Linda Quinby Lambert
Writer & Researcher
About
Linda Q. Lambert is a retired community college library director, a 2015 graduate of the Stonecoast MFA 
Creative Writing program at the University of Southern Maine, the mother of four sons and three daughters, and grandmother to thirteen.
She also holds a masters degree in Journalism from the University of Southern California and one in library science from Emporia State University.
She is an active member of Red Wheelbarrow Writers in Bellingham, Washington, an organization which provides monthly happy hours, participation in a collective NaNoWriMo novel, the chance to be a Writer in the Window at Village Books, and interaction with a diverse bunch of engaged writers. The groups’ publication, Memory Into Memoir (2016), includes Lambert’s essay “Her Name is Quintana Roo,” a story about meeting Joan Didion and her daughter in the sixties. She contributed the introduction to Red Wheelbarrow’s second anthology, So Much Depends Upon…, as well as a personal essay: Poetry: Accidental and Occasional.
She inserted the initial Q in her name to honor the Quinbys who adopted her and to eliminate the alliterative overkill of Linda Lee Lambert.
Latest Posts
Disovering Zyxt!
Because I was three days behind in the A-Z Blog Challenge, my wife suggested—just before I wrote X—that I cover three letters in one blog. "Do you think there's a word that has X, Y, and Z in it?" she asked. "Sure," I said, thinking there must be one. But, nothing...
Yirns, Yahoos and Yorgans
Using this whimsical, multi-colored Y-alphabet letter encouraged me to find whimsical, multi-colored, or at least unusual words. How 'bout these from some of the sources I've used in the A-Z blog challenge? Yirn v. "To whine; to pout, or show petulance by facial...
X Marks the Spot, J.M. Barrie, The Urban Dictionary, and Xystus
According to the online Urban Dictionary, "X marks the spot" was a symbol pirates used to designate the location of treasure. Then the British Army appropriated the phrase and the X for executions. They marked a piece of paper with a black X and positioned it on the...
The Word Detective…Again
Way back on April 5th, I talked about John Simpson’s The Word Detective, a memoir about Simpson’s time as an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary. Meanwhile, I found The Word Detective by Evan Morris, published in 2000 by Algonquin, a most charming book, right...
V is for a Vigilant Virago
I never know where I'm going to find a compelling word, in this case, a V-word—in, say, the OED, from one of our 30+ word books, or in some random, unexpected place. Since I had a hangover bad mood, triggered by yesterday's two-hour wait for a mudslide-delayed Amtrak...
U is for An Uber-Cool driver
Über, borrowed from the German, is a prefix that crowns a noun: A geek becomes an uber-geek, a runway fashion queen becomes an uber-model. "An uber building came about...an enormous quasi-crystalline structure that reached out multicolored limbs of fiberglass and...
Titular, Temulency, and Tetragram
What I really want to write about is the book I mentioned in yesterday's blog, The Superior Person's Book of Words, but neither the title, the author's name, Peter Bowler, nor the publisher's handle, David R. Godine, begin with a "T." So, to meet the minimal...
Superior Person— A Remembrance
On Monday morning, April 3rd, the day my brother-in-law died, I was scanning through our word book collection and came upon two copies of the The Superior Person’s Book of Words by Peter Bowler. I extracted the one inscribed by Corinne Hayak, a LaConner Regional...
Resistance
Resistance is the theme Red Wheelbarrow Writers selected as its blog topic for 2017—an apt response for this time of political tumult. Blog coordinator Di Woods e-blasted a plea for members to sign up for a blog slot. "Resist," she began, and included a dictionary...
Q is for A Quiver of Cobras…for one thing
I turned to my wife Amory’s collection of alphabet books—200 and counting—to see what authors had chosen for their Q words, the 17th letter of our alphabet. A beautiful book called Bembo’s Zoo by Brazilian-born artist Robert de Vicq de Cumptich cleverly represented...