LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY: Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Author of Navigating the Divide
Monday, October 14, 2019 || 6pm Book Passage || Ferry Building, San Francisco ||www.bookpassage.com
It’s another Octoberfest!
Please come to this San Francisco celebration for LCW Founder Linda Watanabe McFerrin’s newest book: Navigating the Divide.
Navigating the Divide is a career-spanning, multi-genre collection from the award-winning Asian-American writer and indie lit legend Linda Watanabe McFerrin. In poetry and prose that is sometimes profoundly personal, sometimes astoundingly surreal, this world traveler and devoted literary explorer breaks down walls, bridges, cultures, and genres, delighting and instructing the reader. This rich, multi-faceted collection really does “navigate the divide” between spiritual and physical, between thought and desire, between identity and others.
Linda Watanabe McFerrin is a poet, travel writer, and novelist. She is the author of two poetry collections, two novels, a collection of award-winning short stories, and a travel guidebook. Her literary honors include the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and various travel writing, poetry, and fiction awards. Her latest novel, Dead Love, was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in a Novel. As the founder of Left Coast Writers, Watanabe McFerrin has taught and mentored a long list of writers and is a beloved figure in California’s rich, historic literary culture. She has led workshops around the world, and with ASP author Joanna Biggar, she co-founded the Wanderland Writers series of workshops and anthologies, which they co-edit.
Reading Linda’s work is like being mesmerized by a snake before it swallows you whole. The words shimmer, creating a dreamscape where the story unfolds and draws you in while strange, sometimes bizarre, encounters play out in minutely described detail. You ‘emerge’ from her stories rather than ‘finish’ them. The poems are spare, elegant and evocative, stirring deep emotions even while not ostensibly emotional. This is a beautiful book by a writer who has honed her writing skills and knows precisely how to wield them.
—Maureen Wheeler, Co-Founder of Lonely Planet Publications
Poetry like burnished steel and prose that reads like poetry. The most captivating and rewarding book I’ve read this year.
—Tim Cahill, Author of Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, and Pass the Butterworms
“Navigating the Divide by Linda Watanabe McFerrin reminds me of the prodigious efforts of the legendary Polynesian long canoe wayfinders, who navigated the vast ocean using only the stars, the sun and moon, and the pattern of the waves. Likewise, the poems and prose pieces here range across the wide globe, from San Francisco and Oakland, to Shanghai and Tokyo, as well as the often enormous distance between love and loneliness, strangers and friends, sadness and happiness. The insights here into the human condition are often as wrenching as a sea storm, but also as euphoric as the moment when the fog lifts and your ship slips into a safe harbor.”
— Phil Cousineau, Author of The Book of Roads and The Art of Pilgrimage