Literary Salon: The Writing Road-Writers and Editors Discuss Travel and Travel Writing 🗓

Susan Alcorn, travel writer and long-distance trekker, has walked more than 3,000 miles in Spain, France, Portugal, and Switzerland, on Camino de Santiago pilgrimage routes. From her first walk across Spain, came her book,Camino Chronicle: Walking to Santiago, which was named finalist for the prestigious 2007 Ben Franklin award for Best Travel Essay. Susan Alcorn has climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro; journeyed to Torres del Paine, Chile, to hike its famous circuit route (from which came Patagonia Chronicle); and completed the Pacific Crest Trail.  Although she is not averse to traveling by car, boat, train, plane, bus, and rail, she believes that on foot is often the best way to get acquainted intimately with the people, culture, and land through which she travels. Her upcoming book, Caminos Norte and Primitivo: Paths and Interludes, will be released this fall. 

Lou Ann Granger is the author of With Love for the Journey: Life Lessons from the Artist’s Travel Journals, an evocative illustrated travel memoir of her quest for time, memory, and meaning along the road. She describes herself as an “ordinary” physicist-artist-traveler who finally found her way to the world of mixed media art journaling after early retirement from a career in sonar engineering. She has led navy sea trials in the Mediterranean, Tasman, and Timor Seas, and traveled to over 40 countries.

Lou Ann spreads her visual journals, book collection, and overflowing art supplies throughout her house in Southern California, where she lives with her physicist husband James. In between her ongoing writing, art journaling, technical consulting, and e-commerce activities, she ponders why she hasn’t been to East Africa yet.

Poet, travel writer, novelist, Left Coast Writers® founder and Panel Moderator, Linda Watanabe McFerrin (www.lwmcferrin.com), is the author of two poetry collections, past editor of a popular Northern California guidebook 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. In addition to authoring an award-winning short story collection, The Hand of Buddha, she has co-edited several anthologies, including the Hot Flashes: sexy little stories & poems series and the award-winning and ever-growing “Wandering in …” series. Her zombie novel, Dead Love (Stone Bridge Press, 2009), which was set in Japan, was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in a Novel.

Linda has judged the San Francisco Literary Awards, the Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence and the Kiriyama Prize, served as a visiting mentor for the Loft Mentor Series and been guest faculty at the Oklahoma Arts Institute. A past NEA Panelist and juror for the Marin Literary Arts Council, she has led workshops in Greece, France, Italy, Ireland, England, Japan, Central America, Indonesia and the United States and has mentored a long list of accomplished writers and best-selling authors toward publication.