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 most delightfully wicked time of the year and the last chance to be naughty before buckling into Lent’s iron girdle, the 40 days of abstinence and contrition that precede Easter. As a good Catholic girl, I remember Ash...

Recipe for a Balinese Feast ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin Linda's gado-gado 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 the Wanderland gang, we’ve had one glorious multi-course meal after another—at Cafe Lotus, at Casa Luna, at Café des Artistes and more, but nothing compares to our farewell banquet for the writers in the hills above town. After a night...

Discovering Indonesia ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin Me and the Diamond Python 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 are talking incessantly about “nut grafs” in the workshop—is why, exactly, are we all here … in Bali? The answer from many of the writers we’re working with on this journey is that the impetus is the...

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, we will meet tonight, as planned, at Get Lost Books in San Francisco —not to promote the anthology, but for the more important feature of our association—as an act of solidarity and courage. We are all stunned, but we want to respond to terrorism with action. We will gather and...

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 the boot that is Italy. She was a bit of a dominatrix, my masseuse, and I liked this about her: the way she slapped me around. Sometimes one needs a good dressing down....

Last Dance on San Bruno Mountain Magazine Issue Jan-Mar 2011 by Linda Watanabe McFerrin Chuang Tzu and the Butterfly Chuang Tzu in dream became a butterfly, And the butterfly became Chuang Tzu at waking. Which was the real–the butterfly or the man? Who can tell the end of the endless changes of things? The water that flows into the depth of the distant sea Returns anon to the shallows of a transparent stream. The man, raising melons outside the green gate of the city, Was once the Prince of the East Hill. So must rank and riches vanish. You know it, still you toil and toil–what...

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 in the middle of winter it’s warm most of the time … mid-sixties to low seventies this time of year. I actually like the desert best when it’s being “desert-y,” although hiking Death Valley in the summertime (like Tim Cahill did some years back)...

The Queen (Marie Laveau) and I 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 from moi. Believe me, I’ve had experience with this, though the humor is always a dark hilarity and the laughter tends to sound more like a cackle. I followed exactly that prescription when I returned to New Orleans for my first trip...

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 like the birth canal to another world. We are skeletons too. My husband Lowry and our friend Jeff are tall, gaunt, black-caped and spectral. The white markings on the chest of Lowry’s black shirt suggest a ribcage. Jeff’s black gloves are spidered with...

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 into the bison’s brown eye. This shaggy creature looks to be about six feet at the shoulder and must weigh over a ton. But I am rooted to the spot, suspended in time, breathless and jubilant about coming back to the tallgrass prairie and what remains of the herbaceous ocean that, as little as 100 years ago,...