Writer Linda Murphy Marshall chats with me today about her upcoming memoir, Immersion: A Linguist’s Memoir.
Bio:
Linda Murphy Marshall is a multi-linguist and writer with a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literature, a Master’s in Spanish, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has traveled extensively through Africa in her work for the U.S. government as a specialist in African languages: during a war, a coup, following the terrorist bombing of the U.S. embassy in Tanzania, and in support of a Presidential visit. She co-authored a book on the South African “click” language, Xhosa, and is a docent at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Her first memoir was published in 2022 (Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery) and her second memoir is being published in September of 2024 (Immersion: A Linguist’s Memoir).
Welcome, Linda. Please tell us about your current release.
Immersion: A Linguist’s Memoir is about what happened to me after I left a toxic environment in my hometown: Kirkwood, Missouri. I moved to the East Coast and earned a living as a multi-linguist, traveling to Africa on more than a dozen interesting and often dangerous assignments, finding myself in the process, building my confidence. The book also deals with a pivotal assignment I went on to Brazil’s outback, where I discovered that I had worth, that I was good with languages.
What inspired you to write this book?
After writing my first memoir – Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery – I wanted to complete my story. That first memoir ends with my desire to leave my Midwestern roots, to go somewhere I could be valued, escape the toxic environment in which I lived. Immersion is that story, the second half of my story, if you will. In both cases, in both memoirs, I wanted to tell my story, my truth.
Excerpt from Immersion:
“This excerpt occurs at the end of the book, following an assignment to travel with President George Bush to Tanzania:
“Suddenly the years collapsed into a handful of colorful pictures, reminding me of an early scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy is trapped in her bedroom in Kansas as the tornado rages outside. The windowpane suddenly breaks. As it does she looks outside to see dozens of swirling images: of trees, furniture, her house, a chicken coop, cows, a boat, the witch on a bicycle, all whizzing by the window as Dorothy stares transfixed, until finally the house crashes down in Oz. Shaking the hands of President Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, and the secretary of state, I felt like Dorothy, staring through that window as my own adventures roared by…Oz symbolized the life I’d built brick by brick since first going to Spain nearly forty years before….places where I’d learned how to be myself, how to open that same window to let in influences from fascinating people and cultures, where I’d finally created an identity that fit.”
What exciting project are you working on next?
I’m compiling the essays I’ve written through the years (more than 25 have been published in literary journals) and I hope to put them in an anthology. I’m also using images from both memoirs to create sketches and paintings that reflect pivotal elements of both memoirs.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I first considered myself a serious writer at two points: when I began working on my MFA and when I began to submit essays (and journals published them). Until then, I don’t think I took myself seriously, maybe because I hadn’t ever shown anyone what I’d written.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I don’t currently write full-time. I’m a docent at the Library of Congress and am on the board of the National Museum of Language. In addition, I currently write in fits and spurts because I’m in the midst of publicity and marketing for my second memoir, but my true love is the act of writing, of putting words together to create something that wasn’t there before. I plan to return to a more active writing life after Immersion has been released and publicized.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I’m not sure it’s a quirk, but I wrote numerous drafts of both of my memoirs, never satisfied with the one at hand. Ultimately, I think that improved the final product immensely, but it seemed to be unending, my ongoing dissatisfaction with the book at hand.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
When I was a child I wanted to be a concert pianist; that was what I excelled at. If you read my memoirs, you’ll see that I was not a great student until I went away to college: I was too anxious, lacked confidence, was frequently compared to one of my older brothers. Piano was what I did well. But then I was exposed to foreign languages and realized I had a gift with them and they replaced my love of piano, although I still play for enjoyment.