Now 35 years later, Linda is a well-established author with twelve published children's books, including the Wonderhorn time-travel series of children's novels. The first two in this series are highlighted below.
In addition, she has written and had produced adult and children's plays, and award-winning adult short fiction and poetry published in various literary magazines.
"Hannah watches the windshield wipers swish-swish back and forth, late afternoon November rain jet-streaming off the car as she attempts to hold her expressway speed below the posted limit. Sometime this morning, and no one could tell her when, Hannah's seventy-seven-year-old mother, Edith, was found collapsed and unconscious in her dressing gown on Franklin's rain-drenched east beach. Hannah, called from her tenth grade English class and flung into this disaster, made her way to the office feeling as though she were moving through thickened air. The secretary was, of course, more than sympathetic when Hannah explained why she would need a sub for the rest of Monday and Tuesday as well.
It takes a good hour and a half to drive from Toronto to Franklin. How could this have happened? Hannah wants a blow-by-blow description. What time did her mother leave the house this morning? How long did she wander about in the wind and drizzle? Why didn't someone on the street notice her? Who found her collapsed on the stone beach, her pink, quilted housecoat matted with sand and seaweed? "In some degree of shock and hypothermia"—that's what the policewoman had said in an almost breezy tone of voice, as if she were giving the weather report.
The more she tries to concentrate on her mother and the crisis at hand, the more her past reinvents itself—contradictions bridging the almost five-and-a-half decades of her life. Duty versus escape. Memory versus selective amnesia. Roots versus branches. For the past forty years, climbing as far up and out as she could, hoping never to return, and at the same time, desperately wanting to.
This stress, in turn, brings on a massive dose of guilt. She hasn't visited her mother enough and has developed avoidance as a life skill. Dutiful Christmas trips always, a few days whirling in with presents, arriving in darkness, leaving in darkness. Short, compartmentalized visits bounded by time and her teaching life. Summer holidays rarely, always a legitimate excuse: summer school and courses that kept her feet moving up the pay-scale ladder, travel related to the curriculum, renovations to her tidy nest. These last few years when she does visit, she has refused to admit anything is changing, especially those silent but pervasive ravages of time.
Now her mother—the master organizer and money manager, typing and filing until just before her seventieth birthday, her mother, the supreme sacrificer, who subsequently grayed and withered into retirement—has become unpredictable and confused, no longer able to cope."
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Digital eBook editions of Linda's existing works are being actively considered for conversion by a specialized eBook publisher and a number are expected to be available through Kobo and/or in Chapters by late 2012.
