Linda Ulleseit

Linda Ulleseit, born and raised in Saratoga, California, has an MFA in writing from Lindenwood University. She is a member of the Hawaii Writers Guild, Marketing Chair for Women Writing the West, and a founding member of Paper Lantern Writers. Linda is the author of Under the Almond Trees, which was a semifinalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Contest, and The Aloha Spirit, to be released in 2020. Linda believes in the unspoken power of women living ordinary lives. Her books are the stories of women in her family who were extraordinary but unsung. She recently retired from teaching elementary school and now enjoys writing full-time, as well as cooking, leatherworking, reading, gardening, spending time with her family, and taking long walks with her dogs. She currently lives in San Jose with her husband. They have two adult sons and two yellow Labradors.

Twitter: @LUlleseit

Is your go to comfort food sweet or savory? Is it something you make yourself? Does food inspire your writing?

I spend a lot of time in the kitchen, cooking meals and baking. My family complains that I make so many cookies and desserts that they gain too much weight. I point out that they don’t need to eat a dozen cookies in one sitting. The kitchen, then, is definitely a place of comfort for me. During this pandemic, like so many others, I have begun a sourdough starter and baked a lot of bread. My go-to comfort foods, though, are usually sweet. I remember in 1989, after the Loma Prieta earthquake, I made two 9” round coffee cakes and ate almost an entire one by myself. It was a scary time, right? I had two sons under two years of age, and for the first time I was terrified for my children. My coffee cake recipe is a yellow cake (made from scratch) with brown sugar swirled through it. The broiled topping is brown sugar and cereal flakes. Very comforting!

I love Hawaii, and with THE ALOHA SPIRIT nearing publication, I have been enjoying Hawaiian foods. While I make SPAM musubi and poke salad, my Hawaiian favorites are store bought. You haven’t lived until you’ve had red coconut balls (They taste like the inside of a Mounds candy bar) or dark chocolate Kona coffee cookies from Honolulu Cookie Company. I hunt down those sweets whenever I visit Hawaii, and yes, I’ve ordered them delivered to my home in California since I can’t visit Hawaii right now.

Food does not inspire my writing, although it is always an important part of my research for a book. I found an excellent almond cake recipe to go along with my novel UNDER THE ALMOND TREES (find that recipe on my website). The kitchen is my happy place and my brain is free to wander. In my head, I can play out scenes between my characters and watch them take the novel in different directions. Some of that I can actually use!

Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?

I’m a fast reader, so I’ve read a lot of books. I tend to not retain a lot of what I read, so I enjoy rereading books, too. When there is any down time in my life, I pick up a book. I am a very forgiving reader who’s read published and unpublished books in a variety of genres, by authors of varying talent and expertise. I’m very good at catching grammar mistakes, but I read past plot points that others find troublesome. If you look at my Amazon and Goodreads reviews, I give five stars most of the time. I truly enjoy books that many others don’t. Having said that, there are books I have not finished reading.

It seems a personal failure to me when I am unable or unwilling to finish a book. As an elementary school teacher, I encouraged my students to abandon a book, after giving it a good try, if they didn’t like it. I need to follow my own advice! Recently I wanted to read The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. I agreed with some of their ideas about how children are being protected so much they can’t think for themselves or handle opinions different than their own. The problem arose when the authors kept pushing their own Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I couldn’t even get past chapter 4. For a very different reason, I also gave up on Once There Was Fire: A Novel of Old Hawaii by Stephen Shender. This novel should have been right up my alley since ancient Hawaii is an interest of mine. The story was fast paced and interesting, but the author insisted on using real names-all long Hawaiian names starting with K. I quickly confused the characters and the plot became muddled.

Sometimes I stop reading a book because the writing is just bad. As I mentioned, I’m pretty forgiving. For me to stop reading, the writing must be horrible. For this reason I never finished Twilight. Another novel changed the main character’s name halfway through the book.

The most unrewarding books are the ones that start slow and don’t get better. I keep reading, giving them a chance. I truly feel betrayed when I finish the book and realize it never got better!

What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?

I have always loved to write. Even in elementary school, writing was my favorite subject. In middle school, after being assigned an essay on the Civil War, I asked the teacher if I could write it from the point of view of a slave. I had the soul of an author even then. It doesn’t matter if a reader understands the difference between a writer and an author. If the writing is done well, a reader can enjoy it no matter what the author’s purpose is.

For me, a writer is a person who writes for someone else. Whether it’s an essay for school, a magazine article, or a blog post, a writer creates for the reader. This type of writing is necessary. I don’t mean to belittle this type of writing at all. Sometimes it’s what pays the bills while an author works on the next bestselling novel. It can be enjoyable, too. My blog, for example, feels like a conversation with my readers, a way of reaching out to them in a more casual way to share what’s on my mind.

An author writes for herself (or himself). There’s a book in the author’s head that is screaming to be released. In the first six months after I retired from teaching, I wrote a draft of a creative nonfiction piece about the changes in education over the twenty years I taught. I started before there were school shootings, before technology, before the sense of entitlement that affects today’s children. In the book, I trace how the change happened slowly, and I offer some recommendations. Then COVID 19 hit and the world changed. Everything in that book is obsolete. It will never be published, but it was cathartic to write. I will revise and rework it because it’s important to me, not because it will ever be published.

Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance?

Oh, this is my favorite question! Creative people have a deep need to create. I’m happiest when I am making something. When I was younger, I did calligraphy and macrame, dabbled in painting and sewing, and even tried stained glass. That latter effort didn’t go well at all.

One of my longest-lasting loves is cross-stitching. I stitched two large pieces (16” x 20”) from photographs for wedding gifts, and I have Christmas stockings cross-stitched for family members. Framed cross-stitched pictures hang in several rooms of my house. On the antique bench in my entryway, I have a pillow with cross-stitched shams for each month of the year. Unfortunately, I no longer cross-stitch. When it got to the point that I couldn’t see the tiny x’s any more, I had to find other outlets.

My mother taught me how to tool leather in the 1960’s. Two years ago, shopping in Carmel, California, I ran across a handtooled leather journal. The store wanted $300 for it! I told my husband, “I’ll just make one.” He thought I was kidding. Now I have an Etsy store where I sell handtooled leather items. The pounding of the hammer on the tools relieves a lot of stress as well as creates something beautiful.

Recently, during quarantine, I have discovered beaded bracelets. I beaded several wristbands for my Apple watch, and am currently exploring wire weaving. I also consider cooking and gardening creative endeavors, and I love both of those. Sometimes I wish I cleaning house would fulfill my creative needs, but it doesn’t. Not even close.

What brings you great joy?

I find the things that give me the greatest joy also require the most attention and work to keep going. For example, family is the source of my greatest joy. My husband and I have been married for 31 years in September of this year. He is still the person I want with me when I visit new places, go out to dinner, or watch TV at night. We have two adult sons, one of whom is married. My father-in-law, two nephews and their fiancees live close by. Gathering everyone together for a summertime swim party at our house or for Christmas holidays warms my heart. There is a great deal of love in our family, which is readily apparent when we get together. There are times, though, when spats arise or undercurrents taint our interactions. I have to put in some effort in order to get through it and recover the joy.

My writing gives me a similar feeling. When it’s going well, or when a new book is being released, or when I get a good Amazon review, joy fills me. There are many days, however, when the words won’t come and I spend more time on Facebook than on my manuscript. Facebook does not give me joy since it usually means I’m neglecting something else. When I force myself back to writing, it doesn’t take long for the muse to start singing and the joy to well up again.