More About Linda Collison
I write adventure.
Born in Baltimore, Linda Collison moved west as a young woman cobbling together a composite career that has included nursing, parenting, teaching skydiving, freelance writing, volunteer firefighting, and other occupations. Linda and her husband, Bob Russell (they met skydiving) wrote two guidebooks in the 1990s based on their travel adventures. The husband-and-wife team has sailed many blue water miles together, aboard their sloop Topaz, based in Hawaii. Their three-week sailing experience aboard the HM Bark Endeavour, a replica of Captain Cook’s 18th century ship, inspired Linda to write Star-Crossed, a nautical historical novel published by Knopf. The New York Public Library chose Star-Crossed as one of the Books for the Teen Age — 2007.
Charleston — an inspiration for Keogh’s historical fiction
How We Write: The importance of place and time in storytelling Sometimes I think I could live on the road. For me, travel is inspiring, invigorating, instructive, and necessary. Particular places -- their histories, their inhabitants, their natural histories, their ghosts -- compel me to connect on a deeper level. The setting is the story's womb, its incubator. Place and time shape character and influence plot. When I travel I immerse myself in the place, absorbing sounds, colors, tastes, the feel of the air on my skin, the way it[...]
I was born in a Baltimore suburb, practically on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, but I didn’t do any sailing or boating of any kind until I was in my forties, married to a man who had sailed Lake Michigan as a teen and who had never gotten enough of it. We were living in Hawaii then, and we bought an old sailboat with good bones (a Luders-36) and spent a couple of years fixing her up and shaking her down in preparation for a 2500-mile crossing to the Society Isles in the South Pacific. “Miles to Windward” is a memoir of the first leg of a two year cruise, and was first published as a feature article in Sailing Magazine; October 2001.
