Linda Dahl

Kat and I getting down

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I have always loved to write about characters - usually edgy, little-known folks with wonderful stories and talents. I love places too and music, above all jazz. As a girl, I dreamed of traveling around the world and as soon as I could, I took to the road, living in steamy Guayaquil, Ecuador at l7 with a family, recalled in "Coming of Age in Ecuador" in my story collection Come Back, Carmen Miranda. I was later fortunate to live and work in other Latin American countries - Peru, Brazil, and especially various parts of Mexico.

After college, I moved to the Yucatan in Mexico with the portable Olivetti that went everywhere with me. I was in a state of painful urgency, wanting and needing to write but not getting very far. (It was the early '70's.) Much of me is in my newest book, Gringa in a Strange Land, but it is fiction. A year or so later, I made the pilgrimage to another strange land called New York, with a suitcase, several hundred dollars and two contacts. Finding the requisite cheap, shabby apartment (you could still do so in those days), I started writing in earnest. I had a number of ridiculous jobs to pay the rent, such as writing reviews of C- movies I never actually saw (no one else seemed to either), driving an ice-cream truck in Central Park for one day (I crashed into a tree or rock and was immediately fired), and writing a history of the cheeses of the world with a two-week deadline for a manic food editor. In time, I produced several novels, biographies and essays about great women jazz personalities and continued traveling, writing about quirky Latin American finds like the Carmen Miranda Museum in Rio, a "candomble," a.k.a. voodoo priestess, and a Mayan folk healer who talked to plants.
I am happy to say that most of my books have been published, well-reviewed and are still in print. Gringa in a Strange Land, my newest, is set in Mexico. A portrait of an artist as a young woman on one level, but also a portrait of that exhilarating and confusing time especially in the developing world. A time when revolution seemed imminent, when the "counter-culture" and its Mexican equivalent offered both hope and ennui, violence as well as peace and love. Sex, drugs, and Latin rhythms.


Books in print:

January 2010: Gringa in a Strange Land A novel, this is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, an on-the-road body and soul adventure in Mexico set in the early 1970's. "You'll think of Robert Stone's work and Babet Schroeder's film More in that the novel so adeptly renders an era, a country and a state of mind." Randolph Hogan, translator of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor


Stormy Weather: A History of Women in Jazz, was called “a brilliant work” by Publishers Weekly and “inspiring” by The New York Times. “For anyone who loves jazz, this is their book,” declared The Los Angeles Times.

Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams, wrote Gene Santoro in the New York Times Book Review, “is a stunning character in search of a soul mate. Williams has found her writing soul mate in Linda Dahl, and the engrossing result is Morning Glory. "Every great artist deserves a biography of this caliber,” wrote Scott Yanow in Jazz Improv. Morning Glory was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2000.

Come Back, Carmen Miranda: Stories about Latin America "Deft and deep portraits of not only American middle-class young people disaffectedly roaming ‘the other America,’ but also of the people who live there. A wonderful group of stories.” Danbury News-Times

Haunted Heart: A Biography of Susannah McCorkle. "{The book} strikingly resembles the woman it describes: it is vivacious, tender, saturnine, industrious and deeply intelligent." Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic