The cul-de-sac in a small suburb south of Cleveland, Ohio offered only a handful of playmates, so I was often bored as a child. The good thing is boredom can lead to imaginative play. I remember lying on my back in the living room to stare up at the white stucco ceiling, and creating stories about the characters and animals I saw in the plaster swirls. The woods behind my house became my playground, where I talked aloud to spiders and salamanders, planned ruses and adventures.
Luckily my mother encouraged creative pursuits. She read to me. She took me to the library. She supplied me with crayons, paint, scissors, glue, and giant pads of paper. She taught me to sew, and let me cut up my clothes to redesign them. She let me paint murals on my bedroom walls. I built houses for my trolls from shoe boxes, and hand-stitched tiny clothes from fabric scraps. I sat on the front step and crafted books from folded, stapled squares of manila paper, filling them with happily-ever-after-stories and drawings. I still have some my favorite picture books, many filled with pencil marks, as if I had tried to write my own stories before I knew the alphabet.
I graduated high school with an art scholarship to attend Cooper School of Art in Cleveland and worked in graphics for several years. My husband and I and our three children moved to Michigan in the early nineties. Over the years, I freelanced in art, founded an adult ADHD support group, taught calligraphy, sold a line of purses crafted from hardcover books and record album covers, participated in Pet-a-Pet therapy with our chocolate Lab, conducted journaling workshops at a domestic violence shelter, and worked as a conservation picture framing designer.
I eventually found my way back to writing, starting with poetry and then short stories. Eager to learn, I attended every conference, retreat and weekly workshop that I could. Soon my work began getting published and placing in contests. Encouraged by a poetry editor, I wrote a novel based on one of my short stories, but quickly realized I still had much to learn. So, in my fifties, I returned to school for a Masters of Fine Art in Creative Writing.
My debut novel, In the Context of Love, won multiple finalist awards, including the Hoffer Award and Sarton Award for Fiction. It’s written in first person point-of-view with a second person address, and based on an article from Glamour titled “My Father was a Rapist.” My goal was to write a novel of healing and hope.
My short stories, poems, essays and art have been published in anthologies and literary journals including Prairie Schooner, Clackamas Literary Review, Paterson Review, New Ohio Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Permafrost, Rattle, Twist of Noir and others. My artwork has appeared in Tar Wolf, CALYX, From East to West, and the cover of The MacGuffin. My essay, “My Horrible Celebrity Crush,” appears in Idol Talk: Women Writers on the Teenage Infatuations that Changed Their Lives, published by McFarland.
I have a poetry chapbook award from Heartlands Today. I authored four other poetry chapbooks, the most recent being Sleepwalker, from Finishing Line Press, about the death of my eldest child to suicide. I also wrote and illustrated a children’s picture book, Gordy and the Ghost Crab, inspired by my grandson’s first encounter with ghost crabs in coastal North Carolina.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Linda’s novel Love and Other Incurable Ailments in 2026.
