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Navigating the Divide: Poetry & Prose
Navigating the Divide: Selected Poetry and Prose 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.
352 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 1, 2019
7 people want to read
About the author
Linda Watanabe McFerrin
22 books16 followersLinda Watanabe McFerrin (www.lwmcferrin.com) is a poet, travel writer, novelist and longtime contributor to numerous newspapers, magazines and anthologies. She 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 twelve anthologies, including the Hot Flashes: sexy little stories & poems series. Her latest novel, Dead Love (Stone Bridge Press, 2009), 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 and the founder of Left Coast Writers, she has led workshops in Greece, France, Italy, England, Ireland, Central America, Indonesia, Spain, Cuba and the United States and has mentored a long list of award-winning writers and best-selling authors toward publication.
Navigating the Divide, a collection of Linda’s selected works is available now from Alan Squire Publishing.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 21, 2020
Linda Watanabe McFerrin’s Navigating the Divide: Selected Poetry and Prose is mostly emotive and sensual “creative non-fiction,” with short stories and pieces of her sexy zombie thriller, (yes, really), Dead Love, brought in for good measure.
Linda joined the Berkeley Poets Cooperative in 1984, headed by Gail and Charles Entrekin, whose “love permeated their poems and filled the space around them,” she said in her introduction, “One Door Closes.” “I can see why the Co-op thrived for all those years… the sessions were thrilling – full of risk and dread and elation. Charles and Gail were the perfect hosts…Everyone was opinionated. Not a lesson was wasted.”
Even though she turned to writing more prose than poetry eventually, Linda used those workshops to become a truly gifted writer, editor, coach and mentor; also hosting the fabulous and useful Left Coast Writers’ meetings at Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera first Monday evenings of every month. Navigating is a tasty smorgasbord of Linda’s work, varying from profound and insightful coming-of-age sections of Namako: Sea Cucumber, The Hand of the Buddha short stories and poetry to her entertaining and enlightening parts of Dead Love and her excellent travel essays.
Her eye for detail, sense descriptions, contemporary male-female relationships and the pleasures and perils of travel and family life; especially as a Welsh-Japanese-American, are second-to-none. Her “genres, cultures and points of view” kaleidoscope from her Grandmother’s tiny traditional town life in rice-paddy Japan to “right-now” super-urban Tokyo, Opium Wars and Cultural Revolution Shanghai from 1884-to-present and “the 96th Avenue Baptist Church.”
She slides from ruthless gangsters in fancy taxis to six-year old Tina casting “the vague shape of her longing” up to her Grandmother in heaven to searching out Shinto shrines and kami “folk deities” to Tamara pouring “Jack Daniels in a Dixie cup” when “She was moving toward some sort of crisis and she didn’t like it” with editor Ted’s “all-powerful masculine vortex.” Just on the edge of too-funky, her ear for dialogue, brushstroke character-definition and succinct metaphors pull us on:
Compared to Selita, Terrell’s “other girlfriends” were “like a closetful of cheap nylon nightgowns, they seemed only marginally alluring and infinitely replaceable.” (p. 70) Describing her father prepping dinner, he’s “Standing at the counter with one of Ineko-san’s blue aprons wrapped around him”…”making a big mess with a huge pile of shellfish, moving back and forth between counter and stove, cutting the heads off shrimp and slipping them out of their wafer-thin jackets of exoskeleton, pulling off funny blue veins, then rinsing them in a colander. They were shiny and grey, with big heads festooned with antennae and a pair of beady, accusing black eyes. It was actually the first time I realized that shrimp had heads,” (p. 46) and then, from “Something to Rave About,” “In the kitchen, two tall women with red hair stood at an enormous industrial stove, stirring soup. They looked like twins. Both wore short black cocktail dresses, chef’s toques and threateningly pointed, six-inch stiletto heels that made them appear taller still. The chef’s toques were stiffly starched columns topped with a poof that made them look like they had their red heads up in their respective clouds.” (p. 297)
Exorbitant, rebellious and admitting to anything; good, bad or downright evil, Watanabe-McFerrin is a new voice sprung from Old Berkeley coming forward to be reckoned with.
Linda joined the Berkeley Poets Cooperative in 1984, headed by Gail and Charles Entrekin, whose “love permeated their poems and filled the space around them,” she said in her introduction, “One Door Closes.” “I can see why the Co-op thrived for all those years… the sessions were thrilling – full of risk and dread and elation. Charles and Gail were the perfect hosts…Everyone was opinionated. Not a lesson was wasted.”
Even though she turned to writing more prose than poetry eventually, Linda used those workshops to become a truly gifted writer, editor, coach and mentor; also hosting the fabulous and useful Left Coast Writers’ meetings at Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera first Monday evenings of every month. Navigating is a tasty smorgasbord of Linda’s work, varying from profound and insightful coming-of-age sections of Namako: Sea Cucumber, The Hand of the Buddha short stories and poetry to her entertaining and enlightening parts of Dead Love and her excellent travel essays.
Her eye for detail, sense descriptions, contemporary male-female relationships and the pleasures and perils of travel and family life; especially as a Welsh-Japanese-American, are second-to-none. Her “genres, cultures and points of view” kaleidoscope from her Grandmother’s tiny traditional town life in rice-paddy Japan to “right-now” super-urban Tokyo, Opium Wars and Cultural Revolution Shanghai from 1884-to-present and “the 96th Avenue Baptist Church.”
She slides from ruthless gangsters in fancy taxis to six-year old Tina casting “the vague shape of her longing” up to her Grandmother in heaven to searching out Shinto shrines and kami “folk deities” to Tamara pouring “Jack Daniels in a Dixie cup” when “She was moving toward some sort of crisis and she didn’t like it” with editor Ted’s “all-powerful masculine vortex.” Just on the edge of too-funky, her ear for dialogue, brushstroke character-definition and succinct metaphors pull us on:
Compared to Selita, Terrell’s “other girlfriends” were “like a closetful of cheap nylon nightgowns, they seemed only marginally alluring and infinitely replaceable.” (p. 70) Describing her father prepping dinner, he’s “Standing at the counter with one of Ineko-san’s blue aprons wrapped around him”…”making a big mess with a huge pile of shellfish, moving back and forth between counter and stove, cutting the heads off shrimp and slipping them out of their wafer-thin jackets of exoskeleton, pulling off funny blue veins, then rinsing them in a colander. They were shiny and grey, with big heads festooned with antennae and a pair of beady, accusing black eyes. It was actually the first time I realized that shrimp had heads,” (p. 46) and then, from “Something to Rave About,” “In the kitchen, two tall women with red hair stood at an enormous industrial stove, stirring soup. They looked like twins. Both wore short black cocktail dresses, chef’s toques and threateningly pointed, six-inch stiletto heels that made them appear taller still. The chef’s toques were stiffly starched columns topped with a poof that made them look like they had their red heads up in their respective clouds.” (p. 297)
Exorbitant, rebellious and admitting to anything; good, bad or downright evil, Watanabe-McFerrin is a new voice sprung from Old Berkeley coming forward to be reckoned with.
March 5, 2023
Deeply personal, gorgeous prose and poetry within a travelogue. When you skip the tourist spots and experience the real and unexpected on your travels? That's the reward of this book! Pick it up before your next trip to the SF Bay Area, Asia, and Europe, and immerse yourself in something special.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews