Linda Dahl

I love to write about characters - usually edgy, little-known folks with wonderful hidden stories and talents. I love places too, and music, above all, jazz. As a girl, I dreamed of traveling around the world. As soon as I could, I took to the road, living in steamy Guayaquil, Ecuador at 17 with a family, an experience recalled in a novella, Coming of Age in Ecuador, in my compilation of stories about Latin America, Come Back, Carmen Miranda. Continuing my love affair with the region, I found a series of jobs - grunt on a Mayan archeology site in Chiapas, Mexico, volunteering with the American Friends Service Committee in an impoverished mining village, teaching English, and finally, doing freelance journalism, in Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil and Mexico.

One of my most memorable stays was in the Yucatan, where I moved after college, with the portable Olivetti that went everywhere with me in those pre-computer years. I was in a state of painful urgency. I wanted and needed to write but I was not getting very far. It was the early 70's, need I say more? Much of me is in my latest book, Gringa in a Strange Land, but it is fiction.

After I left Mexico, I made the pilgrimage to another strange land called New York City, with a suitcase, typewriter, seven hundred dollars and knowing two people. Finding the requisite cheap, shabby apartment, which you could still do in those days, I started writing in earnest in between trying to pay the rent with a series of ridiculous jobs, such as writing reviews of movies that were so bad that neither I nor anybody else apparently ever actually saw them; driving an ice-cream truck through Central Park for one entire day before smashing into a rock and getting fired; and my own personal favorite: writing a history of cheeses of the world with a two-week deadline for a manic food editor out of a Woody Allen movie. Update: The just-completed (in 2011) novel Cleans Up Nicely.

In time, I produced several novels, articles and biographies about jazz personalities. I continued travel writing, focusing on quirky topics like the Carmen Miranda Museum in Rio; a candomble a.k.a.voodoo priestess in a slum of Rio who dispensed solid psychic advice while drinking rum and smoking a stogie, and an interview with a Mayan healer who introduced me to some of his "children," a tiny milpa of corn and beans.

I am happy to say that my books have been well-reviewed and are all still in print. Gringa in a Strange Land is my latest. A novel, it is set in Mexico, available via my Buy This Book page or on Amazon. A portrait of an artist as a young woman, and also a portrait of an exhilarating and confusing moment in recent history. In the l970's, revolution was imminent in many parts of the Third World and the American "counter-culture" had spilled over into other countries. In Mexico, hope and ennui, purity of vision vied with the degradation of drugs, violence and peace co-existed. Sex, drugs - and merengue.