Remembering a day off the coast of southern Ireland … ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin Gale force winds, rain, twenty-six-foot seas—we’d hit a bit of a rough spot in the weather on the Irish Riviera, the promoters’ somewhat euphemistic appellation for the strip of resort towns—Youghal, Ardmore, Dungarvan, Cobh and Ballycotton—that dot Ireland’s southern coast and draw…
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…
Time Traveling through the Perseid Shower ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin “Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise again in light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” –Sarah Williams It’s August; the Perseid Shower is just about due, and I am time traveling again. Ever since humans…
Embracing Fat Tuesday ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin NEW ORLEANS — PINOCCHIO zooms by on roller skates, thin, hairy legs protruding from green lederhosen. Three Elvises swivel past, hips rotating like long-playing records. A besequined, masked stranger raises his wine glass and blows me a kiss. Scandalous. Ridiculous. Crazy. Taboo. It’s Fat Tuesday – Mardi Gras, the…
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…
Safe Passage ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, my writing group was scheduled to give a reading from an anthology of travel tales at Get Lost Books* in San Francisco. Here is the message that I sent to the group about that night’s scheduled meeting: In the wake of this a.m.’s terrible news,…
The Italian Masseuse ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin The woman’s hands were huge. Or so it seemed as I lay in my skimpy paper underpants, standard issue at the thermal spa center in Santa Cesarea Terme, a tiny town on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, in Puglia, at the absolute tip of the high heel of…
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…
