Linda Strange
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The Last of the Best

The Last of the Best

August 17, 2021 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized, USA

Watch a video of this blob by going to my You Tube Channel. The text came when we were in…

Fear and Trembling

Fear and Trembling

February 4, 2020 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized, USA

It’s that time of year again, Black History Month, the month when I once again try to explain to nine…

Don't Send Her Back

Don’t Send Her Back

July 22, 2019 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized, USA

The defining chant of Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign is almost certainly going to be “send her back.”

A Cruel June

A Cruel June

June 17, 2016 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

It goes on. Last Sunday morning we woke up to read about yet another mentally ill individual who went out…

Christmas in the Caribbean

Christmas in the Caribbean

December 26, 2013 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

Christmas Eve in Bequia is a day of frenzied shopping, for unlike up in the States, no stores down here…

Bagging It

Bagging It

August 15, 2013 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

Okay, if I were the boss of that posh shop in Zurich, Switzerland, Trois Pomme, I would fire the saleswoman…

The Little Blue Dress

The Little Blue Dress

July 24, 2013 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

My husband and I were watching the news last night and out of the chaos of war and royal babies…

One if by Land

One if by Land

July 14, 2013 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

So, we went up to Boston, my husband and I, about three months after the Boston bombings and found the…

Hopscotch

Hopscotch

June 25, 2013 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

You remember the 1980 movie “Hopscotch,” don’t you? Walter Matthau played a rogue CIA agent who was publishing a book…

Nineteen Eighty Four

Nineteen Eighty Four

June 16, 2013 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

I know I should feel outraged, violated, sullied. When the whistle-blower Edward Snowden this last week let it be known…

Mother's Day

Mother’s Day

May 13, 2013 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized, USA

Mother’s Day is now a trip to the cemetery for me, I’m afraid. A trip to the florist’s first, of…

Easter

Easter

April 1, 2013 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

These days, we don’t go in much for huge Easter feasts with the relatives anymore. Easter is more of a…

Waiter, There's a Horse in My Soup

Waiter, There’s a Horse in My Soup

March 8, 2013 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

You really have to feel sorry for the French. No matter how bad things ever got over there, no matter…

Snow Days

Snow Days

February 13, 2013 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

Remember just two blogs ago, I exhorted all of you to embrace the much maligned winter season? Well, I can…

Life Without Football

Life Without Football

February 5, 2013 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

When I got up this morning, I did check and see who had won yesterday’s game, not because I was…

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

January 29, 2013 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

All right, it’s been pretty cold lately and at the moment it’s raining ice onto my roof.  Everyone has been…

Eastward Ho!

Eastward Ho!

January 12, 2013 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

Back when I was in high school in the late seventies and early eighties, back in the waning days of…

Island Of the Clouds

Island Of the Clouds

December 31, 2012 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

Let me just get it over with and explain where it is we are. On an island called Bequia which…

Living in America

Living in America

December 15, 2012 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

There have been days since my father and mother passed away three-and-a-half years and a year ago respectively when the…

Coming to America

Coming to America

December 11, 2012 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

“You all memorized the Constitution, right?” the thin, blonde lady immigration officer asked a packed courtroom in Hartford, Connecticut last…

Boat People

Boat People

November 22, 2012 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

So, Thanksgiving is once more upon us, the season in which where I work, little lines of boys and girls…

Shorefront Anyone?

Shorefront Anyone?

November 6, 2012 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

When I was an undergraduate at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England, there was a lecturer there by…

It's Not a Riot Any More

It’s Not a Riot Any More

October 28, 2012 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

The trial was over. The appeal had failed. The world’s press had gone home when last weekend, Maria Alyokina, age…

School Days

School Days

October 17, 2012 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

So the Taliban are now shooting girls who want to go to school, are they? Not that this is really…

Horror in Hyvinkää

Horror in Hyvinkää

May 30, 2012 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

There was a time nearly a hundred years ago when Finns did shoot at other Finns. Depending on who you…

Don't Go to Gibraltar!

Don’t Go to Gibraltar!

May 23, 2012 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

“Whatever you do, don’t go to Gibraltar.” This was what our friends and neighbors down on the Costa del Sol…

Fascinators Forever

Fascinators Forever

May 16, 2012 · by Linda Strange · in Uncategorized

I’m going to a wedding in England this summer and I’m pretty pleased about it. Of course, I’ll be happy…

Author

Portrait photo of Linda Strange

All countries are strange, none stranger than your own.

January 2023
I am delighted to announce that Glass Mountain Literary Magazine has published my short story Retention in their current issue. You can read the story here.
September 2022
Watch a video of me reading a live version of a blog about the Berlin Wall, The Wall I Knew.
July 2022
Watch a video of me reading a live version of my blog, The Last of the Best.
May 2022
I’m excited to announce three pieces of my writing have recently been published. What Ever Happened to Igor, an essay in Pangyrus, is about a study trip I took to Ukraine in 1985 with a group of Finns and Swedes. Igor was a young Ukrainian-Swedish man from Stockholm who was going to meet his father in Kyiv, a father he hadn’t seen in twenty years. Want to watch a video of me reading the essay? Click here. Will They Make it Home Again?, another essay in Pangyrus, explores the relationship between the images of World War Two childhood evacuations recorded in select works of European literature and the images of evacuation we now see on our television screens from Ukraine. Click here to watch the video.
Finally, The Longest Day, is a short story published in the 2022 Freshwater Literary Journal. It details the experience of a young non-English speaking Cape Verdean girl, Gee, on her first day in an American inner-city school. It is an account of Gee’s first encounter with her new ESL teacher and the safe space this teacher creates for Gee to express her true emotions. Watch a You Tube video of me speaking with Georbina DaRosa, the real-life inspiration for my story.

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