Watanabe McFerrin will also answer questions from participants after the reading.
Her work sets out to navigate the divide not just between cultures and literary genres, but also between the spiritual and physical, between thought and desire, between individual and collective.
“I’ve never felt constrained by my heritage in my work,” Watanabe McFerrin said in an interview in PANK Magazine. “Maybe I have been constrained by my heritage in life, where I’ve danced the outsider’s dance, but not in my work, which is a record and release of that dance. In my work, I’ve always felt inspired by my heritage, challenged by it, sometimes confounded by it.”
Linda Watanabe McFerrin is a poet, travel writer, novelist, and contributor to numerous newspapers, magazines and anthologies. She is the author of two poetry collections and a winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction. Her novel, Namako: Sea Cucumber, was named Best Book for the Teen-Age by the New York Public Library. Her latest novel, Dead Love (Stone Bridge Press, 2009), was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in a Novel. A past NEA Panelist and juror for the Marin Literary Arts Council and the founder of Left Coast Writers, Linda has led workshops in Greece, France, Italy, England, Ireland, Central America, Indonesia, Spain, and the United States.
Lost Pines
This year the Japanese beetle
has attacked my pines.
I will sell no trees this Christmas.
My wife works diligently,
Makes baskets from the dead needles –
and me, with nothing to put in them.
–Linda Watanabe McFerrin, from Navigating the Divide: Selected Poetry and Prose, published in 2019 by Alan Squire Publishing
