Linda B Morganstein
I’m an overeducated writer/artist who also happens to be the product of a Borscht Belt childhood in the Catskills. My father was a charismatic and emotionally reckless maître d’ in a few world famous hotels. My mother was a waitress who channeled Marilyn Monroe. As a child, I did the cha-cha and drank Shirley Temples in cocktail lounges. Everyone I knew was a story-teller. My friends were bartenders and female impersonators. Still, I read everything in the local library without (thank you, librarian) much censorship, including Freud, Nabokov, Steinbeck and Agatha Christie.
I escaped on scholarship to Vassar, then dropped out and drove a VW bus to California, where I lived in the Bay Area and Sonoma County for many years. Much later, I studied with Jane Smiley at Iowa State University. Eventually, I made my way to Minnesota. I currently reside in Saint Paul, Minnesota with my understanding spouse Melanie and our exceptional dog, Courage. In addition to writing, I am an avid golfer and sourdough bread-baker.
I have five published novels and numerous published short stories and poems.
I am currently at work on a huge project. I have invented a photo-journal that resembles LIFE magazine, called NUMINOSITY. In it, I create all the content, including ads for imaginary products and articles about a movie director, a cultural anthropologist and a radical psychoanalyst, all versions of me. I use complex but playful photo-collaged work for my illustrations, including turning my parents into mythological characters.
Works

Numinosity: A Fractured Memoir
Numinosity: A Fractured Memoir is a book audaciously modeled on the iconic Life magazine. It consists of six chapters, each an issue of a photo journal called Numinosity. The content is based on pulse-raising events of the times and Morganstein’s eccentric family history, woven into a fictionalized memoir. The issues feature articles written by invented personalities, all played by the author. In addition, she creates all of the advertisements for pretend products, making fun of consumerism with fond ambivalence. Like the artist Cindy Sherman, Morganstein uses her insecurities and swagger to make a larger point about the relationship of humor and tragedy in art, emphasizing that the key to liberating oneself from the past is embracing memory and creating a tragicomic story from it.