her as someone who had more power than me because she was apparently friendly with all these famous writers and, you know, I was just a little, mid-list person, you know, toiling away in obscurity. And I felt like she's going to crush me like a bug. And of course it doesn't make any sense. Now it seems ridiculous. 

But again, her nose for people that were vulnerable, and I know we talked about this at the time, she reminded me a lot of my ex-husband, my crazy ex-husband who was a gaslighter and, you know, just, somewhat of a sociopath, you know? It's like there were parallels there. And I think that maybe contributed to my fear also. As I felt like, you know, after the experience with my husband, I thought I had a good nose for people that were a problem. And apparently not, you know?

Bethanne Patrick: But writing is a healing practice and by putting pen to paper, it did offer a kind of catharsis for the wronged. Here’s Melissa again:

Melissa Chadburn: I'm also grateful that like, you know, this was sort of a healing experience to report on it in that, like, how often are you gaslit and then you call it out and you're right, and it's published, you know? I mean in that sense, it is great. It's like, how often do we get to do that? I mean, everyone loves a grifter story, I think for that reason. It's because it's like, you know, it's got that arc.

A lot of people have painted her as like, a woman who preyed upon other women and particularly women of color. And I'll just say that the biggest survivor victims in her wake were actually men, and men she dated. They were kind of taken for everything. 

And she's more akin to, like, a Dirty John than, like, you know, that’s really where her real grift happens, is like, she finds men and presents herself a certain way and always has some windfall that is coming later. Like, when she met Adam's family, she had mentioned that she's, you know, stands to inherit a great deal of money. And so, sort of legitimized him fronting her lifestyle. 

Bethanne Patrick (To Melissa Chadburn): I'm sorry. I, this just makes me act-actively cry.

Bethanne Patrick: I’m really sorry. At this point during my interview with Melissa, I started to tear up. You see, when I crossed paths with Anna March, I met a lot of the people Melissa was talking about. I met at least one of the men that, in the end, had been caught up in a relationship that left him hurt and out thousands of dollars. I met the women whose vulnerability Anna preyed on. Hell, I was one of those women.

All season we’ve talked about people caught in the crosshairs of literary grifters. But when you can put faces, names, and memories to the wronged? When you’re one of the people who fell under their spell? Well, the story feels a little different. Looking back, in the great scheme of things, the money that Anna ran off with didn’t necessarily amount to much. But for the vulnerable communities she got into business  with, in some cases, the checks she skipped out on sending were the difference between people paying rent or eating dinner.

For me, Luis, Karen, and Melissa, we were left wondering: what was Anna really after? And was she still out there, somewhere? 

Karen Palmer: I probably will Google her  until, until I die, you know, every, every six months or so, just to see.

Luis Urrea: You know, my confession is I still miss her. I look up Anna March still to see if that creature has surfaced. But whoever Anna March, the construction is, is now gone. But I can't imagine this avaricious machine, this Terminator, has stopped. She must be somewhere else. Perhaps she's, you know, she's organizing farmers for Farm Aid, who knows what she's doing. But, you know, when you run a scam, sooner or later, the scam rusts and breaks and you know, and it's all these terms, you know, her need her need, whatever that thing inside her, brought her down.

Melissa Chadburn: It’s complicated and then it's not complicated in the sense that, really, it's sad because what she was getting, or what she was after, was some type of love and recognition. And, you know, she burned people along the way and, she went about it the the wrong way. But I think that it was just like, her complicated grift was about love and recognition. It wasn't like she was hoping to get rich one day.

Bethanne Patrick: And maybe to gain some kind of collective closure, Melissa told me about what happened when she recently did Google Anna March.

Melissa Chadburn: Hhere she is: Anna March Kruse is a junior at SCS, majoring in Liberal Studies, informally following the Theology major, Religion, Politics, and the Common Good and Philosophy minor at the college. Like Saint Ignatius, she's an adult learner with a complicated justice-involved past. After a crucible event in 2018, Anna returned to college in the fall of 2020 after a 32 year hiatus.

She is the proud recipient of a Father Lafarge scholarship at Georgetown. She loves living on the Hilltop campus and is happy to be back in D.C., her hometown, after a dozen years living away in Rehoboth Beach. She is thrilled to be at Georgetown and grateful for the opportunity to learn, to repair, and to get ready to go forth and be of good service. A lifelong activist and writer, she loves kayaking, the arts, contemplation, the practice of making amends, and traditional Mahjong. She is a member of the Anthem, Georgetown’s literary magazine, and has supported Georgetown’s Mutual Aid Fund. She adores the Pivot Program, feels a real kinship with the fellows, is grateful for the grace they offer, and all they are teaching her about how to live with dignity. 

Bethanne Patrick (To Melissa Chadburn): Pardon me while I die on tape, while I just, absolutely – I was trying so hard to just shut myself up while you were reading so we could get a clean take.

Melissa Chadburn: Yes, we all do enjoy contemplation. I mean, so that was taken down. So, I think the person who shared it with me contacted the school. They contacted the school to say, this person is a bullshit person. 

Bethanne Patrick: In the end, my little corner of the literary world did get some kind of redemption, thanks to people like Melissa and Karen and Luis, people who chose to speak up. But if you find yourself being invited to an all expenses paid Italian villa by a pink-haired feminist who wants to wine and dine their way to taking down the patriarchy, maybe try a background check first.

Did you like learning about Anna March? Are you interested in learning about other literary grafters and grifters throughout history? Then, I’d recommend checking out these titles:

Given Anna March’s Julia Child house business, perhaps you’d enjoy Julie and Julia by Julie Powell.

We’ve been recommending lots of newish books, so let’s make an exception to the rule. The great American con artist novel? The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade, by Herman Melville. 

Can You Ever Forgive Me? by Lee Israel. Such a great book and movie starring Melissa Mcarthy. 

Missing Pages is a Podglomerate Original, and is written and produced by a small army. 

Showrunner: Caila Litman

Producer, Researcher, and Writer: Jordan Aaron 

Producer: Matt Keeley 

Production: Mixing and Mastering by Chris Boniello 

Production Assistance: by Court Deans. 

Marketing by Joni Deutsch, Morgan Swift, and Madison Richards 

Social Media by Sylvia Bueltel 

Art by Tom Grillo 

Production and Hosting by me, Bethanne Patrick 

Executive Produced by Jeff Umbro and the Podglomerate 

Fact Checking by Doug Weissman and Kathleen Hennrikus

Legal Review by Alexia Bedat and Louise Carron at Klaris Law

Special thanks to Dan Christo, The Modern Love Podcast, Nina Simone, Luis Urrea, Positano, Italy, Karen Palmer, Melissa Chadburn, Melissa Chadburn’s entourage of puppies, and I guess, to Anna March… wherever she may be.

You can learn more about Missing Pages at thepodglomerate dot com, on twitter @misspagespod and on Instagram @missingpagespod, or you can email us at missing pages at the podglomerate dot com. 

If you liked what you heard today, please let your friends and family know and suggest an episode for them to listen to. I’m Bethanne Patrick, and we’ll be back next week with another episode….