Getting to know Linda

Trains were the music of Linda’s youth. Her father was a switchman in Dilworth, Minnesota, a small town just outside of Fargo, North Dakota, where she was born. Her mother took care of the family of two girls, a boy and a feisty cocker spaniel, named Koko. They lived a short field away from the tracks in a house that her dad built. Linda remembers seeing him running along the top of a rail car as it was going by. He would wave to her and her sister who were playing in their yard.

That changed when she was four-and-a-half years old and her parents decided to move to Canada. They settled in the lush Niagara region, a far cry from the flat open prairies. Some relatives believed that Canada was the far north – wilderness and ice and snow. Instead, they actually moved 200 miles south to the “banana belt” of Ontario, with much warmer winters and fruit galore.

The geography of their new home was blatantly different; the difference in culture was more subtle. “People don’t tend to think of Americans as immigrants in Canada because the language is pretty much the same; however, we very much were,” Linda explains. “Immigrants are people who live a kind of duality. For instance, in school I was learning about Canada but my family life was very American. My home was now in Canada, but when we said “home” we meant Minnesota. I think it was living the duality that made me able to see from different perspectives.” This ability and her passion for learning about different cultures have enhanced Linda’s innate understanding of how people work and think. She knows what people want, sometimes even before they do, and just how to give it to them.

Linda is a great reader and worked at Chapters for a few years. She joined the book club and had only been to two meetings when she was asked to become its leader. Although a bit daunting for an introvert like her, it was right up her alley because she got to probe the characters and scenarios of books she might never have read otherwise. Even more, she loved the challenge of providing a themed snack for the group. First she would read the story, paying attention to any mention of food – a favourite dish of one of the characters, or a meal that took place at a turning point in the plot. Then she would go through volumes of recipes or search online for a specific dish, or something from the cuisine of the country or era in which the story took place. The book club members looked forward to the meetings just to see what Linda would have come up with and how she would relate it to the story. She has an uncanny ability to make associations like that, associations among diverse ideas, situations, the imagined and the real. Such creativity keeps her clients delighted with her unique way of making their product or service memorable and desirable.

Looking at the world through Linda’s eyes would be fascinating. “When I hear people say they are bored” she states, “I am surprised. There are so many interesting things to learn or see. And, the ironies of life that go on around us all the time can be very entertaining. For example, I came upon a display of the book Can You Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella. Because of the binding, all of the covers had curled open in the humid weather and looked as if the text was trying to break free, like a secret trying to get out. ‘Obviously not,’ I thought in response to the title’s question. Things like that tickle my fancy. So I laugh a lot, and I am never bored.” Linda sees life as an adventure and brings that sense to her writing.

A very talented freelance writer and editor, she specializes in web content and profile raising marketing.