About

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.
I currently have completed a Catskill's novel.

Featured Work

The Last Oasis Hotel

Available

Short Synopsis: The Last Oasis Hotel by Linda Morganstein

In the summer of 1972, SARA LEVY arrives at one of the largest resorts in the Catskills, the fictional Kaplan's Oasis Hotel. She’s the daughter of a madcap Catskills couple who were killed on their way to their big break on The Tonight Show when she’s nine years old. She’s sent to live in a sheltered suburb with her well-meaning, condescending aunt and uncle. She reluctantly agrees to go back to take a summer job at the Oasis at the behest of her best friend, Arlene Goodman, the child of Holocaust survivors. Sara is struggling with abandonment issues, suppressed talent, and her budding feelings for other women.
When Sara and Arlene arrive at the Oasis, they meet the young people who are working and playing hard for the summer. HARVEY FUNT is an obnoxious egotistical bully who introduces them to the gang. Most notable for Sara is LUCY PEREZ, a brilliant half Jewish, half Puerto Rican med student, whom Sara is immediately attracted to.
As Sara and Arlene learn the ropes, each confronts her own nightmares, culminating in Arlene getting fired for dropping hot borscht on a guest and fleeing back to the suburbs. Sara, after losing the one person she trusts, develops an unlikely friendship with Harvey, based on their longings to perform. Harvey is an accomplished ventriloquist, with a puppet named Willie, a Black grandfather figure. The Funt duo hatch a scheme to perform at a nearby bungalow colony.
Meanwhile, Sara and Lucy do a sensual dance, with Sara giving the frustrated Lucy mixed messages. Things come to a head when Sara and Lucy have furtive sex after the Funt duo bungalow colony performance. Freaked-out Sara pushes Lucy to the floor, then orders her out.
After seeing the performance, a Hollywood agent calls Sara and Harvey, offering them a pilot in Los Angeles, if they get married. They agree to a sham marriage.
The pilot is terrible, and the series is worse. The agent gets Sara a new pilot without Harvey, who goes back to ventriloquism in seedy clubs. Harvey meets a nice girl, a ventriloquist. He begs for a divorce, which Sara reluctantly agrees to, since Harvey has become a source of comfort and stability.
Lucy attends the wedding. She’s now a brilliant pediatric neurosurgeon at UCLA Medical Hospital, with an oncologist girlfriend. Lucy catches Sara off-guard by professing her love, still, for Sara. They start seeing each other “platonically,” until a young patient of Lucy’s dies. Lucy and Sara have comfort sex. Sara finally realizes the Lucy is her real love, no matter what the consequences.
A few years into the relationship, the gang reconverges in the Catskills to attend the funeral of Ruth Sanger’s chauffer, a man everyone loved. Once there, Sara acknowledges that she is an entertainer, devoted bringing comfort, humor, and joy to an audience, be it in person or on television.
In the end, she realizes, we are all crave unconditional love and connection, rooted in a connection with a Source that guides us, if we listen. She knows her mission.
The novel takes a bold approach, told from multiple points of view, across a time span of seventy years, slowly revealing secrets and hidden desires.

Other Works

  • Numinosity: A Fractured Memoir

    October 2017