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 of my favorite Italian restaurants in San Francisco’s North Beach district. I suppose I could also blame Paul Prudhomme. I had, after all, been whipping up many a crab salad, seafood filé gumbo and crawfish etoufée since my return from New Orleans with the famous chef’s cookbook....

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 today — vehemently denies them, it isn’t hard to believe that a guy with a lust for fast cars who has been razored and nearly robbed in Peru, held down crocs (OK, they were babies) in Papua New Guinea and hurtled along twisting...

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 Swamp in the county of Sumter, South Carolina. Martha and I had been hiking along on the High Hills of Santee Passage of the Palmetto Trail when the large green-brown serpent slithered across our path and disappeared into the waters of Old Levi Mill Lake. Martha was disturbed; I was ecstatic. I let out a...

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, Jazz, Blues, soul food, cooling ocean breezes, wraparound porches, and warm welcomes that begin with y’all. Relax! Let your heart open, soul sing, and spirit soar. Daily writing workshops created to enhance the Southern adventure will be led by award...

This trip was not about roughing it. On a previous trip to Costa Rica … Dixie and I had slogged through rain-soaked jungle and bounced over rutted, kidney-damaging roads, eschewing tours and overdeveloped beaches as a matter of principle.  By the time the twin-engine Travel Air plane deposited us at an airstrip a few miles from Golfito, a ragged banana port on the lip of the Golfo Dulce, and we pressed our way onto a boat that was headed for Puerto Jimenez on the other side of the Gulf, we were exhausted and over-stimulated.  At that point, Dixie, my travel companion and fellow material girl,...

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 from Cornwall had their backs to the dark plank wall. Portraits of Yeats and Shaw frowned down on them. “I’m going to have to number these tunes,” muttered the Cornish fiddler. “There’s no point; you can’t count,” taunted one of the Irish...