Linda Dahl

Like so many other millions of readers, I've gotten hooked on the Scandinavian detective/crime "genre." I admit I felt a bit of "ethnic pride." Like the Puerto Rican Day parade for that island band, the outpouring of writing by Norwegians, Swedes, Icelanders, even the odd Dane and Finn, made this "Dahl" (Norwegian, father's (more…)

And the movies are...(drumroll): "Carrington" and "Lust,Caution."
"Carrington" is a great and very peculiar love story: between straight painter Dora Carrington and gay writer Lytton Strachey during the dying idyll of the upper-class (and bohemian) Edwardian England of hyper-refined sensibilities and hyper-groomed flower gardens. Emma Thompson works at the top of her (more…)

Can you get cancer even if you
a)eat lots of leafy green and orange vegetables
b)are not overweight
c)exercise regularly
d)drink alcohol very moderately or not at all?

Yes, you can. I did.

Does receiving treatments for cancer equal "battling" or "fighting" cancer?

No, not in my book. Cancer has (more…)

some links to reviews of Gringa:

amazon

http://mitchellshannon.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/your-moody-feminist-existentialist-stoner-hero/

http://raynadeatren.blogspot.com/

http://jenerahealy.com/2010/01/05/gringa-in-a-strange-land-by-linda-dahl-review/

You'd think so. Yet how often you read or hear about someone crashing and burning, even dying. Then a brief mention: "Oh yes, he/she also drank/drugged a lot." Oh, right: that. As if it was a separate compartment to the personality. In fact, addiction aka substance abuse aka chemical dependence (pick your poison) permeates everything else. Why do I say this so confidently? Because I know. Because I was one. Because I'll always be one, even with 34 years of sobriety.
Many writers have written novels with addictive protagonists - my favorites are Malcolm Lowry's the Consul in "Under the Volcano," and the Jean Rhys books. But these characters were written from the inside, as it were, by alcoholics who didn't know the other side - sobriety. In "Gringa in a Strange Land," I write about Erica Mason, a young artist in the early l970's living in Mexico and struggling with addiction. Then in "Cleans Up Nicely," I take her to New York and the other side, the roller-coaster of early sobriety. Having been on both sides, I hope the reader will get the full picture of how, grossly but also subtly, substance-abuse infects body, mind, and spirit. And what a strange new land sobriety is for those who first land there.

A man who writes angelically
A man who lives diabolically
The writer's eye and ear in perfect tune
The writer's life cacophony

The vastness outside explained
Inside, a wasteland

This, to me, is V.S. Naipaul

"Gringa in a Strange Land" received the Writers in the Sky Award for the Best Creative Writing of the Year 2010!