“April is the cruellest month,” wrote T. S. Eliot in Part I of The Waste Land, and I agree. This month has been a really difficult one for me with its shadowy ruff, “breeding” as Eliot says, “Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/memory and desire …” So in that contemplation I am offering up this…
Happy New Year! Sun Nien Fai Lok! Xin Nian Juai Le! It’s the Year of the Rooster, and it looks like 2017, the New Year, promises to be a year of intense energy and productivity as well as no small amount of drama. As my neighbors prepare for it in various ways, I like to…
Morris Island, South Carolina, April 2015 Here we are again, the writers and illustrators who have come together for this year’s Southern Sampler Artists Colony, on Morris Island with Captain Anton DuMars and Sharon Cooper-Murray, aka The Gullah Lady. Anton has stayed with his boat and Sharon has taken us on a walk along the…
Marbella, Spain, 2015 The pop-eyed fish ogle us from the walls of El Estrecho, a little tapas bar in the seaside village of Marbella on the Mediterranean coast. Bubble-eyed and kite-tailed, they have no business being here, spying upon us as we eat our tapas, drink our wine, lament the unavailability of gazpacho at this…
May 17, 2014 I’m totally flipping my lid again. It’s another day at the races, another day of hats and horses, and once again California Chrome, the three-year-old American Thoroughbred foaled in Coalinga, California, is a winner. This time he (yes, I will use the gender specific personal pronoun) won the Preakness Stakes which, when…
Two great pieces of news arrived in my e-mail message box this morning. The first piece of super news: They are finally sending the gold stickers for the front cover of Wandering in Paris: Luminaries and Love in the City of Light, the prize-winning anthology of stories produced at our last international literary workshop. You might…
It’s Derby Day today and that means hats! ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin Hats matter, always for some of us, and today and tomorrow—along with mint juleps, thoroughbred horses and other grand Southern traditions—at this year’s Kentucky Derby. Having just returned from South Carolina and the Southern Sampler Artists Colony where we were celebrating and memorializing Charleston…
Palm Desert, California: December 22, 2012 ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin Spectacular and panoramic morning at 6:30 a.m. on the balcony of my villa at Palm Desert’s Desert Springs Marriott and here I was getting set to rhapsodize about the snow-dusted San Jacinto Mountains in the distance, the towering palms, the Mary-and-Joseph-gee-whiz-I-can’t-believe-it’s-almost-Christmas baby-blue sky with its little…
Recipe for a Balinese Feast ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin We gathered the writers in advance of our departure to Indonesia at the James Presho House for a Balinese dinner; the menu: spring roll appetizers; gado-gado; nasi goreng; a meaty, kebab-like version of chicken satay; and ice cream with crystallized ginger. Nice try. Here, in Ubud with…
Discovering Indonesia ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin So, here I am in Indonesia—Java and Bali—where novelist (That Paris Year) Joanna Biggar and I are leading a travel writing workshop in the hills above Ubud. We’ve covered some interesting ground, literarily speaking, but the nut that we seem to be coming back to again and again—yes, yes, we…
