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....