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…
I am lost, swimming in the soft light of the bison’s umber eye, where I feel myself reflected. Above me the sky arcs, an incredible big top of robin’s-egg-blue that dips down to meet the vast carpet of tawny grasses on a distant horizon. I do not think it is especially wise to be staring…
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…
Looking forward to traveling with Maureen again. Tony won’t be with us, but he is very much alive. “Tony Wheeler is dead.” The rumors, it seems, have been circulating for years. And while Wheeler, founder, along with wife and travel partner Maureen, of Lonely Planet Publications — the largest travel guidebook publisher in the world…
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…
April 13-19, 2010 Writing and Photography Workshop with Linda Watanabe McFerrin and featured local photographers … Charleston and the South Carolina Low Country beckons! Join the organizers of the Southern Sampler Artists Colony on a journey into a place like no other—a place brushed with spirit, dipped in belonging, and brought to life in Gospel,…
St. Patrick’s Day reminds me of a trip to Ireland with my favorite fiddler! We were at Maggie’s, a pub on Kiernan Street in Kilkenny, and the devil was panting at Anthony Macauley’s elbow, for the Irish lads were dueling it out with the musicians from Cornwall and the fiddles were smoking. The four musicians…
