Macon Fry's love for Cajun Country actually began years before he ever moved to Louisiana. A fan of rhythm and blues recordings, he began studying and collecting Cajun and Zydeco records while in school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He made several trips to Louisiana over the years before finally making the decision to call it home in 1980.
“Less than forty-eight hours after arriving in New Orleans, I found myself a bleary-eyed passenger in a packed car speeding across the Atchafalaya Throughway at 8 A.M. As the sun smoldered along the tops of the black willow and cypress, I looked down from the interstate at the blackness of the nation's largest freshwater swamp and pondered how different and beautiful South Louisiana was.”
Fry stayed in New Orleans teaching in public schools in Jefferson and Orleans parishes and began submitting articles to local magazines about his excursions into the bayous. He quickly found that even people in New Orleans, just outside of Cajun Country, were not as familiar with the lay of the land in Acadiana. That's when he decided to start compiling information for what would become Cajun Country Guide, an outsider's guide to the sounds, tastes, and sights of South Louisiana.
In 1990, Fry, with his coauthor and fellow travel writer Julie Posner, drove 20,000 miles through the Cajun prairie covering most of the highways and byways. They took every swamp tour, visited every dance hall, and ate at over half of the homestyle restaurants they passed.
Fry continues to write a weekly column for Wavelength, a New Orleans entertainment magazine, and contributes articles to New Orleans magazine as well. His trips to Cajun Country have not stopped with the publication of his travel guide. There's still a chance that on a Saturday morning you might run across him in a small Acadian tavern, tapping his feet to the beat of a squeeze-box with a boudin sausage sandwich in one hand, and his camera in the other.