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…
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…
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…
From the Travel Notebook: I’m back in Palm Desert again. I love deserts largely because they never cease to amaze me. Yesterday, for example, it snowed … just northwest of Palm Springs. It hasn’t snowed here for ten years. The past couple of days I’ve been spending my time in the outdoor pools because even…
Laissez les bons temps rouler! And we certainly did at Words and Music 2010 in New Orleans in spite of the fact that the theme was “The Literature of War and Collateral Damage,” or maybe because of it and because “When faced with disaster, the best medicine is laughter” … yes, that’s a direct quote…
Noche de Los Muertos 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 Dead—proceed in almost single-file procession through a cramped alleyway that feels…
