Last night at Book Passage in the Ferry Plaza for a Left Coast Writers poetry event, I realized that I never enter a bookstore without wanting to read every single book therein, which I know is impossible. I have this strange feeling that tucked between the covers is a message that I can’t afford to…
The Sweet Life ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin Do I need to read Connie Bennett’s new book, Beyond Sugar Shock? You bet, I do … I once ate an entire box of brown sugar … with a teaspoon … in under thirty minutes. No, it wasn’t a contest. I had a hankering for something sweet, and back…
Noche de Los Muertos ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin Remembering a dark night in San Francisco … We are pressed, our backs to the wall, in Balmy Alley, a bottleneck of a back street in San Francisco’s Mission District, as the dead drift by. Skeletons on stilts, in bridal gowns, playing drums in steel bands—Los Muertos, The…
I could blame it on Luigi, the bald Italian sculptor. “Don’t eat so many prawns,” he warned with an ominous, dark-eyed glare as I tucked into the fist-sized pink curls that lay, glistening in butter and garlic, on the serving platter before me. The month was August; we were celebrating a friend’s birthday at one…
The size of the snake had grown, in the telling, from the length and breadth of my friend Martha’s arm, to the far more dramatic dimensions of her muscular cousin Dickie’s. I was at a gathering of the Dabbs clan at one of the old family properties by the Crossroads just east of Black River…
